I recently came across a post on Reddit from someone looking to connect with other DevOps professionals. I reached out, and we ended up moving the conversation to Discord.

It's been pretty nice having a place where we can talk about things we're working on, exchange ideas, troubleshoot things, and share what we've learned.

But the conversations haven't really stayed limited to DevOps - which is actually what I've enjoyed most.

We sometimes end up talking about things like:

• How DevOps/tech work differs between countries
• Differences in workplace and engineering culture
• How people got into the industry and how their careers have developed
• Tools, practices, and technologies people are using
• Interesting things we're currently learning or building
• And occasionally just completely random stuff 😄

I'd like to meet more people from different parts of the world and have more of these conversations.

You don't need to be a DevOps expert or have 10+ years of experience. If you work somewhere around DevOps, SRE, cloud, infrastructure, platform engineering, sysadmin, or software engineering - or you're simply learning in that direction - feel free to reach out.

We're currently a small group (40+) , and we'd like to keep it that way rather than turn it into a huge server full of people who never talk, so please consider joining only if you are an active discord user.

If you'd be interested in chatting and getting to know some other people in the space, leave a comment or send me a DM. Happy to connect.

We are looking for an experienced DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer with strong VoIP/Asterisk expertise for a short-term telephony platform scalability and high-availability POC.

Key Skills Required:

• Linux Server Administration & Nginx
• Asterisk / PJSIP
• Kamailio or OpenSIPS – SIP proxy & load balancing
• MongoDB Replica Sets
• Redis + Sentinel
• Node.js deployment & application scaling
• Cloudflare Load Balancing & R2
• SIP/RTP, NAT, firewall & network troubleshooting
• High Availability & Failover testing

Project Scope:
Set up and validate a scalable staging environment involving multiple Node.js application servers, SIP proxy, Asterisk nodes, MongoDB/Redis HA, call recording to object storage, and failover testing.

Duration: Approx. 3–4 weeks
Engagement: Short-term / Project-based
Preferred: Engineers with hands-on experience building or scaling VoIP/telephony infrastructure.

Interested candidate

Is the course worth watching? I know DevOps is line an ocean and one need to build the instinct and have multiple tool knowledge but still from the perspective of a new learner is the course good enough to at least provide with the strong/good enough fundamentals?

We're running a bunch of Java (Spring Boot) microservices on EKS, and right now every service uses memory as its HPA metric. After digging into it, I've started to think that's wrong, and I want a sanity check from people who've actually run this at scale before I push a change.

What my research turned up:

• The JVM allocates heap up to its max and doesn't release it back aggressively even after GC, so memory usage doesn't track load.
• Because of that, memory can be high while actual load is low, or load can be high while memory looks fine — so memory-based HPA either never triggers or scales out permanently and never scales back in.

So the direction I'm considering is to pick the HPA metric based on service type:

• HTTP / request-serving services → CPU (or better, RPS / p95 latency as a demand-based metric)
• Async / queue-consuming services → queue depth (SQS backlog, via KEDA)

My questions:

1. Is this reasoning sound, and is type-based metric selection the right direction?
2. For the HTTP services, is jumping straight to RPS/latency worth the custom-metrics complexity (Prometheus Adapter), or should I start with CPU and only move to RPS if CPU proves to be a bad proxy?
3. For async workers, is KEDA + SQS queue depth the standard approach, or are people doing something else?
4. This is the part I'm least sure about: I already know from our architecture which services are HTTP-facing and which are async/queue-driven — but how do I actually verify that empirically rather than just trusting the design docs? Is there a clean way to confirm a service's real load profile (e.g. checking whether it even has an ingress/receives HTTP traffic, whether its work is truly SQS-triggered, CPU-vs-memory correlation under load) before I assign it a metric?

Thanks 🙏

I’m currently trying to learn the basics of DevOps, things like Docker, AWS, GCP, CI/CD, Kubernetes, etc.

Docker and the local tools are easy enough to practice, but when it comes to cloud platforms like AWS and GCP, a credit card is often required to create an account or access certain services.

I currently don’t have a credit card, so I’m wondering: What’s the best way to learn AWS/GCP without one? Would appreciate any recommendations from people who learned cloud without having a credit card. 🙌

Anyone want to practice DevOps Mock Interview ?

