One of the most traditional topics nowadays is the unexpected career shifts from various professions to IT and vice versa. I have this fantastic colleague – a professional butcher by training. He sets up monitoring systems like a pro and can defend his point of view convincingly. His education certainly plays a part in that.
You can also include me among those with a peculiar career switch. As many remember from my previous posts – I originally started as a doctor, who then veered towards fundamental science and tissue engineering. All those diversions with stem cells, growing organs in bioreactors, and other atypical experimental tasks. And then, out of the blue, I was invited for an interview at a large telecom company... Long story short, I found myself as a DevOps in a company dealing with complex projects, some of which are about adult videos. Yes, those very special educational movies for adults that drive progress, with petabytes of traffic, millions of users, and all the other joys.
Here’s how it works for us - there comes a time in a business when they realize, that's it. We've arrived. The infrastructure is working, everything seems fine, but it's built on hacks carefully laid by three generations of employees. There’s no documentation, nobody remembers how it all works. If a server dies, resurrecting it would be a miracle.
And that's usually the moment when we, the WiseOps team, come in. We start dissecting every nut and bolt of the archaeological layers of code, architecture, and business logic. We already have dozens of clients, three of whom are in the video content business.
Let's dive deeper, and I'll try to show you what this whole industry looks like through the eyes of a doctor/bio-engineer/DevOps.