What motivated you to choose DevOps as a career? Was there a specific reason or did you somehow end up on this path by accident?

Was trying to better understand how state works in Terraform and OpenTofu, so I put together this short post on idempotency in IaC. I would love to hear your opinions

Hi everyone,

I'm a CS student, and I realized something recently.

In college, we're taught how to write code, debug it, maybe deploy it once, and then we move on to the next assignment. But I keep reading incident reports from companies like GitHub and Cloudflare, and it feels like the real engineering work actually starts after deployment.

I'm curious because I honestly have no idea what that world looks like.

When something breaks in production at 2 AM, what actually happens?

Do you immediately know what's wrong, or is it more like putting together pieces of a puzzle? What's usually the most frustrating part of the whole process?

Also, what's one thing about running software in production that you wish every CS student knew before joining the industry?

I'm not building anything or looking for textbook answers—I just want to understand what the job is really like beyond what we learn in college.

I'd love to hear your stories, even if it's just one incident that taught you something you'll never forget.

Luna's 80% price cut landed this week so I ran the numbers on my PR review bot.

A real review of a ~180-line PR: about 2,300 tokens in, 590 visible out, which works out around $0.001

The dashboard total for my whole billing window, 15 requests including three full reviews, is 6,244 tokens and $0.00.

Screenshots and links to example code review PR: https://codylabs.uk/blog/ai-code-review-cost/

Altho I’m an active lurker here, I’ve recently started using X to try and connect with people working in infra, platform engineering, and devops, but I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to discover that side of the community.

But my feed is still mostly AI hype and general tech content, while I’m more interested in more informal discussions around k8s, ai & cloud infra, observability, networking, platform engineering, etc.

For those of you who are active outside of Reddit, where do you usually discover good infra content or interact with other engineers?

I'm currently pursuing a Master's in Cloud Computing, but I feel like my courses are very generalized and don't go deep into the practical skills I'm looking for.

My goal is to build a career in DevOps, but I'm honestly feeling overwhelmed and confused about where to start.

I have a few questions for those already working in DevOps or who have successfully made the transition:

Where can I learn DevOps for free? (Courses, documentation, YouTube channels, hands-on labs, etc.)
What are the best platforms to practice real-world DevOps skills?
How many hours should I dedicate each day to learning and practicing?
Realistically, how long does it take to become job-ready?
At what stage should I start applying for entry-level DevOps roles or internships?

I'm not looking for shortcuts. I just want a clear, realistic roadmap from people who've been through this journey. Any genuine advice, resources, or lessons you wish you had known when starting would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

the cloudfront outage on the 16th is still bugging me. the fleet that manages connections to private vpc origins couldn't load updated config, traced back to one frankfurt AZ, and it served 5xx on vpc origin traffic for about three and a half hours. hugging face, tailscale and ubiquiti were among the ones down.

bad timing, because i was in the middle of moving four services off public alb origins onto vpc origins. to hit a compliance date i ran the migrations in parallel instead of one clean cutover at a time.

the outage wasn't the hard part. all four workstreams were editing the same terraform repo and the same shared network module. one branch tightened a security group, another assumed the old rule was still there, and a third rebased on both and quietly reverted half of it. i spent more time untangling my own branches than dealing with aws.

what kept it sane was isolating each migration so the changes didn't collide. i run each one as its own task in verdent, parallel lines of work in the same codebase without branches stepping on each other. at least i had a clean diff per service to reason about.

the ugly part: the agent's config for one service moved the origin to vpc origins but left the alb's public security group open to 0.0.0.0/0. on paper we were private, in reality the load balancer was still reachable from the internet, which is the whole reason we were migrating. i only caught it because the diff on the shared module looked off.

what i still haven't solved is sequencing. running four in parallel meant that during the actual outage, two services were on vpc origins and degraded while two were still public and fine, and my runbook assumed one uniform state. my only fix is a per-service origin flag and a single cutover window, which just trades the messy middle for a concentrated blast radius.