I'm trying to enhance my career by improving my skills in Infrastructure as Code and Platform Engineering. I come from a background in network engineering and general sysadmin tasks, both in cloud and on-prem environments. I'm comfortable with PowerShell and Bash, and I have some experience using Terraform. Currently, my job involves about 75% on-prem infrastructure and 25% cloud work. I've created a Docker server in a lab, but I haven't had the chance to deploy containers in a real production setting. I'm also considering pursuing some certifications to help kickstart my journey; I'm looking at the Hashicorp Terraform Associate, GitHub Foundations, GitHub Actions, and the Red Hat Certified Engineer due to its relevance with Ansible. I'm aware that just having certifications doesn't equate to real-world knowledge, so I plan to practice alongside my studies. I'm curious if anyone has any other suggestions or focus areas for me.
3 Answers
Instead of jumping straight into certifications, I’d suggest learning through hands-on projects first. Once you have a solid grasp, then go for the certifications—those often just teach you specific products without the broader context.
Certifications can be useful but won’t really make a huge difference without actual project experience. Try spinning up a full infrastructure setup that includes CI/CD with Terraform and some monitoring. That’s where the real learning happens!
First off, you should definitely get comfortable with Git and GitHub—version control is crucial for this whole process. After that, dive into Ansible since you already have some infrastructure experience. Just a heads up, if you aim for the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification, remember you'll need to complete the RHCSA exam too. While both certifications are respected, I wouldn’t say RHCE is strictly necessary. Also, skip the GitHub Actions cert; you can learn that from online resources or books. Consider getting familiar with Jenkins too, as it’s a common self-hosted alternative for CI/CD tasks. Plus, mastering Docker, going beyond just deploying containers to actually building them, will set you apart, and you might want to check out Kubernetes eventually since it's in high demand. Finally, brushing up on a programming language like Python (which is a must now) or even Golang can be really beneficial, especially for automation tasks that Terraform and Ansible might not cover completely.
Honestly, I found this response pretty rambling. Just get to the essentials!
Absolutely! Git really is the backbone that connects all these tools and processes together. You can’t go wrong with starting from a repo-centric perspective.