{"id":4917,"date":"2026-10-28T01:29:51","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T19:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T01:29:51","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T19:59:51","slug":"devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>POST-MORTEM AND MANIFESTO: THE 72-HOUR DEATH MARCH<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Document ID:<\/strong> PM-2024-05-12-PROD-COLLAPSE<br \/>\n<strong>Status:<\/strong> Bitter.<br \/>\n<strong>Author:<\/strong> Senior SRE (On-call since Tuesday, currently vibrating from caffeine toxicity)<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m writing this because if I don\u2019t, the &#8220;DevOps Transformation Committee&#8221; will spin this as a &#8220;learning opportunity&#8221; in their next slide deck. It wasn&#8217;t a learning opportunity. It was a preventable disaster caused by layers of abstraction we don&#8217;t understand, managed by people who think &#8220;reliability&#8221; is a Jira ticket status. <\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t slept. My eyes feel like they\u2019ve been scrubbed with steel wool. The following is the raw reality of what happened while the &#8220;thought leaders&#8221; were dreaming of &#8220;digital acceleration.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_80 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-grey ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6ae454d43af8d\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #999;color:#999\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #999;color:#999\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6ae454d43af8d\"  aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-3' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#Timeline_of_Failure\" >Timeline of Failure<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#1_The_Incident_03_14_AM_and_the_Cascading_Failure_of_Logic\" >1. The Incident: 03:14 AM and the Cascading Failure of Logic<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-3\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#2_The_YAML_Graveyard_Why_Our_Abstractions_are_Leaking\" >2. The YAML Graveyard: Why Our Abstractions are Leaking<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-4\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#3_Version_Pinning_and_the_Lie_of_%E2%80%9CLatest%E2%80%9D\" >3. Version Pinning and the Lie of &#8220;Latest&#8221;<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-5\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#4_The_%E2%80%9CDevOps_Engineer%E2%80%9D_Title_is_a_Trap\" >4. The &#8220;DevOps Engineer&#8221; Title is a Trap<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-6\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#5_Statefile_Corruption_and_the_Prayer_to_the_S3_Backend\" >5. Statefile Corruption and the Prayer to the S3 Backend<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-7\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#6_Hard_Truths_for_the_Next_On-Call_Rotation\" >6. Hard Truths for the Next On-Call Rotation<\/a><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-3' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-8\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#Letter_to_the_Junior\" >Letter to the Junior<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-9\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#Related_Articles\" >Related Articles<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Timeline_of_Failure\"><\/span>Timeline of Failure<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>03:14:00<\/strong> \u2013 PagerDuty triggers. <code>ServiceUnavailable<\/code> on the Checkout API.<\/li>\n<li><strong>03:16:22<\/strong> \u2013 Attempted to scale the deployment. <code>kubectl scale<\/code> hangs.<\/li>\n<li><strong>03:18:45<\/strong> \u2013 Realized <code>metrics-server<\/code> is <code>OOMKilled<\/code>. HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler) is dead.<\/li>\n<li><strong>03:25:10<\/strong> \u2013 Discovered Nginx Ingress Controller is throwing 504s. Upstream nodes are unresponsive.<\/li>\n<li><strong>03:40:00<\/strong> \u2013 First attempt to roll back the &#8220;Standardized Infrastructure Update&#8221; from the previous afternoon.<\/li>\n<li><strong>04:10:15<\/strong> \u2013 Terraform plan indicates it wants to destroy 412 resources, including the production RDS instance. Rollback aborted.<\/li>\n<li><strong>05:30:00<\/strong> \u2013 Discovered a race condition in the CI\/CD pipeline that pushed a &#8220;latest&#8221; tag to the container registry, overwriting the stable build.