What Does a Typical DevOps Workday Look Like, and Which Hosting Tools Do Companies Use?

I’ve been working in DevOps for about eight years, after starting in traditional systems administration. A normal day usually begins with checking monitoring alerts and failed scheduled jobs before stand-up, followed by reviewing the ticket queue. From there, the work usually falls into one of three categories: responding to incidents or access problems, completing planned infrastructure and pipeline work, or getting pulled into an unexpected issue that takes over the day. Terraform updates, CI/CD improvements, deployment troubleshooting, and helping application teams are common tasks. The exact routine varies a lot depending on whether the company is cloud-native, hybrid, or still heavily dependent on on-premises systems.

Our production environment is primarily Azure. We use App Service for many web applications, AKS when container orchestration is required, and Azure Functions for event-driven workloads. Terraform handles infrastructure as code, while GitHub Actions provides CI/CD. Datadog and Azure Monitor are used for monitoring, with Grafana for dashboards. Azure Key Vault manages secrets and Entra ID handles identity and access. Other companies may use an entirely different mix, such as AWS, Jenkins, GitLab or Bitbucket pipelines, Docker, Nginx, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and tools like Ansible or Kubernetes.

Thanks for the detailed breakdown. My background is in backend and database work, and I’ve since moved into DevOps. I currently work with Linux, Docker, Nginx, PostgreSQL, PgBouncer, SQL Server, Jenkins, Bitbucket runners, Grafana, and SigNoz. We use AWS heavily alongside Azure, but I haven’t had much hands-on experience with Terraform, Ansible, or Kubernetes yet. I was mainly interested in comparing the tools used across different production environments.