A History

I got my first job touching live servers back in 2006. At the time, I was working as a dishwasher and got an internship at a small local hosting company that recently made the jump from web hosting to full server hosting. My non-existent training consisted of basically shadowing the most senior SysAdmin at the time.

Up until that point, my experience with server OSes and enterprise network hardware was non-existent. I managed to learn quickly by asking questions and doing legwork on major projects when I wasn’t moving offices and setting up physical storage. Since they hosted their own servers in a NOC, I got some server hardware experience as well.

When the internship was about to end, my paychecks at the restaurant started bouncing. I thankfully got hired on part-time at $9/hr. After I finished school, I was moved to full-time. Eventually the company was sold to a larger hosting company and dismantled around the end of 2011. I was able to get another job at a server hosting company in Chicago before they shut down though.

At the second hosting company, they actually had a virtualization implementation that allowed clients to obtain individual virutal machines on shared hardware and entire Hypervisor servers they could spin up their own VMs with. The system wasn’t great, and they ended up replacing it for a private cloud solution that was based on VMware. At the time, I was senior on the SysAdmin team and I was learning a lot about infrastructure management. I eventually got moved to the recently formed DevOps team, and things were rather stressful due to my own inexperience and having to put out fires in general. I ended up leaving that company in 2014 to take a position as a sole SysAdmin for the tech department of an organization.

At my new company, they had existing production infrastructure with a server hosting provider, but were looking for alternatives. I was given the unique opportunity to test and work on an IaaS platform of my choice, and eventually migrate all production and development infrastructure to it. This is where I am now.

Looking back, I can definitely say that the paradigms of ‘* as a service’ and DevOps have sped up the ability for someone to do infrastructure work at less cost. In my next post, I will try my best to explain the whole bullshit behind the DevOps paradigm.