<\/li>\n<li><strong>09:00:00<\/strong> \u2013 Management asks for an &#8220;ETA on the fix&#8221; while I\u2019m deep in an <code>strace<\/code> dump.<\/li>\n<li><strong>14:00:00 (Day 2)<\/strong> \u2013 DNS propagation issues begin because someone &#8220;cleaned up&#8221; the Route53 records to &#8220;reduce clutter.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><strong>02:00:00 (Day 3)<\/strong> \u2013 Finally stabilized the control plane. Total data loss: 4 hours of non-critical telemetry, 100% of my remaining sanity.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"1_The_Incident_03_14_AM_and_the_Cascading_Failure_of_Logic\"><\/span>1. The Incident: 03:14 AM and the Cascading Failure of Logic<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>It started with a whisper and ended with a scream. The Checkout API didn&#8217;t just die; it underwent a total existential collapse. The &#8220;DevOps Transformation&#8221; promised us that by moving to Kubernetes v1.29.1, we would have a self-healing infrastructure. <\/p>\n<p>Self-healing is a lie. It\u2019s a marketing term for &#8220;it will try to restart the dumpster fire until the entire data center smells like smoke.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The root cause was a &#8220;performance optimization&#8221; pushed by the Platform Team. They decided to &#8220;leverage&#8221; (I apologize for using a consultant word) the default kernel parameters on our worker nodes without testing the impact on high-concurrency workloads. Specifically, they ignored <code>net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse<\/code>. <\/p>\n<p>Under the load of our 3:00 AM batch processing, the nodes hit the ephemeral port limit. Thousands of sockets stuck in <code>TIME_WAIT<\/code>. The Nginx ingress controller, running on the same nodes, couldn&#8217;t open new connections to the backends. <\/p>\n<pre class=\"codehilite\"><code class=\"language-bash\"># Raw output from node-04-prod during the peak of the outage\n$ netstat -atn | awk '{print $6}' | sort | uniq -c\n   14 LISTEN\n   42 ESTABLISHED\n   65122 TIME_WAIT\n   3 CLOSE_WAIT\n$ dmesg | tail -n 5\n[259201.412] TCP: request_sock_TCP: Possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies. Check SNMP counters.\n[259205.110] TCP: TCP: Hash table overflow\n[259210.001] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet\n<\/code><\/pre>\n<p>The &#8220;DevOps&#8221; approach here was to let the HPA handle it. But the HPA relies on metrics. The metrics-server was running on a node that was already saturated. It couldn&#8217;t report the CPU spike because it couldn&#8217;t even talk to the API server. We were flying blind in a cockpit where every gauge was painted on.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"2_The_YAML_Graveyard_Why_Our_Abstractions_are_Leaking\"><\/span>2. The YAML Graveyard: Why Our Abstractions are Leaking<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>We have built a cathedral of YAML. It is a fragile, sprawling mess of Helm charts that reference sub-charts that reference &#8220;standardized&#8221; templates maintained by a team that hasn&#8217;t touched a production server in three years.<\/p>\n<p>During the outage, I tried to manually override the ingress configuration. I found myself digging through six layers of Kustomize overlays. Every time I changed a value, something else broke because of a &#8220;helpful&#8221; validation script in the CI pipeline that enforces &#8220;best practices.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>These abstractions don&#8217;t simplify; they hide. They hide the fact that at the end of the day, a process is running on a Linux kernel, and that process needs file descriptors and memory. We\u2019ve replaced understanding the system with understanding the configuration of the system. <\/p>\n<p>Look at this snippet from the &#8220;Standard Ingress Template&#8221; that caused the 504s:<\/p>\n<pre class=\"codehilite\"><code class=\"language-yaml\"># The &quot;Standardized&quot; Ingress that killed us\napiVersion: networking.k8s.io\/v1\nkind: Ingress\nmetadata:\n  annotations:\n    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io\/proxy-connect-timeout: &quot;15&quot; # Too low for our legacy DB\n    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io\/proxy-read-timeout: &quot;15&quot;\n    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io\/configuration-snippet: |\n      more_set_headers &quot;X-DevOps-Transformation: Success&quot;; # This is literally in the template\nspec:\n  ingressClassName: nginx-internal\n  rules:\n  - host: api.prod.internal\n    http:\n      paths:\n      - path: \/v1\/checkout\n        pathType: