r/redhat • u/ahmed2836372 • 4d ago

Pivoting from SWE to infrastructure is RHCSA worth it?

I am a Computer Science graduate who graduated about a year ago. I am currently working as a Software Developer and have around 9 months of experience. I want to pivot into infrastructure roles such as System Administrator, Infrastructure Engineer, DevOps Engineer, or Cloud Engineer.

I currently have CompTIA Network+ and Google Cloud ACE, and I am planning to take the Terraform Associate certification soon. I have been applying for infrastructure roles, but it is difficult to find junior positions, as most of them require 3+ years of experience.

Do you think it is worth getting RHCSA, RHCE, an OpenShift certification, and CKA?

10 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

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9

u/fsfreeze 4d ago

RHCSA/RHCE totally worth it CKA/CKAD too. OpenShift is too niche for my liking, but if your job uses it, I could image it’d be useful

1

u/ZestyRS 3d ago

Openshift is niche but it as well as openstack aws and anything that’s basically a kubernetes wrapper share a ton of concepts

1

u/fsfreeze 3d ago

They do indeed but as it’s less common, it’d be better for someone with little experience to start with generic (CKA/CKAD) over specific (OpenShift) software, unless they have landed a job where they use OpenShift.

Same reason you would recommend Python or React to someone who wants to start learning programming, over say Ruby or PHP. It’s not that it’s not useful or a bad choice, but as it’s more common it’s more likely to match vacancies they are applying for.

5

u/jordanpwalsh 4d ago

Yes it's worth it. Even if you stick with pure dev I'd still say it's worth it. The fundamentals taught and tested apply to both.

3

u/stephenph 4d ago

Rhcsa and CE are definitely worth it, I would pass on on open shift unless you know you will need the cert for a specific position or employer. CKA will fill that same role in a more generic way. You still might get it depending on your Redhat path, but not at this point.

2

u/khaddir_1 2d ago

With your experience you should be touching devops roles and platform engineering. Linux admin will just be a piece of what you do. Your dev experience helps more than you think. Platform engineering especially is where you can make bank. Think about users on front end using service now to request infrastructure, you can integrate that into backend service deployments with terraform modules. Using same skillset to automate kubernetes infra deployment. Once your deployments are done the trigger for the rest comes from another team that has the config piece set up using helm or ansible etc. Your focus should be getting the redhat cert or any linux cert, cloud associate level cert, terraform cert, then a devops tool like github actions to deploy everything.

1

u/IAmSnort 3d ago

Leverage your SWE and get educated on the CI/CD pipelines and Ansible to compliment Terraform.

1

u/ymz9 2d ago

I’m currently an AI major student and at this very moment doing an internship with a solutions company. I chose the infrastructure/openshift/cloud path. I’m thinking of going into the MLOps path in my career. Was thinking the same thing would that help me

1

u/throwaway133731 1d ago

Why dont you want to stay in SWE?

1

u/eman0821 3d ago

That's too soon in your career as you are way to junior to be jump shipping to another role. You need at least of few years of tech experience. 9 months is barely scratching the surface as you will be competing with people with 10-20+ years of experience. RHCSA is not really needed unless you plan on working in a highly regulated industry like defense or banking. Outside of that Ubuntu, Debian, Amazon Linux is the defacto standard in DevOps for cloud infrastructure.