I've been working in QA for about two years, and over the past year I've gained hands-on experience with Azure and Azure DevOps. I've learned from a senior technical colleague when possible, but formal knowledge-sharing sessions are usually limited to about once a month. Most of my experience has come from working with our actual environment and improving processes for the team.
So far, I've centralized dashboards and cut daily monitoring time roughly in half, automated an Azure Runbook that produces a daily data report instantly instead of requiring about an hour of manual work, and worked with managed identities, Azure Policy, role assignments, storage monitoring, IoT Hub, alerts, and other Azure metrics.
I've passed a fundamentals certification and have started applying for junior Azure and DevOps positions. However, many listings ask for three to five years of Azure experience as well as Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD, and related tools. I currently work full-time, have a part-time job, and study Azure, so I have limited time for personal projects. I also can't share my company's implementation details because of confidentiality requirements.
Is Azure administration or cloud/DevOps still a realistic direction for someone with my background? Should I focus on Azure administration, SRE, or a broader DevOps skill set? I'm willing to keep learning, but I'd appreciate practical advice on what to prioritize and how to demonstrate experience when I can't publish my work projects.
3 Answers
Azure is still worth learning, but the challenge isn’t specific to Azure. Employers are generally reluctant to put inexperienced people in charge of production infrastructure, regardless of whether the environment uses Azure, AWS, or another provider. Your current work sounds closer to cloud administration, monitoring, and parts of SRE than full DevOps, which is completely valid but is worth presenting accurately on your résumé.
Azure administration and DevOps overlap, but they aren’t the same role. Administration often involves identities, policies, networking, monitoring, storage, and day-to-day platform operations. DevOps usually adds source control workflows, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containers, testing automation, and deployment design. If you want DevOps roles, build those adjacent skills gradually. If you prefer operational work, target Azure administrator, cloud operations, platform support, or junior SRE positions instead.
Your QA background can be an advantage instead of something you need to hide. Modern quality engineering often includes automated API and end-to-end testing, CI pipeline integration, test environments, load testing, and deployment validation. You could move toward quality engineering, cloud test automation, or platform-focused QA while gradually taking on infrastructure work.
Even if you remain in QA for now, ask to observe how your organization handles deployments, incident response, infrastructure changes, and pipeline maintenance. An internal transfer may be more realistic than trying to compete immediately for a DevOps role that demands several years of production experience.
The tools listed in job descriptions are useful clues about what employers expect. Focus on Terraform or Bicep, Git, CI/CD pipelines, Docker, networking, Linux, and basic Kubernetes rather than collecting Azure services without learning how they fit together. You don’t need to master everything at once.
For projects, create a small deployment that provisions infrastructure as code, builds an application through a pipeline, runs tests, packages it into a container, and deploys it to Azure with monitoring and least-privilege access. A modest, complete project is more persuasive than several disconnected tutorials. For company work you can’t disclose, describe the problem, your responsibilities, the technologies used, and the measurable result without exposing names, code, or sensitive architecture.
You don’t have to abandon Azure. Learn the administrator fundamentals deeply, then add automation and infrastructure-as-code skills. Your existing Runbook and monitoring work are good evidence that you enjoy improving repetitive processes, which is a strong foundation for cloud operations or SRE.
A small organization or nonprofit that is moving into the cloud can sometimes provide that first opportunity. One person may handle support and cloud work at the same time, which can be stressful, but it can create the production experience needed for the next career move.