Prefix\n        backend:\n          service:\n            name: checkout-service\n            port:\n              number: 80\n<\/code><\/pre>\n<p>The <code>proxy-connect-timeout<\/code> was hardcoded to 15 seconds. Our legacy database, which the Checkout API talks to, occasionally takes 16 seconds to respond under load. Because the Platform Team wanted &#8220;consistency,&#8221; they locked the timeout. When the load hit, the ingress started dropping connections, which triggered retries, which increased the load, which filled the <code>conntrack<\/code> table. <\/p>\n<p>This is &#8220;Day 2&#8221; operations. &#8220;Day 1&#8221; is getting the YAML to apply. &#8220;Day 2&#8221; is realizing your YAML created a feedback loop that destroys your business.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"3_Version_Pinning_and_the_Lie_of_%E2%80%9CLatest%E2%80%9D\"><\/span>3. Version Pinning and the Lie of &#8220;Latest&#8221;<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>We are currently running a mix of Terraform v1.6.4 and various providers that were &#8220;auto-updated&#8221; by a Dependabot-style tool. This is a recipe for statefile corruption. <\/p>\n<p>Someone in their infinite wisdom decided that we should always use the &#8220;latest&#8221; version of our internal base images. &#8220;It ensures we have the latest security patches,&#8221; they said. <\/p>\n<p>What it actually ensures is that your environment is non-deterministic. At 05:30 AM, while I was trying to redeploy the Checkout API, the CI pipeline pulled a new &#8220;latest&#8221; base image that included a breaking change in OpenSSL 3.0.7. Suddenly, our service-to-service mTLS was broken. <\/p>\n<pre class=\"codehilite\"><code class=\"language-text\"># Logs from checkout-api-v2-7f9db9c84b-l2x9z\n[ERROR] 2024-05-12T05:32:11Z: Failed to initialize SSL context.\n[ERROR] 2024-05-12T05:32:11Z: OpenSSL error: error:03000086:digital envelope routines::initialization error\n[INFO] 2024-05-12T05:32:12Z: Service exiting...\n<\/code><\/pre>\n<p>The &#8220;DevOps&#8221; way is to automate everything. But if you automate the deployment of unpinned versions, you are just automating your own demise. We spent two hours bisecting base images to find out which one introduced the regression. <\/p>\n<p>We talk about &#8220;immutable infrastructure,&#8221; but our build process is as mutable as a Google Doc. If I can&#8217;t rebuild the exact same binary from a commit hash from three months ago, I don&#8217;t have a pipeline; I have a random number generator.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"4_The_%E2%80%9CDevOps_Engineer%E2%80%9D_Title_is_a_Trap\"><\/span>4. The &#8220;DevOps Engineer&#8221; Title is a Trap<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>I am tired of being a &#8220;DevOps Engineer.&#8221; It\u2019s a nonsense title. DevOps was supposed to be a culture of shared responsibility. Instead, it became a way to fire the SysAdmins and tell the Developers they\u2019re now responsible for the entire stack, while hiring a few &#8220;SREs&#8221; to clean up the blood when the &#8220;transformation&#8221; hits the fan.<\/p>\n<p>The organization treats us like janitors with better salaries. We are expected to know the intricacies of the Linux kernel, the nuances of BGP routing, the specific syntax of three different cloud providers, and the &#8220;agile&#8221; way to write a post-mortem. <\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;DevOps Transformation&#8221; meant we stopped talking about &#8220;servers&#8221; and started talking about &#8220;resources.&#8221; But the cloud is just someone else\u2019s server, and it\u2019s usually a server that\u2019s over-provisioned and under-monitored. <\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve created a culture of &#8220;toil.&#8221; We spend 80% of our time fixing the tools that were supposed to save us time. We spend hours &#8220;bikeshedding&#8221; over whether to use Pulumi or Terraform, while our actual application logs are being sent to a <code>\/dev\/null<\/code> equivalent because the Prometheus query is too expensive to run.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of Prometheus, here is the query that was supposed to alert us to the connection exhaustion:<\/p>\n<pre class=\"codehilite\"><code class=\"language-promql\"># The alert that never fired\nsum(rate(container_network_transmit_errors_total{namespace=&quot;prod&quot;}[5m])) by (pod) &gt; 0\n<\/code><\/pre>\n<p>Why didn&#8217;t it fire? Because <code>container_network_transmit_errors_total<\/code> doesn&#8217;t track <code>TIME_WAIT<\/code> saturation at the node level. It tracks interface errors. The packets weren&#8217;t being dropped by the interface; they were being dropped by the kernel before they even got to the interface. We were looking at the wrong layer of the OSI model because our &#8220;standardized dashboards&#8221; were built by someone who thinks the network is a &#8220;seamless&#8221; (ugh) abstraction.