So i am learning Devops and kubernates so I’ve built an Indian Crime Tracker to explore crime incidents and safety information across India.

I’m looking for people to try the application and share feedback. Your feedback will help me identify issues and improve the platform.

🔗 https://ict.referdin.com

Please give it a try and let me know what you think!

I’ve completed around 6 months in my first job at a System Integrator, and I’m currently getting ₹25k/month. My work has been mainly infrastructure — HPE servers, VMware ESXi/vCenter, Hyper-V, Veeam, Windows Server, networking, Palo Alto, storage, etc. Since it’s an SI, I get exposure to different clients and technologies, but most of my work is implementation and technical support.

Now my company is considering spending around ₹3–4 lakh on HPE training and professional certifications for me, but they want a 1–2 year commitment in return. If I take it, I would probably become more specialized in HPE/VMware/infrastructure.

At the same time, I’ve started getting very interested in Linux, cloud, automation, Terraform, CI/CD and DevOps. I haven’t worked professionally on these yet, but these are the areas that genuinely make me curious. My current company being an SI also means I probably won’t get much DevOps exposure here.

So I’m confused about which direction is better for me:

1. Stay here for 2 years, take the HPE certification and build a career in enterprise infrastructure/virtualization/storage/networking.

2. Stay another 6–12 months, keep building cloud/automation skills on my own, and then move toward Cloud/DevOps/Platform roles.

I’m also seeing some of my friends working as SWEs at companies like Microsoft/Google and earning very well, which has made me question whether I should also consider SWE, although I’m not sure yet whether I actually enjoy software development enough to make that my career.

So what I really want to understand is: with my current background, what kind of engineer should I try to become, and would you recommend that I specialize in infrastructure through this HPE opportunity or keep my options open and move toward Cloud/DevOps?

I don't want to make the decision just based on immediate salary. I want to choose the path that gives me the strongest technical growth and career opportunities over the next 5–10 years. What would you do in my position?

Hey everyone!

I’m a university student and recently got my first job as a Junior DevOps Engineer. My background is actually in cybersecurity, and I had basically zero professional DevOps experience before this.

And now I’m sitting here thinking: what the hell am I actually supposed to do? The problem is that I’m being given tasks mostly verbally, and sometimes I leave a meeting thinking: “Okay… what exactly am I supposed to do now?” I know some basic Linux, Docker, Git, Ansible, networking, etc., and I’ve done some university/personal projects, but I’m realizing that knowing the tools is very different from knowing how things are actually done in a real production environment.

The tasks can be quite vague. I might be told to look into a service, improve some code, update something, or research a solution, but I often don’t know where to start or what the expected end result is supposed to look like.

And honestly, this is probably the most difficult part for me right now. It’s not even necessarily the technical stuff — it’s understanding how I’m supposed to approach a problem when I don’t yet know what “the normal way” of doing things is.

I’m trying to learn, but there is SO much information out there that I’m getting overwhelmed. And sometimes it feels like everyone around me knows exactly what they’re doing while I’m just sitting there trying to figure out what the task even means.

So I’d really appreciate some advice from experienced DevOps engineers:

How did you approach your first DevOps job when you didn't know much about the real-world side of things?

How do you personally approach a vague task when you don't fully understand what is expected from you?

What helped you most during your first months on the job?

Are there any resources you found genuinely useful for learning the practical side of DevOps?

I’m not expecting to become a DevOps expert overnight. I just want to stop feeling completely lost, figure out how to approach these tasks properly, and eventually become useful to my team.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I teach DevOps to career switchers and freshers, and I keep noticing the same pattern: people come out of a course expecting to "automate everything" and walk into a job that's mostly debugging pipelines someone else built, negotiating between dev speed and ops stability, and a LOT of reading logs.

Nobody tells you upfront that the job is way more about judgment and communication than tool mastery. Docker/K8s/Jenkins are the easy part — knowing when NOT to automate something, or how to explain a tradeoff to a non-technical PM, is the actual skill gap I see in new hires.

Curious if this matches what people already working in DevOps roles have experienced — did your first job look anything like what your course/bootcamp made it seem like?