Been on calls today listening to nothing but very high-end networking discussions about very high-end hardware and complex Kubernetes network configuration. This stuff demands the equivalent skills of a full IT department, including very senior network administrators. This is the reason when someone says, “You need to learn Kubernetes” you can look at them like they don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. You can’t “know” Kubernetes any more than you can “know” every advanced administration skill from an entire IT department. For example, I’m fortunate to have had some network experience (at one time wanted to just go into network engineering) so I can follow the conversation. But if all you had was a CKA certification you would be lost on this call completely. This is why companies like mine ask for Infrastructure Engineers instead of DevOps people.
By the way, this includes an entire software development team. The applications that are thrown together for Kubernetes administration and monitoring require significantly more skills than normally required of an SRE/System Administrator. I’m really fortunate to have a lot of these, but keeping those skills up means that things like my networking skills subside. You can’t keep them all fresh.
Bottom line: if you are considering working in this Cloud-Native / Infrastructure space you are never going to be able to stop investing 6-12 hours per week (usually on your own time) learning and keeping up with just the pace of new stuff, let alone the basics. A Computer Science degree for this stuff is totally useless. In fact, I know of no official path to learn it in any academic institution. It’s almost entirely all lab experimentation and exploration.