cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/60171730
Hey y’all, looking to land my first DevOps Engineering role soon, and figured I should use enterprise software as much as possible for some resume building and personal practice. For reference, I’ve set up a NAS server once before but haven’t got too much experience outside of that. Basing this on some DevOps Engineers I’ve talked to IRL and some friends who hire engineers, but wanted extra community feedback.
Use case: parents are data hoarders, probably have at least 4tb saved composed of every type of media you can think of, so hopefully the whole family can use this when I’m done with it all. Otherwise, aiming to be able to claim experience with enterprise grade DevOps software.
Some of this is personal research, a lot of Reddit research, and some LLM comparisons used to choose between two software systems. Please let me know what you’d keep or change! I’m still kinda new to this :p
Hardware: (old gaming pc)
- Intel i5-9600K
- 32GB DDR4 RAM
- GTX 1070
- Gigabyte Z370XP SLI
- Seagate IronWolf 12TB 3.5" SATA
Hypervisor & OS:
- Proxmox VE (type-1 hypervisor)
- Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS (VM operating system)
- cloud-init (VM provisioning automation)
Infrastructure as Code & Automation:
- Terraform (infrastructure provisioning)
- Proxmox Terraform Provider (VM automation)
- Ansible (configuration management)
- GitHub Actions (CI/CD pipelines)
Containerization & Orchestration:
- Docker (container runtime/builds)
- Kubernetes/k3s (container orchestration)
- Helm (Kubernetes package manager)
- ArgoCD (GitOps continuous deployment)
Networking & Ingress:
- Traefik (ingress controller/reverse proxy)
- MetalLB (bare-metal load balancer)
- cert-manager (TLS certificate automation)
- WireGuard (VPN software)
- Surfshark (VPN service)
Secrets & Security:
- HashiCorp Vault (secrets management)
- External Secrets Operator (Kubernetes secret syncing)
- SSH hardening (secure remote access)
Observability & Monitoring:
- Prometheus (metrics collection)
- Grafana (monitoring dashboards/visualization)
- Loki (centralized log aggregation)
- Promtail (log shipping agent)
- Alertmanager (alert routing/notifications)
Storage & Backups:
- ZFS (filesystem/storage management)
- NFS (network storage)
- Persistent Volumes/PVCs (Kubernetes storage)
- Restic (encrypted backups)
- Velero (Kubernetes backup/disaster recovery)
Container Registry & CI Infrastructure:
- GitHub Container Registry or Harbor (container registry)
- GitHub Runner (self-hosted CI runner)
AWS Emulation:
- LocalStack (AWS cloud emulation)
- Terraform AWS Provider (AWS IaC practice)
- MinIO (S3-compatible object storage)
Self-Hosted Applications:
- Prowlarr (indexer manager)
- Sonarr (TV show management automation)
- Radarr (movie management automation)
- LazyLibrarian (book management automation)
- Lidarr (music management automation)
- Homarr (application dashboard)
- Seerr/Overseerr (media request management)
- Jellyfin (media server)
- qBittorrent (torrent client)
- NZBGet (Usenet downloader)
- Immich (photo gallery & backup)
- Mealie (meal planner)
- Moonlight (low-latency remote gaming)
- Kavita (ebook/manga/audiobook reader)
- Funkwhale (music streaming)
- Grafana (monitoring dashboards)
100% building a home lab and being able to talk about it openly, from memory, in your own words, from experience, is invaluable for interviews.
I might update this. I might not. I have a lot to say but In out drinking.
All I will say now is save this list. You’ll look back at it in 5 years and wonder what half of those things are.
…
Okay a bit more from the bar:
If you want dev sec ops, grafana, elk, build dashboards, get your agents setup in your fleet, get it all secure locally. That alone will impress any interviewer who knows anything.
Dev ops specifically? Focus on building a local GitLab instance. Use grafana to monitor it. Run some app that has a busy db. Grafana dashboards on that. Oh my goodness, what a HOG you are GitLab! Tune it for your env. Purposely misconfigure something to watch, idk, the RAM keep growing because you didn’t setup redis or some shit.
The sea is vast. You’re hungry. Employers will see that once you land interviews.
If you want a ton of dev sec ops ideas, I am a good sounding board. Regular dev ops isn’t my daily grind so I know a bit less. What I do know is if you’re not ready to rebuild a multi node cluster some night after hours, you’re not quite a boss (doesn’t mean you’re not ready). So, emulate that nightmare.
Back to drinking 🍻
Edit: double check your *arr ideas bc afaik most of those were abandoned after a few major vulns were uncovered. That was months ago so that may be old hat.
Thank you! I know a chunk of the *arr stack isn’t useable anymore.
I’m trying to get the resume experience so that I can actually land an interview! I’ve gotten an offer from every job I’ve ever interviewed for in my life (mid 20’s) but I can’t seem to land DevOps engineering interviews :./
I’m sure the job postings will say, but many dev ops roles are looking for someone with senior experience. Like 8-10 years or the resume is ignored.
Id say the way to beat this is look for tier iii roles for folks that don’t know what they need is dev ops. Explain the value of what you want to do as a sysadmin to bring value. Then just write dev ops on your resume when you wind up doing dev ops.