New Guy Here

[jcarney1987]

So previously I used to manage my own web hosting company, then I took the trade of HVAC and slowly but surely lost my hosting company.  Server management I was pretty good at, and I did learn some basic perl to do some very basic things, but with all things not practice I've pretty much lost all my knowledge of programming.  So I decided to pick up it all back up and get back into the industry and learn PHP instead because well let's face it.  Right now it integrates easier.  I hate though how lazy the code can be written. 

So you might see me time or 2 here, and who knows, maybe we can be friends

[gizmola]

PHP is in a pretty good place now, and is a very different experience than what it was 10 years ago.  With that said, it's really not a highly used Devops/sysadmin language.  Neither is Perl, for that matter.  Devops, and the emergence of the practice of Devops will likely be new to you.  It's where system administration has evolved to.  Here are the main take aways in my opinion:

• Virtualization/The Cloud is pervasive
  • Much of hosting is done on virtualized servers.  So familiarity with the different types of virtualization is highly valuable
  • In addition/ Containers (Docker, Kubernetes, etc) have been taking over application development, and increasingly production deployments
• DevOps makes git and hosted git repositories a core component of deployment and administration.  You have to know git well, and the options for hosted git like github, gitlab and bitbucket
• DevOps groups use Hashicorp Terraform for "infrastructure as code" to setup/teardown/alter complicated environments in the cloud
• The tools for additional provisioning and maintenance of servers continues to evolve
  • Chef and Puppet were both popular and continue to be used by many orgs, but Ansible and Salt(stack) have emerged as alternatives for automation of administrative tasks
    • Ansible and Salt are both written in Python
    • Chef is written in a combination of Ruby/Erlang
    • Puppet was originally written in Ruby, but has evolved into a hybrid c++/clojure/ruby product

Once you start using any of these provisioning/admin tools, you end up focused on their recipes/modules and in some cases, you might be able to extend them, or use elements of the core language.  Notice that there is no java/javascript/php or perl to be found in this list.

I don't mean to discourage you from jumping into modern PHP development, but it has to be said, that it's not a big player in the world of System administration/Devops, so you might be better off learning Python & Ansible if you plan to get back into hosting & system administration.