Ops School Curriculum (2012)
opsschool.org
opsschool.org
It's true, the project is 5+ years old. The industry was very different back then, we were barely starting to think about containers at scale. The cloud was a thing for sure, but the main contributors were mostly working in places with physical infrastructure.
Over the years we've discussed how we can reboot the project. There is always interest and desire, but time is hard to find :) The project will stay up as it is because we still feel there is value in learning the basics.
Over time the understanding of what is "basics" is evolving. This year I'm chairing the SREcon conference in Singapore. The program has a "Core Principles" track which talks about things like deep dives on linux memory management, database indices, how BGP works, etc. There is a lot of desire to still have these super deep dives into underlying technology. I hope we can find a way to turn this into a stronger curriculum with labs and teaching exercises one day :)
- One of the original OpsSchool founders
As someone who has been practicing a lot in an 'old school' environment (many of our customers still run our software the old way) I honestly think this still is a very good curriculum.
Actually I think many of the things listed, people underlook at them. I've seen with my eyes digging very deep on "cloud" and "devops" stuff fail completely (and spectacularly, I must admit) ad very basic things.
I'll be digging deeper into opschool.org, is there a way to have an offline copy (besides running httrack) ?
I feel like there is still a lot of value in "deep dive" information no matter how pervasive automation becomes in our industry.
So I get the overall goal here, but reading this, this feels like somebody's trying to fight the last war.
> Since the early 90’s, operations engineers have been in high demand. As a result, these positions often offer high salaries and long term job security.
...because most of the control surfaces offered minimal automation and there were many fewer options for management. This isn't even a "well, AWS/GCP/Azure will eat your lunch" thing, it's a "the robots can do most of this already" thing. There are still roles for network engineers, large-scale datacenter management, and that sort of thing--but this "curriculum" reads as very...hands-on...when a holistic, automation-first approach is overwhelmingly preferred in industry (outside of the trailing edge, where those high salaries and that stability aren't nearly as common).
Again: not saying "use the cloud, datacenters don't matter." But I'm not sure that this encompasses what "ops" typically means (as opposed to "IT", which is itself becoming a largely automatable and automated function, or "devops", which will get there sooner than later) and I'm very unsure that places that will still be dealing with data centers in ten years, instead of outsourcing it, will benefit much from juniors with this skillset instead of one built around software definition and a pervasively automation-first mindset.
I'm a software developer first and foremost. When I've needed to deal with hardware, I learned it. And it was easier because the first question was always "OK, now how do we make this something a human doesn't do?". It's a band-pass filter for what actually matters to continued operations.
I could be confusing this with Dune. [1]
Understanding how to systematize and automate is a more employable skill than having a very high-level understanding of, say, Active Directory.
Here's an example of a modern mindset with trailing-edge technologies: I'm having to learn VMware for my current job. I had hoped to literally never do so. (I don't want to manage a data center. But if you use certain cloud providers...you manage a tiny data center.) But I am learning and applying VMware through the lens of pervasive automation and systematization of the problems I'm actually trying to solve. While the team in place before me spent most of their time installing minimal automation (configuration, monitoring, etc.) we are making it a prerequisite of our ownership of the infrastructure for this team's product. Because we like to be able to sleep at night.
In general, I think the soft skills sections should get a lot more promotion (it's buried so far down the sidebar I had to scroll!). The technical stuff is already well-documented elsewhere, but nobody ever told me how important being politically savvy was in this niche until I had already blown both feet off several times.
Because no operations engineer should use MS Windows? :see_no_evil: