I Paid for DevOps Training After My Company Said No. 8 Months Later, They Paid Me Back.
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
His job is making sure Galileo never fails. When DevOps was coming to his platform, he applied the same standard to himself.
Meet Deimos 👋
Deimos is an L2 Maintenance Engineer at DLR Space Applications Institute mbH — the organization responsible for monitoring the operation of Galileo, the European global satellite navigation system that over 1.4 billion smartphone users rely on every day.
He maintains a complex on-premise system that keeps that mission running.
He is not a career switcher. He didn't lose his job. He wasn't told to upskill. He looked at what was coming to his platform 18 months in advance, decided he was going to be ready, and went all in — on his own time and his own money — before anyone asked him to.
This is his story.
Tell us a bit about your role and your background?
I'm an L2 Maintenance Engineer. My job is to maintain an on-premise system — Linux, networking, firewalls, switches, scripts, applications — that was deployed by a third party.
When something breaks, people look at me. That's the job.
Outside of that, I have a PhD in satellite navigation. A good part of the thesis was to develop a tool for all the research, which is open source, free, fast and useful for both educational and professional applications.
I still collaborate with the research group from time to time, mainly helping maintain the tool or with tool applications, like international courses.
So my background is a mix of deep IT operations and research. I knew Linux, Bash and programming well, but I had zero DevOps knowledge before the bootcamp.
What made you decide to start the DevOps bootcamp?
I found out that the new version of our operational platform was going to use Kubernetes, GitLab, HashiCorp Vault, and Kafka.
In my role, you're expected to be able to fix anything.
There's no "I didn't know about that part."
Also I am one of the top engineers in my company. I have a reputation to maintain. And to me, that means you don't rest on what you already know.
So I didn't want to wait until it arrived and scramble.
"I wanted to understand it properly, ahead of time, so that when the moment came I was the most prepared person in the room."
Your company didn't support it at first — what happened there?
My bosses agreed it made sense. But when it went to upper management, the answer was no.
And to be fair — for a company that would need to train many engineers, not just one, the cost stacks up quickly.
My company is used to working with project internal tools or external tools with a specific, narrow purpose.
From their perspective, investing in such a broad training didn't make sense to them.
But I knew DevOps isn't a tool with a narrow purpose.
When you adopt Docker and Kubernetes, you adopt a whole new ecosystem — one that changes how you build, deploy, secure, and maintain everything. You can't cherry-pick half of it and expect to get the benefits of DevOps.
Honestly, I was in a similar mindset at first. But when I researched it and saw the full scope of the bootcamps, I understood the magnitude of what DevOps actually is. It breaks all your previous assumptions and current workflows.
Once I saw that, the decision was easy. I paid for it myself — both bootcamps, the CKA course, and the GitLab CI/CD course.
Why TechWorld with Nana specifically and not other options?
I've created training material myself, so I know what goes into making complex things genuinely understandable.
"I know the difference between content that was thrown together and content that was carefully built."
And Nana's DevOps course was the only one with the full picture.
I had looked at other things. LinkedIn courses, scattered tutorials. But I needed something I could point to with real credibility.
Something that gave me demonstrable, structured knowledge — not just a certificate for watching videos.
What specifically made you trust TWN enough to make that investment?
I actually found TWN years before I enrolled. I came across their video "Kubernetes is dropping Docker support - What does it mean for YOU?" when it came out.
At the time I wasn't in DevOps at all, but the explanation just clicked. I saved TWN and moved on — knowing I'd come back when the moment was right.
Several years later, I did.
When I learned about their two bootcamps, my first reaction was "this is too much". But then I thought — if Nana explains things this clearly, and still made the bold move to build something this comprehensive, it's because you actually need all of it.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
He wasn't wrong 😁👇
But this is what "full picture" looks like.
Here's what you need to know.
Most "DevOps" courses cover 3-4 tools in isolation — Docker, maybe Cloud, maybe a CI/CD tool. Other bootcamps go a bit wider, but still stop at 5 maybe 6 tools, each taught separately, and certainly never connected into a complete picture.
What Deimos needed — and what the real job actually requires — isn't knowing individual tools. It's understanding how everything fits together: how you build, deploy, secure, automate, monitor, and maintain a full system from end to end.
That's what each of these programs are built for.
1) The DevOps Bootcamp takes you from zero to being able to work as a mid-level DevOps engineer.