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"5_Statefile_Corruption_and_the_Prayer_to_the_S3_Backend\"><\/span>5. Statefile Corruption and the Prayer to the S3 Backend<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>When the rollback failed, it wasn&#8217;t because the code was wrong. It was because the Terraform statefile was locked by a &#8220;ghost&#8221; process in a failed GitHub Action. <\/p>\n<p>We use S3 for our backend with DynamoDB for locking. During the chaos, the lock didn&#8217;t release. I had to manually intervene in the AWS Console\u2014the ultimate admission of failure for an SRE\u2014to delete the lock entry.<\/p>\n<p>But it got worse. Because of the &#8220;drift&#8221; between our &#8220;snowflake servers&#8221; (yes, we still have them, they&#8217;re just called &#8220;long-running EC2 instances&#8221; now) and the Terraform code, the <code>plan<\/code> output was a nightmare.<\/p>\n<pre class=\"codehilite\"><code class=\"language-text\">$ terraform plan\n...\n# module.vpc.aws_route_table.public will be updated in-place\n~ resource &quot;aws_route_table&quot; &quot;public&quot; {\n    - tags = {\n        &quot;ManagedBy&quot; = &quot;Terraform&quot;\n      } -&gt; null\n    # (4 unchanged attributes hidden)\n}\n\n# module.db.aws_db_instance.primary will be destroyed and recreated\n-\/+ resource &quot;aws_db_instance&quot; &quot;primary&quot; {\n    ~ engine_version       = &quot;14.7&quot; -&gt; &quot;15.3&quot; # Force replacement\n    ~ instance_class       = &quot;db.r6g.xlarge&quot; -&gt; &quot;db.t4g.medium&quot; # Wait, what?\n    ...\n}\n\nPlan: 12 to add, 5 to change, 412 to destroy.\n<\/code><\/pre>\n<p>The &#8220;DevOps&#8221; team had &#8220;leveraged&#8221; (sorry) a community module for the VPC that had a breaking change in its latest minor version. Because we didn&#8217;t pin the module version, a simple <code>terraform init -upgrade<\/code> during the emergency changed the entire plan. <\/p>\n<p>If I had hit <code>apply<\/code>, I would have deleted the production database. In the middle of an outage. This is the &#8220;safety&#8221; our modern tooling provides. It\u2019s a chainsaw without a guard, and we\u2019re using it in the dark.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"6_Hard_Truths_for_the_Next_On-Call_Rotation\"><\/span>6. Hard Truths for the Next On-Call Rotation<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>We need to stop lying to ourselves. <\/p>\n<p>First, DNS is not a &#8220;set and forget&#8221; service. It is the foundation of everything, and ours is held together by hope and legacy records. The <code>ndots: 5<\/code> default in Kubernetes is killing our latency. Every internal lookup is doing a five-step search through the DNS suffix list. We are DDOSing our own CoreDNS pods.<\/p>\n<p>Second, our IAM roles are a disaster. We claim to follow &#8220;least privilege,&#8221; but every time a developer hits a &#8220;403 Forbidden,&#8221; we just add <code>AdministratorAccess<\/code> until it works, promising to &#8220;clean it up in the next sprint.&#8221; That sprint never comes. We have service accounts with more power than the CTO.<\/p>\n<p>Third, &#8220;Day 2&#8221; operations are the only operations that matter. Anyone can spin up a cluster. Very few people can keep it running when the disk fills up on a Friday night because the log rotation script failed. We are optimizing for &#8220;Day 1&#8221; (speed of delivery) and ignoring the &#8220;toil&#8221; of &#8220;Day 2&#8221; (maintenance).<\/p>\n<p>Fourth, we need to kill the &#8220;DevOps Engineer&#8221; title. Call us &#8220;Infrastructure Janitors&#8221; or &#8220;Systems Sufferers.&#8221; At least then the expectations would be honest.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Letter_to_the_Junior\"><\/span>Letter to the Junior<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>To the new hire who just finished a 6-week bootcamp and thinks &#8220;DevOps&#8221; is about writing YAML and &#8220;leveraging&#8221; (I am so sorry) the cloud:<\/p>\n<p>Turn back. <\/p>\n<p>You think you\u2019re an architect, but you\u2019re a plumber in a building where the pipes are made of glass and the water is pressurized acid. You\u2019ve been told that the cloud is &#8220;serverless&#8221; and &#8220;elastic.