I’m a DevOps engineer at a mid-sized SaaS startup. You won’t find my name in any headlines or on any conference stage. But if you use our app — and tens of thousands of people do — you’re benefiting from my work every single day, whether you know it or not.
My job? Keeping the wheels turning. Or in modern terms: keeping the cloud from falling out of the sky.
It’s funny. When I tell people what I do, I usually get blank stares. “You work… in development? In operations? What does that even mean?” The truth is, it means both. And neither. DevOps is a weird liminal space. I write code — but I’m not a software engineer. I manage infrastructure — but I’m not an old-school sysadmin. I automate, optimize, monitor, and when all else fails… I’m the one who gets paged at 3am.
Ah yes, the pager. Every DevOps engineer develops a love-hate relationship with the on-call rotation. You dread hearing that vibration in the middle of the night — but also feel a weird thrill when you successfully bring a broken system back from the dead. It’s like being an emergency room doctor for servers.
Our stack? Kubernetes on EKS, running on AWS. Terraform for IaC. GitHub Actions for CI/CD. Datadog and Grafana for observability. Prometheus everywhere. But honestly, the tools are the easy part. The hard part is culture. Teaching developers why you shouldn’t merge on a Friday. Convincing product managers that uptime matters more than one more shiny feature. Fighting the good fight for test coverage and sane rollback plans.
People think DevOps is about tools. It’s not. It’s about trust. Developers trust me to keep the platform stable. I trust them not to ship untested code. The business trusts us both to keep customers happy and revenue flowing. It’s a fragile ecosystem. And when it breaks — when the site goes down, or the database hits a performance cliff — it’s on me to pull it back together.
It’s stressful, sure. But it’s also rewarding. I get to see the entire system, end to end. I get to fix things that no one else can. And at the end of the day, I know my work matters — even if no one outside my team ever sees it.
So next time you click a button and it just works? Spare a thought for your friendly neighborhood DevOps engineer, quietly keeping the lights on behind the scenes.
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