After thinking about it a bit more I think my thoughts are more along the lines of recognizing a need for a split between a traditional sysadmin role and a devops role. What do you wish developers knew when they asked for resources? What would you require them to know before they have access to production servers? (I agree that's contrary to best practices but some definitions of 'devops' go that far.) What about ad hoc infrastructure, e.g., what would expect developers to know before they start creating running their own docker images on a k8s cluster?
I'm in an unusual, but not unheard of, position since we have a stable ops environment but our product requires us to support an incredible variety of servers/configurations. Many developers know how to create an instance on EC2 and how to use yum to install the latest version of some server but I'm currently on a joint team trying to figure out how we can offload a lot of non-production work from the ops team without blowing up the budget or destroying security. Ops simply doesn't have the bandwidth to understand all of the different servers/versions we need to support. I also want to reiterate one point - the LPIC exam shouldn't cover the same material as the AWS exams even though so many devops candidates will be doing most if not all of their work in a cloud environment. However the test should be aware of it, e.g., if you're in a traditional environment you'll set up postfix so your server can forward local email into your corporate email. If you're in a cloud you'll probably use SES for the same purpose. Why would you want to have to maintain an additional server if you're only using it as a relay? Every server you run on your EC2 instances increase the risk surface for a compromise. Likewise OpenLDAP should mention that it can be backed by a relational database even if no details are required. In a traditional environment you'll set up a database somewhere, in the cloud you might decide it's better to use RDS. I think AWS also offers AD. A sample question could be: Which server/service can be used to send email (Choose two) - postfix - postgres - SMS - SES - RDS but that can be a little tricky since someone familiar with AWS will know that you can easily set up pipelines between different services directly or with simple lambdas. That means the client may post to a JMS topic and it magically transform into outbound email. That means that 'SES' (simple email service) is the correct answer but 'SMS' (simple messaging service, iirc), 'SNS' (simple notification service), and possibly even SQS (simple queuing service) would have to be an acceptable answer if the person is knowledgeable. BTW AWS services aren't limited to the cloud. It's easy to set up desktops to use AWS to send email, to use as the database, etc. You could use the AWS gateway so the services are transparently visible on your VPN or just use secure protocols. (E.g., access SES via SMTPS.) For some small- and medium-sized businesses it may be more cost-effective to do this than to maintain their own servers. Bear
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