2) The DevSecOps Bootcamp takes it further — by the end, you can operate at a senior DevOps level or step into a dedicated DevSecOps role.
It's not a course about tools. It's a course about a profession.
The good news: you don't need both.
For most engineers, the DevOps Bootcamp is more than enough to get where you need to go. DevSecOps is there when security becomes a core part of your role — or when you want to go further.
And even if the content didn't map perfectly to my exact setup (e.g. same distribution of Kubernetes), I knew I'd come away with all the key concepts and procedures, which I could then adapt on my own as needed.
Furthermore, the bootcamps would give me a real reference point when the new platform arrived — i.e. actual criteria to evaluate the platform I would have to maintain, instead of just blindly accepting whatever had been set up.
What did 8 months of self-study actually look like?
The DevOps bootcamp took around 6 months. DevSecOps Bootcamp another 2 and a half.
I worked 2 to 3 hours on weekdays and 5 to 8 hours on weekends. I took a 3-week break for the holidays. That was it.
“I tend to overcomplicate things — in a good way. I would test things beyond the exercises, write scripts to undo everything I'd built in the cloud, sometimes rebuild the same environment the next day just to repeat it. It takes longer, but you actually learn."
The DevOps bootcamp was harder — every module was completely new and I had to get used to studying again. DevSecOps felt more natural because it built on what I already knew.
From someone who has built training material: what did Nana get right in the bootcamps that others don't?
When a learning material is made with love to your craft, it gets reflected in the learning material and people notice it (in the same way you notice bad learning material).
It does not mean it’s perfect, just well crafted.
I got this feeling from TWN in the same way I saw students had the same feeling with my training material.
Did your company eventually come around?
Yes — but I didn't win an argument. I just kept going and let them watch.
Note that I unilaterally decided to pay for TWN bootcamps instead of other courses, so the company did not have any obligation to reimburse anything.
I always had this in mind, but I like to be able to choose which courses I want to do without restrictions, so that freedom requires you to pay for them yourself, regardless of whether you get reimbursed or not.
When I was finishing the courses, (and I was from time to time talking about it), they started to think "if one of our top engineers is paying 4k€ and taking 8 months of training, maybe this is something much bigger than just two more tools (Kubernetes and Docker basically)".
So my colleagues started noticing and the upper management started to reconsider. Not because I convinced them in a meeting, but just by finishing the courses.
Eventually, my company reimbursed me for the DevOps bootcamp and the CKA course. They're likely covering the GitLab CI/CD too.
And they've offered to pay for colleagues to enroll.
"This is a recognition from my company for my effort and my value as an engineer, given that this was significantly more than what they would typically approve."
Have you had a chance to apply any of it yet?
The new platform arrives later this year — that's when everything becomes real. But I've already had a few chances to apply what I learned, and one thing stands out.
I was preparing a small test version of the future operational platform. The production environment uses SAN storage, which the test environment doesn't have. I needed a workaround
I asked whether the SAN was mapped as a Kubernetes StorageClass. When it was confirmed, I knew immediately I could swap it for an NFS StorageClass exposed by a VM.
Problem solved.
Why did you go on to do DevSecOps — our advanced program — as well?
With DevOps you can make a cluster work. But making it work and making it secure — that's a different story entirely.
I first enrolled in DevSecOps to have security knowledge in DevOps/Kubernetes, but it turned out that not only the DevSecOps concepts will be used later in my work, but also many new tools and workflows used in the bootcamp.
Security isn't something you bolt on at the end. It's a mindset you need from the very beginning — in how you build pipelines, manage secrets, and think about every layer of what you're deploying.
What would you say to a senior engineer sitting on the fence about investing in this kind of training without their company's backing?
If you want to stay ahead as an engineer, you cannot let others tell you what you can or can’t study.
When you know you need or will need some new knowledge, you must be willing to pay for it yourself.
"The goal is not the reimbursement, but to gain and keep your value and credibility as an engineer, making yourself someone the company cannot afford to lose. "
This costs great effort (like going through the TWN bootcamps), but it pays off later.
And if it doesn't pay off where you are, then you've just opened the door to new job opportunities elsewhere — so either way, it will never be a wasted effort.
Be the Most Prepared Person in the Room
The only question Deimos asked himself was: do I want to be ready when it arrives, or scramble when it does?
If you already know your answer, here's where to start:
