IT life hacks. Tips for DevOps engineers from Asel Madiyarbekova

Axel Madiyarbekova, city — San Francisco, DevOps engineer, @aselincali

Here are some important life hacks that will help you increase productivity and efficiency:

1. In documentation management, I use Confluence. I divide each task into categories and subcategories, which makes it easier to search in the future and also helps to easily add or modify previously created documents.

2. Using a version control system, such as Git, allows you to track changes and work effectively in a team. I also use public Git as a tool for finding solutions to many problems — you can even use it as a kind of search engine.

3. Use command-line shortcuts to automate repetitive tasks, saving time and keystrokes.

4. Automate everything — starting from CI/CD, monitoring automation, and resource creation on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Tools like Terraform and Python will help with automation. Everything I create in AWS or Azure, I do through Terraform; it has many advantages, the main one being that it automatically determines dependencies between different resources in the infrastructure. For example, if it is necessary to create a network first before deploying servers, Terraform will ensure that resources are deployed in the correct order.

5. Create custom shell aliases to simplify frequently used commands.

6. Containerize applications — Docker and Kubernetes will help manage scalability and environment isolation.