&#8221; It\u2019s not. It\u2019s just a very expensive way to run someone else\u2019s Linux kernel.<\/p>\n<p>You will spend your days fighting with tools that were designed to solve problems you don&#8217;t have, creating new problems you can&#8217;t solve. You will be told that &#8220;automation is the key,&#8221; but you will find that you are just automating the speed at which you can break things.<\/p>\n<p>You will learn to hate the word &#8220;transformation.&#8221; You will learn that &#8220;best practices&#8221; are just things people say when they don&#8217;t want to think about the specific constraints of their own system. You will learn that the most important tool in your kit isn&#8217;t <code>kubectl<\/code> or <code>terraform<\/code>; it&#8217;s <code>strace<\/code>, <code>tcpdump<\/code>, and the ability to stay calm when the world is burning.<\/p>\n<p>Being an SRE isn&#8217;t about &#8220;innovation.&#8221; It\u2019s about holding the line. It\u2019s about being the person who knows that <code>net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse<\/code> actually does something. It\u2019s about being the one who stays awake for 72 hours so that everyone else can pretend the &#8220;DevOps Transformation&#8221; is working.<\/p>\n<p>If you still want the job, fine. But don&#8217;t come to me asking why the &#8220;seamless&#8221; (god, I hate that word) deployment failed. I\u2019ll be in the server room, listening to the fans and waiting for the next PagerDuty alert.<\/p>\n<p>Now, if you&#8217;ll excuse me, I have to go delete a manual IAM policy before it becomes a permanent part of our infrastructure. Or maybe I&#8217;ll just go to sleep. <\/p>\n<p>Probably not. The statefile is still drifting.<\/p>\n<p><strong>EOF<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Post-Mortem Summary for Management (The Lie):<\/strong><br \/>\nThe incident was a result of unforeseen micro-service interactions during a period of high growth. We are implementing enhanced observability and refining our automated scaling protocols to ensure a more robust user experience. We continue to prioritize our DevOps journey.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Post-Mortem Summary for SREs (The Truth):<\/strong><br \/>\nThe kernel ran out of ports because we\u2019re idiots who don&#8217;t test our &#8220;standardized&#8221; templates. Terraform tried to kill us. The junior pushed to prod on a Thursday. Everything is still broken, but it\u2019s broken in a way that looks like it\u2019s working. Don&#8217;t touch anything. I&#8217;m going to bed.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Related_Articles\"><\/span>Related Articles<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Explore more insights and best practices:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/what-is-react-a-complete-guide-to-the-popular-js-library\/\">What Is React A Complete Guide To The Popular Js Library<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/aws-best-practices-optimize-your-cloud-infrastructure\/\">Aws Best Practices Optimize Your Cloud Infrastructure<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/what-is-a-docker-image-a-complete-guide-for-beginners-2\/\">What Is A Docker Image A Complete Guide For Beginners 2<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>POST-MORTEM AND MANIFESTO: THE 72-HOUR DEATH MARCH Document ID: PM-2024-05-12-PROD-COLLAPSE Status: Bitter. Author: Senior SRE (On-call since Tuesday, currently vibrating from caffeine toxicity) I\u2019m writing this because if I don\u2019t, the &#8220;DevOps Transformation Committee&#8221; will spin this as a &#8220;learning opportunity&#8221; in their next slide deck. It wasn&#8217;t a learning opportunity. It was a preventable &#8230; <a title=\"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/\" aria-label=\"Read more  on DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024 - ITSupportWale<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024 - ITSupportWale\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"POST-MORTEM AND MANIFESTO: THE 72-HOUR DEATH MARCH Document ID: PM-2024-05-12-PROD-COLLAPSE Status: Bitter. Author: Senior SRE (On-call since Tuesday, currently vibrating from caffeine toxicity) I\u2019m writing this because if I don\u2019t, the &#8220;DevOps Transformation Committee&#8221; will spin this as a &#8220;learning opportunity&#8221; in their next slide deck. It wasn&#8217;t a learning opportunity. It was a preventable ... Read more\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"ITSupportWale\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Itsupportwale-298547177495978\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-10-27T19:59:51+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/android-chrome-512x512-1.