DevOps In Small Retail Company

I work for a smaller retail company (~1000 employees). Three years ago, I was a software engineer with 12 yoe who had just read the Phoenix Project and saw a tremendous need for DevOps in strategic areas of the company. So, I went out on a limb and asked leadership if I could pioneer the DevOps department within the company. They graciously agreed. I have discovered that being the sole DevOps engineer in a small retail company comes with some interesting caveats. For example, there are many technologies that we will never use because they would be overkill and they would be a detriment to IT due to lack of expertise and unnecessary technological complexity. The biggest one that comes to mind is Kubernetes. We have no need for containerization. It would add more complexity than we need at this point. Instead, we use ADO agents running on load balanced IIS servers in Azure. This has proven very easy to maintain, easy to troubleshoot, and lightning fast for deployments. Could we refactor the same application to use containers and deploy them in a Kubernetes cluster? We could, but why would we? Another example is immutable infrastructure. Because we are Windows shop that is tightly coupled to SCCM, it doesn’t make sense to use something like Packer or VMSS in Azure for our infrastructure. We use Terraform or the Azure portal to spin up a VM, and a CustomExtensionScript to add the SCCM client to the new machine. SCCM takes care of the rest. So, what do you do when you are the sole DevOps engineer in an environment that doesn’t need the technology that everyone is hiring for? What do you focus your time and effort on? Do you 1) try to sell your company on solutions and technologies that would be good for your own resume or 2) seek to bring automation and efficiency to other areas of the company that may or may not port over to a new job? To date, I have gone with option 2. There are quite a few areas in my company that need the culture / interpersonal side of DevOps and this has been my focus for the last 12 months. What do you call this type of DevOps engineering? Its not technical engineering but excels at finding the right people in the company to talk to in order to continuously improve processes and update technology. Perhaps I haven’t been reading or listening to the right material, but I don’t hear much focus on this side of DevOps (especially for interviews). I hear a lot about Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Linux, Docker, etc but not much about people skills. Obviously, this skillset is not cut-and-dry like a technical skillset. It’s focused on collaboration and communication rather than technical implementation. I did find a YouTube video by Tiffany Jachja that ended with the following key takeaways: - People, Process, Technology - Understand, Measure, Improve - Outcomes over Outputs The first point is interesting to me. If you don’t have the right people, then your processes and your technology will suffer. That means, getting the right people in the room or perhaps understanding why certain silos have existed in the company for years is critical if you are going to improve your organization. In closing, I love where I work. I have real strategic impact within the company when it comes to introducing automation and facilitating the collaboration of previously siloed departments. I get to work directly with directors and VPs without red tape and we have used the DevOps mindset to save the company over $1M dollars a year in infrastructure costs since 2020. However, I don’t get to work with the latest and greatest technology. I don’t work with AWS or GCP. Should I be worried about my future in DevOps? Will other potential employers see my contributions to people / process development and allow me to catch up on the technology? I am actively pursuing certifications for Kubernetes, Docker, AWS and others but I will not have “real world experience” with them. If I stay with this company, will I hurt my DevOps career without daily experience with the latest and greatest tech? Any thoughts would be appreciated.