How to Succeed in Ops without Really Trying

The last few years have been a time of immense change in the field of operations; not only are there new technologies popping up every day, but the entire way of doing operations seems to be changing. “System administration” jobs are becoming “devops engineers,” “site reliability engineers,” “production engineers,” or something else that no one seems exactly sure how to define. The proliferation of cloud services is making it easier for some companies to avoid having any purely operations organization at all (or at least think they can). In this kind of climate, how does anyone, especially people without much experience, or who feel like they are years behind the curve, keep up with the pace of change? How do you make sure your skills are still keeping you viable in the job market? And how do you do all this without feeling like you're going to have to spend every waking moment keeping up? This talk will discuss some of the secrets to be a successful operations engineer without sacrificing everything else.