Sometimes, I get so deep into a project and things get so intense that I start feeling like I chose the wrong career path 😖
However, when I persevere and finally complete the project, I feel so proud of myself and what to do it all over again😁.
Funny fr😌
The most valuable DevOps skill is not technical.
It is communication.
Last year, we had a production incident. Database was slow. Application was timing out.
I knew the fix: Scale up the database.
But I could not just do it. Scaling the database costs money. Requires approval.
I had to explain to non-technical leadership:
- What was happening (database overloaded)
- Why it was happening (traffic spike)
- What the fix was (bigger database)
- How much it would cost ($200 more per month)
- What would happen if we did nothing (application stays broken)
I had 3 minutes to explain this in a Slack thread.
Got approval in 5 minutes. Scaled the database. Incident resolved.
If I had just said 'we need to scale the database', they would have asked why. That conversation would have taken 30 minutes.
Learn to translate technical problems into business impact.