“Your career should be about what you love, not about what you feel that you have to do” — Michael Levan
Hi! I’m Michael Levan, a tech enthusiast and engineer at heart. Nowadays I spend roughly 50% of my time as a researcher in the DevOps and SRE space and 50% of my time consulting as a Principal Engineer. I’m still writing code pretty much daily, which I believe makes my research and content one step ahead because it has the “practitioner” touch.
You can now typically find me pushing my cognitive limits on a piece of research or performing DevOps tasks for one of my various clients.
I’ve received awards for my Microsoft Azure contributions to the community and the Hashicorp Ambassador award for my work with Terraform. I speak internationally, have 3 published engineering books, create free content on YouTube, and actively blog/write over on Dev.to.
“There’s a big difference between passion and the hustle culture. It’s great to be passionate about what you do, but don’t burn out on it.”
Michael Levan
I’ve made it my life mission to help as MANY people as I possibly can. I’ve had a very successful career so far with positions ranging from Systems Administrator, Senior Cloud Engineer, Senior DevOps Engineer, Lead DevOps Engineer, Developer, Developer Advocate, Chief Architect, and CTO.
I LOVE the path that I took to get to where I am today and I want to help others do the same, whether it’s on the space trajectory as myself or something completely different.
With my wide range knowledge in tech, I’m confident I can help anyone, as long as they want to help themselves.
A little more in-depth…
I started out my career like most do in IT with a traditional infrastructure background, helpdesk/desktop support. After I dove deep and realized the different ways to automate my job, I quickly realized the next step to my career, DevOps and Cloud Engineering. This next step wasn’t easy. I stayed up late, woke up at 4:00AM to study and further myself, all with a newborn at home, so I was barely sleeping as is.
After working as a Sysadmin on Hyper-V, ESXi, Azure, Powershell, and all-around Windows Infrastructure, I wanted to take the next step in my career and see the “other side”. This led me to do a complete 180 and move into technologies like Linux, Python, and AWS. After not knowing much about this space, I buckled down, studied more, and quickly became a Subject Matter Expert.
After working with Linux, AWS, Python, Ansible, Containerization (Docker), Orchestration (Kubernetes), and Web Applications, I started to see a HUGE shift in the Microsoft ecosystem. It wasn’t about Windows and desktops anymore. It was about open source, Linux, containerization, and working as a community. I took this as another opportunity to do yet another 180 and come full-circle back to the Microsoft space to focus my efforts on practicing DevOps on the other side of the realm (again).
After taking all of the knowledge and experience I’ve learned over several years in Dev and Ops, I decided to combine them all with the love of helping others & content creation to work as a Developer Advocate and Software Developer.
Stepping forward in the timeline, I am now creating real-world, project-focused based content, coaching engineers on how to create quality work, performing technical research for various firms, and consulting for customers around the globe on SRE and DevOps projects.
I’m utterly fascinated with development, code quality, DevOps, cloud engineering, and most importantly, building cool stuff! I simply can’t get enough of all of the cool, new, and exciting technology that’s out there. It’s truly a beautiful time to be in technology.
