Autumn is an amazing time of the year. While schoolchildren and students begin the school year with longing for summer, nostalgia for the old days and a craving for knowledge wake up in adults.
Fortunately, it's never too late to learn. Especially if you want to become a DevOps engineer.
This summer, our colleagues launched the first stream of the DevOps school and are preparing to start the second one in November. If you have been thinking about becoming a DevOps engineer for a long time, welcome to the cut!
Why and for whom was the DevOps school created and what is needed in order to get into it? We spoke with teachers and mentors to find out the answers to these questions.
- How did the creation of the DevOps school begin?
Stanislav Salangin, founder of the DevOps school: Creating a DevOps school is, on the one hand, a requirement of the time. Now this is one of the most sought-after professions, and the demand for engineers in projects has begun to exceed supply. For quite a long time, we nurtured this idea and made several attempts, but finally the stars converged only this year: we gathered a team of advanced and interested specialists in one place at the same time and launched the first stream. The first school was a pilot one: only our employees studied there, but soon we plan to recruit a second “cohort” with students not only from our company.
Alexey Sharapov, tech lead, lead mentor: Last year, we took students to work as interns, brought up juniors. It is difficult for students or university graduates to find a job, because they require experience, and you can’t get experience if you don’t get a job – it turns out a vicious circle. Therefore, we gave the guys the opportunity to prove themselves, and now they are working successfully. Among our interns there was one guy - a design engineer at the factory, but who knew how to program a little and work on Linux. Yes, he did not have any cool skills, but his eyes burned. For me, the most important thing in people is their attitude, the desire to learn and develop. For us, each student is a startup in which we invest our time and experience. We give everyone a chance and are ready to help, but the student himself must take responsibility for his future.
Lev Goncharov aka @ultral, lead engineer, infrastructure refactoring evangelist through testing: About 2-3 years ago, I got excited about bringing IaC to the masses and made an internal course on Ansible. Even then, there were talks about how to combine disparate courses with one idea. Later, the need to expand the infrastructure team on the project was added to this. Looking at the successful experience of neighboring Java School graduate development teams, it was difficult to refuse Stas's offer to organize a DevOps school. As a result, we closed the need for specialists on our project after the first release.
— What does it take to get into school?
Alexey Sharapov: Motivation, passion, a touch of recklessness. As an input control, we will have a little testing, but in general, we need basic knowledge of Linux systems, any programming language and no fear of the terminal console.
Lev Goncharov: Specific technical hard skills are a thing to come. The main thing is to have an engineering approach to solving problems. It will not be superfluous to know the language at all, because a DevOps engineer, like a “glue man”, must fashion processes, and this, whatever one may say, implies communication and not always in Russian. But the language can also be upgraded in courses within the company.
— Training at the DevOps school lasts two months. What can students learn during this time?
Ilya Kutuzov, lecturer, leader of the DevOps community at Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions: Now we give students only the hard skills necessary for work:
-
DevOps basics
-
development toolkit
-
Containers
-
CI / CD
-
Clouds & orchestration
-
Monitoring
-
Configuration management
-
Development
Lectures at the DevOps school on the other side of the screen
— What happens after the student has mastered the course program?
The result of the training is the presentation of the course project, which will be attended by projects interested in graduates. Based on the results of the training, the graduate will know the stack of technologies that are used in our company, and will be able to immediately get involved in the tasks of a real project. After summing up the results of the show, job offers will be made to the best students!
- Stas, you once mentioned that it was not easy to recruit a team of teachers. Did you have to involve external specialists for this?
Stanislav Salangin: Yes, it was very difficult at first to assemble a team and, most importantly, to keep it, not to let it scatter and continue to motivate. But all teachers and mentors of the school are our employees. These are DevOps leads in projects who know how our projects work from the inside, sincerely root for their work and for the company. We are called a school, not an academy or courses, because, like in a real school, close communication between the teacher and the students is of great importance to us. We plan to organize our own community with students - not a chat in Telegram, but a community of like-minded people who meet in person, help each other and develop.
Dream team of teachers and mentors. We hope to meet soon and take a group photo in person!
— What do you do in DevOps school?
Ilya Kutuzov, lecturer, leader of the DevOps community at Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions:
“I teach students how to build pipelines on gitlab, how to make tools be friends with each other and how to make them friends without you.
Why DevOps School? The online course does not give a quick dive and does not give a practical skill in working with technology. Any virtual school will not give you the feeling that you really know how to solve practical problems and will be able to deal with a real problem on a project. What students will encounter during their studies is what they will work with in projects.”
Alexey Sharapov, tech lead, head and mentor of the school:
“I make sure that students and other mentors do not act as hooligans. I help students to resolve technical and organizational disputes, helped listeners to realize themselves as devops, set a personal example. I teach a proven and cool containerization course.
Igor Renkas, Ph.D., mentor, product owner:
“I am mentoring students at the school, and I also help Stanislav in the organization and development of the school. The first pancake, in my opinion, did not come out lumpy and we successfully started. Now, of course, we are working on what can be improved at school: we are thinking about a modular format, learning by steps, we want to teach not only hard skills, but also soft skills in the future. We did not have a beaten track and ready-made solutions. We were looking for teachers among colleagues, thought over lectures, a course project, organized everything from scratch. But this is our main challenge and the whole charm of the school: we go our own way, do what we think is right and what is best for our students.”
Lev Goncharov aka @ultral, lead engineer, infrastructure refactoring evangelist through testing:
“I teach students Configuration management and how to live with it. That it will not be enough to put something in git, it is necessary to change the paradigm of thinking and approaches. That infrastructure as code means not only writing some code, but making a maintainable, understandable solution. If I’m talking about technologies, then I’m talking mainly about Ansible and casually mention how to dock it with Jenkins, Packer, Terraform.”
Colleagues, thank you for the interview! What do you say to readers in the end?
Stanislav Salangin: We invite not only super-engineers or young students to study with us, not only people who know German or English - it will all come. For us, the main thing is openness, readiness for intensive work, the desire to learn and develop in DevOps.
DevOps is just a story about continuous development. The DevOps symbol is an infinity sign, consisting of separate pieces: testing, integration, and so on. All this a DevOps engineer must constantly keep in mind, constantly learn new things, take a proactive position and not be shy to ask stupid questions.
DevOps School is an open source project. We do this for the community, share knowledge, sincerely want to help guys who have a desire to develop in DevOps. Now in our company all roads are open for junior engineers. The main thing is not to be afraid!
Source: habr.com