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"512\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"512\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Techie\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Techie\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Techie\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8c5a2b3d36396e0a8fd91ec8242fd46d\"},\"headline\":\"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-10-27T19:59:51+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/\"},\"wordCount\":2012,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#organization\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/\",\"name\":\"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024 - ITSupportWale\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2026-10-27T19:59:51+00:00\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"ITSupportWale\",\"description\":\"Tips, Tricks, Fixed-Errors, Tutorials &amp; Guides\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"itsupportwale\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/cropped-Logo-trans-without-slogan.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/cropped-Logo-trans-without-slogan.png\",\"width\":1119,\"height\":144,\"caption\":\"itsupportwale\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Itsupportwale-298547177495978\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8c5a2b3d36396e0a8fd91ec8242fd46d\",\"name\":\"Techie\",\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\",\"iswblogadmin\"],\"url\":\"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/author\/iswblogadmin\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024 - ITSupportWale","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024 - ITSupportWale","og_description":"POST-MORTEM AND MANIFESTO: THE 72-HOUR DEATH MARCH Document ID: PM-2024-05-12-PROD-COLLAPSE Status: Bitter. Author: Senior SRE (On-call since Tuesday, currently vibrating from caffeine toxicity) I\u2019m writing this because if I don\u2019t, the &#8220;DevOps Transformation Committee&#8221; will spin this as a &#8220;learning opportunity&#8221; in their next slide deck. It wasn&#8217;t a learning opportunity. It was a preventable ... Read more","og_url":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/","og_site_name":"ITSupportWale","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Itsupportwale-298547177495978","article_published_time":"2026-10-27T19:59:51+00:00","og_image":[{"width":512,"height":512,"url":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/android-chrome-512x512-1.png","type":"image\/png"}],"author":"Techie","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Techie","Est. reading time":"11 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/"},"author":{"name":"Techie","@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8c5a2b3d36396e0a8fd91ec8242fd46d"},"headline":"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024","datePublished":"2026-10-27T19:59:51+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/"},"wordCount":2012,"commentCount":0,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#organization"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/","url":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/","name":"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024 - ITSupportWale","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#website"},"datePublished":"2026-10-27T19:59:51+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/devops-engineer-skills-salary-and-career-guide-2024\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"DevOps Engineer: Skills, Salary, and Career Guide 2024"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/","name":"ITSupportWale","description":"Tips, Tricks, Fixed-Errors, Tutorials &amp; Guides","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#organization","name":"itsupportwale","url":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/cropped-Logo-trans-without-slogan.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/cropped-Logo-trans-without-slogan.png","width":1119,"height":144,"caption":"itsupportwale"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Itsupportwale-298547177495978"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8c5a2b3d36396e0a8fd91ec8242fd46d","name":"Techie","sameAs":["https:\/\/itsupportwale.com","iswblogadmin"],"url":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/author\/iswblogadmin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itsupportwale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}