A Linux user myself since 2007 who happened to adopt Linux Debian for personal computing and performed by undergraduate academic projects using Linux and till date been highly indebted to the opensource community..
I’m mostly self taught as you would have understood by now.. I used to seek guidance from internet in the opensource media forums to shape my career..
As a CCNA student and Linux enthusiast, working on linux OS was more of a passion than perusing it as a career and unfortunately I couldn’t find the relevant jobs to fuel it..
I began professional career in the IT industry, I have achieved my Redhat Certification by then.. I have worked through the ranks of being an NOC L1 Engineer, getting promoting to higher levels.. working in a Data Center environment with physical machines, Hypervisors, Storage systems and most importantly Understanding the business needs and project models by interacting with various members across the teams and hierarchy .. gradually working up the ladder pacing myself and putting hundreds of hours understanding the linux system internals which exponentially improved my skills on linux Operating system, I began writing shell scripting for mission critical tasks and enhancing the system performance with automated remediation of issues. Performing system upgrades, Ensuring system availability and managing critical data backups.. all of these had the scope for scripting.
I was always interested in programming since my childhood.. But just the Networking and Linux dominated it more.. I found a rare combination of skills developed within my self.
I wanted to find a sweet stop of infrastructure management and the programming by using some of the OOPS concepts with the magic of python and JavaScript.
The AWS cloud responsibility happened to come on my shoulders in one project to which I could easily adopt and also managing the various functional areas it opened up.
The development team interaction which I adored the most and helping them with their needs was utmost satisfactory and gave me an insight into their mindsets and there by writing them small utilities to fasten up their work and make their work more efficient. Examples of recovering the Data from a corrupted commit repos on SVN trunk.. and then segregating them and converting them into a git repo and then cleaning of merge conflicts became a nightmarish work it indeed felt like an silent achievement at the early days of my career for a finance company who was a client.
The Devops phase shift happened in the IT and I had adopted to it naturally and I was already familiar with my development team’s struggles as I shared their experiences with managing their Version control repos, managing the patches with continuous integrating and delivery, ensuring the stable infra environments to provide them proper Dev, UAT, Test beds with continuous deployments..
The capabilities of environment isolation for developers and the repetitive struggle to give a portable environment for Frontend and middle-ware and DB configurations with working stable and sometimes latest libraries was indeed a struggle and hindrance in product life cycle development stages.
Luckily I discovered Docker while on Discourse forums in 2015.. Fortunately the micro services picked up mainstream and happened to love Docker.. Things happened to come on to me and I was ready to learn and spent hundreds of hours in learning it and justifying it for a business use in early 2016, I was part of the Center Of Excellence team enabling the implementation and bringing together various components.. Using docker swarm for one such use cases to setup a small cluster on AWS cloud for a business line and then exploring the Kubernetes was like the whole new level of excitement.
The Elastic stack was providing many answers to present the ultimate visibility and my experiences to help the higher management in viewing the analytics, and the struggles in parsing the filters to generate proper indexes and creating meaningful charts out of it.
Then the integration of the Version Control systems and CICD tools to this orchestration tools completed a full circle of so called modern day Devops with tools to keep track of the deliverables for quality checking, automatic code testing and load testing, delivery of the code and deployments to Various environments completing the iteration of product lifecycle. Lateron I have successfully worked on Migrating the resources to cloud, Designed DevSecOps CICD frameworks, Enabled the Project management with proper access control, BCP’s and DRs. Creating of the Dev, UAT and Production environments. Setting up Openshift and Kubernetes environments upgrading and maintaining them is a good achievement.
All through the time I have given scope for the team building and impetus on mentorship to my peers and reportee.
The fun of production management became more interesting with the latest and greatest monitoring tools with discovering the unknown problems of the know and the Observability part of detecting the unknown of the unknown is more interesting phase of my IT life.
The Implementation of IaC tools for Idempotency and the ability to perform the automation by writing just 1% amount of code required to write a shell-script code to do the same task is out of bounds and then provisioning of on-prem and cloud resources all thanks to the advancement of dedicated IT force of opensource community. And also the power of burning down and rendering the whole infrastructure useless justified the line.. with great power comes great responsibility.
The Opensource world has shaped me to what I’m today and I continue to grow and learn the skills by putting them into practice and help build technology.
All I can proudly say that I have given importance to learning in a systematic way and putting things into practice to become a better version of myself.
I have started this blog with an intention of sharing some of my work and giving the things back to the community.
The Software IT transformation has transformed the trend of how the IT operations are conducted and the frequency with which it has shifted gears is many more times faster than it did in the past and continuing to spread to the tracks unknown..
As the human tendency is, We don’t believe in things We don’t see and We forget things We did.. This is the motivation for me to start this blog.
– Vamshi Krishna Santhapuri