I graduated with an MCA in 2025 from a college in Pune, Maharashtra. Before my master's degree, I spent about a year working in infrastructure support, including system administration and NetApp storage support. During my MCA, I completed two DevOps internships, and my long-term goal is to move into DevOps.
Since February, I've been applying regularly for DevOps positions, tailoring my resume, preparing for interviews, and improving my technical skills. So far, I haven't had much success, and I'm starting to wonder whether I should change my approach.
My current skills include Linux, networking, AWS, Azure, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Prometheus, and Grafana.
I'm considering either continuing to search for a full-time DevOps role or returning to my previous employer in infrastructure support. Would going back to infrastructure make it significantly harder to transition into DevOps later? Would it be smarter to target cloud support, Linux administration, NOC, or similar intermediate roles first? If I spend another few months or even a couple of years without finding a DevOps position, what path would you recommend?
I'd especially appreciate advice from people who moved from infrastructure or systems support into DevOps, SRE, cloud engineering, or platform engineering. I'm mainly looking for a realistic way to start building relevant experience.
4 Answers
With roughly a year of infrastructure experience, returning to support could be a sensible move rather than waiting indefinitely for a direct DevOps offer. A few more years working with systems, networking, storage, Linux, and cloud-related responsibilities can give you the operational foundation that many DevOps jobs expect. Try to choose a role where you can automate tasks and work with cloud or deployment tooling, not just handle routine tickets.
A direct jump from one year of support experience into DevOps can be difficult because many so-called junior DevOps roles still expect production experience. Consider applying for cloud support, Linux administration, systems engineering, infrastructure, or NOC roles as stepping stones. Once you’re in, look for opportunities to use Terraform, scripting, CI/CD, monitoring, and cloud services, then use those projects to move internally or apply for DevOps positions later.
That makes sense. I’ll broaden my search beyond DevOps titles and focus on roles that let me gain practical cloud and automation experience.
Don’t focus only on collecting tools for a resume. Employers will want to see that you understand how those tools solve operational problems. Build a couple of complete projects and be ready to explain the architecture, security, deployment process, monitoring, failure scenarios, and cost considerations. Also check whether your resume clearly shows your infrastructure experience and the results of your internships.
The DevOps title is changing in many companies. Some organizations expect developers to own more of their deployments, while others use titles such as platform engineer, cloud engineer, or SRE. That doesn’t mean the career path is disappearing, but it does mean you should search for several related titles and emphasize transferable skills: Linux, networking, automation, infrastructure as code, reliability, observability, and cloud operations.
My previous experience was in system administration and NetApp storage support, so I’ll look for ways to build on that instead of treating it as unrelated experience.