What’s a Typical Day Like for a DevOps Engineer?

A typical day in DevOps is a mix of various tasks. You'd usually start by checking alerts and monitoring pipelines. Then, you’d assist developers with builds or deployments and tackle any infrastructure issues that arise, maybe updating Terraform scripts or fixing small bugs. Team meetings are common as well.

The best part is definitely solving problems and optimizing systems, while the worst part tends to be handling incidents or unexpected outages.

Coming from a construction background is a great advantage! You already understand systems and how interconnected everything is. Just remember, while collaboration is significant, you'll have hectic days where everyone needs your help at once. A homelab is a fantastic way to learn; consider breaking things on purpose to better understand how to fix them!

My routine starts with checking alerts and fulfilling any urgent tickets that have come in overnight. Then, I usually dive into project work, whether that’s creating Ansible roles or deploying cloud infrastructure using Terraform. I attend various meetings throughout the day, but the fun lies in putting out minor fires and figuring out how to improve our systems.

As the sole DevOps Engineer at a medium-sized investment firm, I manage everything from access control to deploying CI/CD pipelines. On a typical day, I’m working with Azure and Terraform daily.

If something breaks, it's up to me to diagnose and fix the issue. The workload can be intense but rewarding. I’d suggest focusing on a single cloud provider initially to build deep expertise.

Being in DevOps reminds me a bit of construction—the urgency is often there, and sometimes you’re working late because something urgent comes up. Most of my day involves supporting developers, whether that’s building tools for them or troubleshooting issues they encounter.

Just a heads up, the workload can vary greatly. At times I’ve had jobs that were pretty laid-back, only to go through intense periods where I would be working 16-hour days. It really hinges on the company and tech stack!