Been doing infrastructure work for a while and want to make the jump into SRE or DevOps. Looking for honest takes from people already doing it.
What I’ve got under my belt:
Networking: routing, switching, VPNs, firewalls, APs. Comfortable troubleshooting up and down the stack.
Windows and cloud: Active Directory, Entra ID, Windows Server, Azure, Intune, conditional access policies. Plenty of identity and endpoint work.
Virtualization, backups, load balancing: VMware vCenter, enterprise backup tools, F5. Some Linux too, though not as strong as my Windows side.
Where I know I’m weak:
Programming. I can read scripts and tweak them but I’m not building stuff from scratch.
CI/CD. I get the concept but I’ve never built a pipeline end to end.
Kubernetes. Same deal. I understand it on paper but haven’t run anything real.
A few questions for the people doing this work:
1. Does the infra background actually count for anything, or are hiring managers really just looking for devs who picked up ops?
2. If you were in my spot, what would you grind on first? Python? Terraform? Just throw yourself at K8s?
3. Any home lab projects that actually came up in interviews and helped you land the role?
4. Is something like platform engineer or cloud engineer a more realistic stepping stone before going full SRE/DevOps.
Open to harsh feedback. Rather hear it now than waste a year going the wrong direction.