My DevOps year 2021 in review

The year is almost over and I wanted to review the learnings I had this year. After writing a post about my DevOps learning path for 2021 I wanted to see how much I checked from it and what I did miss. Especially after starting a full-time job where I work as a DevOps Engineer.

The plan was to get the first experience in Kubernetes (K8s), Terraform, GitOps and Ansible over the year. As I wrote in my earlier post I started with the DevOps with Kubernetes course provided by the University of Helsinki which is a great starting point to learn about the different parts of K8s. This was also the basis of my knowledge for my DevOps specific job interview process. After pausing the learning process for my last semester at university I resumed my efforts in learning K8s after finishing university with getting a membership from A Cloud Guru. On the platform, I started a video course for preparation of the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification where I’m currently working forward to. I will try to get my certification in Q1 2022.

Additionally, I had the chance to learn Terraform to manage our AWS infrastructure at my new job. We try to build up our infrastructure as code to get a better overview of it. On top of that, I was able to implement new functions and features into our infrastructure with AWS products like Lambda, CodeBuild, Elastic Container Service (ECS) and S3. One thing that I also learnt is the permission system of AWS roles and users. My motivation is to create these only with the needed permissions and nothing more to increase the security. In one of the tasks, I was also able to implement an automated process that uses and connect multiple AWS accounts in the process.

One thing that got me excited and where I had a lot of fun is creating and presenting an Introduction to Docker at Fond Of. This contained the basics and most used commands for Docker to give our developers more insights into how Docker works. I plan to create a workshop to give our devs more practical experiences in building Dockerfiles and images from scratch.

GitOps and Ansible were the topics that I did not have the chance to interact with yet but plan to do in the coming year. My plan is also to dive deeper into the universe of Kubernetes and also to learn more about AWS resources and services. Furthermore, I would love to write more in Go and create my first own helper programs.

Since I am still a huge fan of JavaScript and TypeScript and a lot is happening there I would like to check out the newest changes and releases of projects like Gatsby 4, Next.js 12 and maybe Svelte.

These are a lot of plans to tackle in 2022 but I’m super motivated to learn all these things and I’m looking forward to what will happen in the next 12 months. I will also try to write a couple more posts about topics I tackled and to also document what I did. So stay tuned for what will happen on this blog in 2022!

Thank you for reading and I wish you all a happy new year,
Niklas