But how did you get your first Linux job? That's where I'm stuck at. Where I live, there's literally zero entry level Linux roles, and the literally couple of Linux roles that are available require you to have centuries worth of enterprise experience with Kuberneres, Openshift, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Terraform etc...
I was a windows guy at a large auction site and started bringing linux in to my workflows and solutions. I'd already been gaining personal experience with linux and the BSDs, solaris, etc. That was my last "windows job."
I'd say there's really no "linux roles" out there. Entry level or not. Everyone collectively decided "devops" was a big bright beautiful tomorrow and made devs learn release management and made ops people get lost (or become the developer they never wanted to be). Everyone shifted their focus towards "as code" solutions because the SRE book said nobody should log in to servers or something. So we hire people that know the abstractions instead and assume nobody really needs to go deeper than that.
It sucks, but learning the abstractions is how you're gonna have to get started. If you're already a linux nerd then you may benefit from understanding what the abstraction is doing under the hood.
If I was starting out right now, I'd go work through Kelsey Hightower's 'Kubernetes The Hard Way' and build functional kubernetes clusters from scratch on a couple of the cloud providers. Do not copy&paste anything from the blog. Every line, every command, by hand. Type out those CSRs and manifests! Recognize what each component you're setting up is and what it's used for. Like "what is the CCM and what's it responsible for?" Or "What's going on with every step of the kubelet bootstrapping process? What controllers are involved and what are they doing?" Read EVERYTHING under kubernetes.io/docs. Understand the relationships between all the primitives.
If you already have some linux, networking, and containers knowledge to build on top of, I think you could work through all of that in less than 4 weeks and have a better understanding of kubernetes than 80%+ of engineers at any level and crush a kubernetes focused interview.
Thanks but my point still stands: there's no entry-level roles, whether it's "Linux" or a Linux-based "DevOps" role. I'm actually working in a windows-based mostly-DevOps type role, but we use almost zero opensource tools and it's very Microsoft centric.
The closest Linux-y roles that I might have a shot at getting into are "cloud engineer" type roles, with a heavy emphasis on AWS - and I hate AWS with a passion (just as much as I hate Azure).
Regardless, the biggest issue is getting that interview call - now in the age of AI, people are faking their CVs and companies are getting flooded with hundreds or thousands of junk applications, so getting that interview call - especially when you don't meet their professional experience requirements - is next to impossible. I could have all the Kuberneres certs in the world, but what's the point if I get filtered out right at the first stage?
Start introducing it where you are. I was an early advocate for the use of WSL2/Docker and along with that a push towards deploying to Linux initially as a cost saving as projects started shifting away from .Net Framework and into .Net Core and Node that were actually easier to deploy to Linux... WSL/Docker became a natural fit as it was "closer to production" for the development workflow.
It's not always possible, but there are definitely selling points that can help you introduce these things. Hell, scripting out the onboarding chores from a clean windows install (powershell to bootstrap in windows, then bash, etc for the WSL environment) with only 3-4 manual steps... and you get a new dev onboarded in a couple hours with a fully working environment and software stack, including an initialized database... You can raise some eyebrows.
Do the same for automated deployments on your existing projects... shift the testing environments to Linux as a "test" or "experiment" ... you can eat away at both directions.
Before you know it, developers can choose windows or mac instead of one or the other, and can use whatever editor they like. Maybe still stuck with C# or MS-SQL, maybe PostgreSQL for green projects.
It’s been 17 years since I got my first Linux job in 2008. Where I live, that’s rare, 99% of the industry here is a 'Microsoft Shop,' and the biggest player in town is practically married to them.
I started out at a small Linux company working with Plone CMS. The pay wasn’t great, but it was the perfect place to learn Linux and Python. Since then, I’ve used Linux every single day, become a Java developer, and started a few businesses. Using Linux of course.
But lately, things are changing. Companies are realizing that when it comes to Data Engineering and Science, C# just can't compete with Python's ecosystem. Now that they need to pivot, they're looking for help, and there are very few people in this area with the experience to answer that call.
I was working in a Windows-centric environment and started using ProxMox as the hypervisor instead of Windows Server. This combined with my self. Hosting hobby (Proxmox mini PC cluster, network diagrams of vlans, self hosting my own blog website, having a handful of small tools in my git repos) was what sold my current company on hiring me, more than my resume of working in tech.
You can make almost any job into a Linux job. Use a linux VM on your desktop to solve a problem for the company. Things change once your employer knows its essential.
I've also seen Linux make inroads in "windows only" enterprises when it became essential for performance reasons. A couple of times, towards the start of a project, windows APIs were discovered to be too slow to meet requirements:
In one case, customer needed us to send a report packet every 40ms. But even when we passed "0" to the windows Sleep() function, it would sometimes stop our program for 100ms at a time. The sleep function on linux was highly accurate, so we shipped linux. Along the way 5-6 devs switched to, or got a second PC to run linux.
In another case, we needed to saturate a 10GbE link with a data stream. We evaluated windows with a simple program:
while(1) send(sock, &buffer, len(buffer);
... but we found windows could only squeeze out 10% of the link capacity. Linux, on the other hand, could saturate the 10GbE link before we had even done any performance tuning. On linux, our production program met all requirements while using only 3% CPU usage. Windows simply couldn't touch this. More devs learned linux to support this product.
Those companies still don't require linux skills when hiring, because everyone there was once a windows guy who figured it out on the job. But when we see linux abilities on the resume it gives candidates a boost because we know they'll be up to speed faster.
