Interview Log - A Day in Life of an OpenStack Administrator

With the Covid-19 pandemic having a catastrophic effect on the global employment segment, job seekers are finding it difficult to choose any career path or to upgrade their skills.

To help you make the right career decision and move up the career ladder, we have approached skilled and experienced professionals from different fields such as cloud computing, cybersecurity, open stack, and other areas, and sought their guidance.

Interview Log – Mr. Arivezhil Namasivayam

We had a chance to connect with Mr. Arivezhil Namasivayam, an Open Stack Administrator, at Cisco, where he is helping the developers and clients with his strong knowledge and skills.

Earlier, he worked with Capgemini India Private Limited as Linux Administrator. Being an experienced Linux administrator, he worked with many products and solving critical, challenging tasks at his workplace and helping the business.

Let’s start a conversation with Mr. Arivezhil Namasivayam:

Please share a brief introduction about your role as an OpenSource Administrator. 

Being an OpenStack administration, I used to work on deployments, management node installation, user creation, project, and instance creation. The primary role is involved in the end to the end deployment process, including setup YAML preparation, verifying cable matrix diagram, rack matrix diagram. Apart from that handling, some troubleshooting issues will occur during deployment. Moreover, we used to work on HOT(Orchestration templates) which will reduce the manual human effort, for instance, creation, network, etc.

What type of career opportunities are available for an open stack Administrator?  Could you please share some insights?

There are ample opportunities available in the market. But we should well be versed in Ansible and Orchestration part to grow further. Setup YAML is written in Ansible, so easily one can learn ansible language without any difficulties. The following roles are suitable. Cloud Engineer, Senior Lead Engineer.

Which are top companies/projects in this field? 

Rakuten, American Express, Redhat, Cisco. All 5G projects now mostly deployed in Openstack.

Tell us about some lessons that you have learned to excel in this field. 

I have learned Ansible in addition to OpenStack. My primary skill is Linux, and it helps me to understand OpenStack more fully.

What does a day in the life of an Open Stack Administrator look like? 

Day to day life of an OpenStack administrator fully includes deployments and other administration activities like creating instances and managing images.

What skills or characteristics make someone an effective remote worker?

Strong communication skills. You should have a high discipline to reply as fast as possible.

Any courses/paths that you’ll recommend to upcoming Open Stack professionals?

You must have experience as a Linux administrator, and knowledge on networking is a must before reading OpenStack. I would suggest taking a RedHat course on CL110, CL210 and to get OpenStack certified. CL310 is a more advanced level that will cover storage and networks fully.

Last words – Do you have any expert advice for our readers about the open stack?

Concentrate on one technology like open stack at a time to excel in that field. Meanwhile, learn to code to achieve better skills and career opportunities. I would suggest learning CS50 from Harvard University, which is available in edX to excel in your coding skills.