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Hey Ala,

Someone just wrote this inside of the community and I wanted to share this with you:

Hey everyone, I wanted to share my thoughts on Mischa's course so far from the perspective of someone who has been working in IT for 7 years.

I think my situation may be a little different from some people in this community, as I already have experience working as a platform engineer at a geospatial start-up for the past 4 years, but ultimately I am also seeking to transition into a more kubernetes focused role and seriously improve my Linux skills in the process.

After several years working in IT support and as a Sys admin, I managed to make the leap into my current role by passing several AWS certifications and focusing on AWS infrastructure and services several years ago. This, along with using terraform, github actions, cloudflare, docker and various other tooling to manage our application infrastructure is what makes up the majority of my day-to-day role.

Though I've had some success in this role, I've never quite been able to shake off the feeling that when it comes to "real" devops/platform engineering that requires deep Linux knowledge (and is not abstracted by various cloud services or tooling) I actually don't know as much as I should do.

This has been apparent on several occasions when a specific pipeline in production has stopped working, or there is a tricky ECS docker error that is actually causing downtime on our app. I was always able to resolve these issues eventually, but my success was sometimes owed more to guesswork and frantic googling. I could patch the symptoms of these production systems but I couldn't confidently explain why, at the fundamental Linux OS level, the problem occurred in the first place.

With my goal to transition into a more Kubernetes focused role moving forward, I came to the realisation that without this deeper Linux knowledge, I will ultimately fall victim to the same pattern throughout my career; patching problems I don't really understand at a fundamental level.

From my limited experience with Kubernetes I know it doesn't simply abstract away from the kernel. That means I can't confidently make this transition without getting serious about the entire Linux ecosystem.

I've just gone through the KubeCraft fundamentals and containers modules, and I can confidently say that it was a great idea to join this community. I've learnt more about practical Linux usage and building a serious DevOps workflow environment than I have in the past 5 years. I've been taking detailed notes at each stage of this course and I can already see how the full course will coalesce into a durable set of Linux knowledge and skills. The type of skills that future-proof you not only for Kubernetes but for any future technology steeped into Linux architecture.

This post might not be especially novel to some of you, but I do want to say that if you are just starting off your IT/DevOps journey and hoping that this course can help you achieve a new career in Tech, please continue pushing on. Learning fundamentally how the Linux kernel works from the beginning of your career is something that I wished I achieved earlier and the future dividends cannot be understated.

There's no doubt in my mind it will put you into a separate class of engineers moving forward, because there are a significant number of people in this industry who understand the abstractions of cloud tooling, but not the actual ground that they are all built on (takes one to know one).

Thanks to Mischa for putting together such great content, and I'm happy to be part of this community. I'll soon be building an Arch Linux system from scratch on an old laptop as per the Linux Advanced module and feel really hopeful for the future,

Happy Learning