Originally sourced from TechTarget. The quotes and attributions below are drawn from that original reporting.
DevOps, open source, and programmable infrastructure were dominant trends heading into 2018. To understand where IT professionals were focusing their energy, TechTarget gathered New Year’s resolutions from DevOps engineers, ops veterans, project managers, and cloud architects. The result is a practical snapshot of the skills and mindset shifts the industry was prioritizing—most of which remain highly relevant today.
Pick Up New Operating System Skills
“I grew up in Microsoft, and I’d like to ratify and expand Linux [server administration]. My goal for the next 12 months is to get a Red Hat certification.”
— Gary Bright, Infrastructure Developer at Niu Solutions (UK)
For engineers rooted in Windows environments, Linux fluency has become increasingly important as cloud-native infrastructure defaults to Linux-based systems. Red Hat certifications cover a broad range of IT functions performed with Red Hat products—from Gluster storage administration to OpenShift container deployment. Beyond its core Linux administrator and developer tracks, Red Hat also offers a dedicated DevOps certification path for practitioners looking to formalize their skills.
Do DevOps Right—Not Just by Name
“[The goal is] getting our heads around what DevOps is, and self-learning, and bringing that back into the organization. You can’t just say, ‘I’m going to do DevOps or just Agile.’ How do I pick and choose from those and push it into our processes and make sure each bit is beneficial to our org?”
Adopting the DevOps label without understanding its underlying principles is a common pitfall. True DevOps transformation requires deliberately selecting practices—continuous integration, automated testing, blameless post-mortems, shared ownership—that solve real problems within a specific organization. Blanket adoption of frameworks without adaptation rarely delivers value.
Rely on Monitoring and Management Dashboards
“We are at the point where we started utilizing management dashboards now and want to do more and more: create all the dashboards, all the alerts and all the data-driven metrics.”
Observability is only as useful as the dashboards and alert configurations that surface actionable signals. Moving beyond reactive incident response—where teams scramble after something breaks—toward proactive monitoring using historical metrics allows teams to spot degradation before it affects users. The goal: use data to prevent incidents, not just respond to them.
Advice for professionals looking to grow in DevOps: combine a relevant certification with at least one programming language. An example path cited was obtaining the AWS Certified Solutions Architect credential alongside scripting or automation skills to bridge the gap between application engineering and operations.
Bring Enterprises into Modern Ops
“I want to get better at providing [configuration and compliance automation] … to help that customer move one step closer to continuous integration, continuous deployment [and] continuous compliance.”
— Larry Herz, Senior Data Center Engineer at Ahead LLC
Not every enterprise can or should move everything to the cloud immediately. A pragmatic approach—evaluating workloads case by case—was already standard practice by 2017. Applications that benefit from auto-scaling or geographic distribution are natural candidates for cloud migration. Large monolithic stacks, by contrast, often require significant refactoring before a cloud move delivers real cost or performance improvements. A lift-and-shift migration without architectural changes can produce cloud bills higher than equivalent on-premises costs.
Configuration management and compliance automation (using tools such as Ansible, Chef, or Puppet) are key enablers of CI/CD pipelines in enterprise environments, ensuring that environments remain consistent and auditable without manual intervention.
Pick Up a New Programming Language
“My last personal goal was to improve my technical communication. What’s next? Learning Go. The ops and developer tooling world is moving to Go, and I don’t have a statically typed language under my belt. I write Ruby every day, and default to Python when given the choice.”
— Paige Bernier, Software Engineer on New Relic’s Demotron project
Go (Golang) was developed at Google and has become a dominant language for DevOps and infrastructure tooling. Its strengths include fast compilation, a straightforward concurrency model via goroutines, and a standard library well-suited to network services and distributed systems. Many widely used DevOps tools—including Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Prometheus—are written in Go, making it a practical skill for anyone working in cloud-native environments.
For engineers primarily working in dynamically typed languages like Python or Ruby, Go introduces static typing, which can catch entire categories of bugs at compile time rather than runtime.
Editor’s note: Demotron is an internal New Relic project that builds intentionally poorly performing dummy applications and back-end services, enabling the company to demonstrate its IT performance monitoring and management tooling in realistic failure scenarios.
Put Multi-Cloud to Use
“My resolution is to have several multi-cloud production engagements where organizations can take advantage on-the-fly of cloud pricing and region availability.”
— Will Kinard, CTO of BoxBoat Technologies
By 2018, the hybrid data center model was already well established. The next logical step was workload portability across multiple cloud providers—enabling organizations to exploit pricing differences, geographic availability, and provider-specific capabilities without being locked into a single vendor.
Containers are the key enabler of this portability. However, realizing multi-cloud deployments in production requires mature container orchestration, a clear approach to networking and service discovery across providers, and federation technologies that allow a unified control plane to manage workloads across clouds. The maturity of tooling in this area has grown substantially since 2018, but the architectural decisions Kinard described remain central to any multi-cloud strategy.
Focus on What Matters—Including Your Own Health
“Personally, I really want to take good care of myself. You do ops work for 15 years and it’s 15 years of sleep deprivation. It can ruin your health. That’s why I’m so passionate now about helping people, particularly in ops, to remove some of that burden of being way overwhelmed. We don’t let our computers get to 100% capacity utilization, and we shouldn’t let ourselves either.”
— Dominica DeGrandis, author of Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow
Burnout in operations roles is a well-documented problem. Persistent on-call rotations, alert fatigue, and organizational pressure to maintain uptime at all costs erode both individual health and team performance over time. DeGrandis’s analogy is apt: systems engineering practice explicitly avoids running servers at 100% utilization because performance degrades and failures become more likely—the same principle applies to human capacity.
Sustainable DevOps practices—including thoughtful alert thresholds, fair on-call rotations, blameless post-mortems, and explicit prioritization of work in progress—are as much about organizational health as they are about technical efficiency. DeGrandis’s book Making Work Visible offers a practical framework for identifying where time and energy are being consumed invisibly, which is a useful starting point for any team struggling with overload.
Key Takeaways
- OS breadth matters: Linux fluency and formal certifications (such as Red Hat’s) open doors in cloud and DevOps roles, even for engineers with a primarily Windows background.
- DevOps is a practice, not a label: Adopt specific techniques that solve real organizational problems rather than implementing frameworks wholesale.
- Observability drives proactive operations: Invest in dashboards and historical metrics to prevent incidents, not just respond to them.
- Cloud migration requires judgment: Lift-and-shift is not always the right move; workload characteristics should drive migration decisions.
- Go is a practical DevOps language: The ecosystem of infrastructure tooling built in Go makes it worth learning for anyone in the cloud-native space.
- Multi-cloud portability requires container discipline: Realizing multi-cloud value depends on mature orchestration and federation strategies.
- Operator health is a system concern: Sustainable on-call practices and workload management are prerequisites for long-term team performance.