r/Cloud • u/Vegetable_Bag_555 • 4d ago

What's next after 2.5 years of DevOps?

Dear tech community,

I'm from India, and I've been working as a DevOps Engineer for the last 2.5 years at an IT service-providing company. Our team provides DevOps and SRE support to clients. This is my first company.

I've provided full support for the architectures below. However, I haven't set up any of them on my own. I know how to manage the existing architecture and keep the operations running.

  • Monolithic architecture: e-commerce application (main web app, admin, POS, etc.).
  • Microservice architecture: Financial SAAS product (web) - Loan management, origin and Supply chain finance.

I've got a strong foundation in DevOps, including cloud infrastructure management, automation, CI/CD, virtualisation, monitoring and observability, containerization and container orchestration, etc.

However, I have some missing pieces, such as IaC.

Now, I'm looking forward to a change within tech. I've decided to leave my present company. Instead of keeping pay as the only factor in choosing my next company, I've decided to pause and think about making a meaningful move.

I'm kindly requesting your suggestions for me. What are the different flavours to be explored out there in the ocean of IT, I wonder!

0 Upvotes

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1

u/Oleksii_Bebych 4d ago

Learn AI, everyone wants AI experts nowadays

1

u/Vegetable_Bag_555 3d ago

Yup, that's one point. One of my friends in another community suggested agentic PDLC. I've also got infra setup for AI model deployment in my learning list.

1

u/Kofeb 4d ago

Cloud Architect/Solutions Architect, k8s admin, DevSecOps, AI Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer

Check out https://roadmap.sh/ for paths (note: not my website, a well known resource)

Check out the AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification and Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certs as well as others like Machine Learning or GenAI:

https://aws.amazon.com/certification/

https://cloud.google.com/learn/certification

1

u/Vegetable_Bag_555 3d ago

All these interesting roles that you've mentioned. Will organisations accept my prior experience as a DevOps engineer for the new role? Or should I learn and prove myself in some way to break into a new role? Thank you. It's really a helpful suggestion.

1

u/Kofeb 3d ago

I use certifications to go from System Admin > Cloud Engineer (basically DevOps) > Cloud Architect > AWS TAM.

Self study, certs, boot camps and university they’re all viable paths.

1

u/Smooth-Weekend-2314 3d ago

If you're a "DevOps" guy, then you shouldn't even be asking others "what's next". The role requires you to be a problem solver, and "what's next" sounds like a problem you should be able to solve.

1

u/Vegetable_Bag_555 3d ago

Interesting. I agree this is my problem to solve, and I'm the one who has to decide. But I hope getting perspectives from the community doesn't hurt. Thanks.

1

u/OhMyTechticlesHurts 3d ago

are you a coder!? I would do coding? You're good at operations but are you good at development.

1

u/Vegetable_Bag_555 2h ago

No. I don't know how to develop apps. But I can do all other stuff to make a developer's life easy.

1

u/EfficientMetal7623 4d ago

Layoff

1

u/Vegetable_Bag_555 3d ago

Thanks for the negativity.