Operations Engineer to DevOps & Cloud Engineer Career Path

Oftentimes in my career mentoring sessions I meet folks from Operations and Network engineer background, asking what are the possible career path suggestions if they are willing to move into Cloud and DevOps specialization.

So here is my response for this question,

There are multiple career paths available to choose. If someone is switching their career path then It requires lots of preparation and hands-on practice by doing pet projects in the specific career path!

These career path suggestions are also applicable to sub-level roles that can come under operations engineer category, like Data center admins, Network engineer and storage administrators

So here we go,?

First one, DevOps engineer: This is the most famous career path for an Operations engineer, where they can learn the application and infrastructure deployment automation along with basic knowledge in Cloud. Otherwise named as CICD automation engineers in the industry.

It is important to note that, key role of the DevOps engineer is to automate the application build, packaging and deploying it into the infrastructure. Also to set-up the required metrics to monitor the infrastructure and application.

So DevOps engineers need to have the basic understanding of how the code is developed, compiled and deployed into the infrastructure.

Next is, Cloud Engineer: Get specialized on a specific cloud provider and can learn Cloud solution architecture to deploy n-tier applications. Cloud architecting is a deeper subject so it needs practice on hands-on automation exercise.

Third career path is, Site Reliability Engineer (or SRE): This should be the role closer to operations engineer roles and responsibilities, where it involves achieving the reliability of application and infrastructure. So this role would be requiring an intersection of knowledge on the understanding of automation areas in DevOps engineer role and cloud engineer role.?Learning of the various tool automation skills are required to succeed in this role.

So in conclusion, These 3 are the broader level of career path categories for an operations engineer.

There are extensions or senior levels of these roles are also available, like Cloud Architect, DevOps consultant or architect and? Cloud Security consultant are to name a few.

But it’s a step by step learning process and moving to later levels requires getting experienced in any one of the specific 3 career path mentioned above.

If anyone would like to discuss or to understand more about it then I'm happy to help.

Comment your thoughts and post your views.