1.10 A day in the life — junior DevOps (story)
Use this story to picture the job. Names are practice only.
Morning: Priya joins the standup for an Instagram-style badge API. Overnight the staging pipeline failed on a flaky test. She opens the CI log, sees a timeout, re-runs once, then asks the developer if the test needs a longer wait or a mock.
Midday: A pull request adds a new badge field. CI runs lint and unit tests. Priya checks that the Dockerfile still builds and that .env.example was updated without real secrets. She requests one change: add a note to the README on how to migrate the staging database.
Afternoon: Production deploy of yesterday's build (already tested on staging). She watches the error-rate graph for fifteen minutes. Disk on the small VM is fine. She updates the runbook with the image tag that is live.
Evening: She stops a personal lab EC2 from the AWS course practice so it does not burn money overnight.
Notice what she did not do: redesign the VPC, invent AWS prices, or run attack tools. She owned feedback loops, artefacts and safe change.
Steps — retell the story in your own words
- Name the morning problem (pipeline / test).
- Name the midday quality gate (PR + CI + docs).
- Name the afternoon production habit (watch metrics + record tag).
- Name the cost habit (stop idle labs).
- Say which CALMS letters appeared (hint: almost all).
What you see in a real junior week: more reading of logs and READMEs than writing brand-new tools from scratch. That is normal. Depth grows with reps.