Required Capabilities for T4, T5, and T6 Operations Engineers

Level and Capabilities

T4 Required Capabilities

Do you master basic operations skills?

Examples: What is the principle of SSH? How to ensure its security? What is asymmetric encryption? What is a man‑in‑the‑middle attack? How does SSH prevent such attacks? How does this affect transmission correctness? Relationship between known_hosts and MITM? Why might the key in known_hosts differ from the remote public key? What is that key and its impact?

Do you understand services?

What are the bottlenecks of your service? What capacity does it have? Which metrics do you monitor, which are at risk, and what is the server doing at each moment? Can you read a curve to infer the current system state or tasks? What are common inter‑module connection and load‑balancing strategies, their advantages and disadvantages, and which fits your service?

Are you a qualified administrator?

Do you know every detail of the production environment? What task‑scheduling methods exist and suitable scenarios? Does your service contain duplicate code or inconsistent scripts? Provide examples. Is your service a “clean” house or a “messy” junk pile? Can you explain service details to newcomers? Have your mentees hit pitfalls?

If the answers to the three questions above are “yes” and you can effectively solve problems using your knowledge, you possess the necessary T4 engineer capabilities. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

T5 Required Capabilities

By T4 you have accumulated sufficient experience in operations, services, cost, and efficiency considerations.

When facing a complex problem, you should be able to think and analyze independently: choose appropriate solutions, understand each solution’s characteristics, acknowledge drawbacks, anticipate new issues, and plan their resolution. Recognize when a solution becomes unsuitable and be ready to replace it. Demonstrating this judgment indicates the ability to balance trade‑offs.

Example – data storage solutions: why choose the left‑hand option over the right‑hand? What conditions, data support, arguments, entry server vs direct disk mount, risk, number of entry machines, load‑balancing choice (LVS vs BVS), replica count impact on download speed, bottlenecks, transition criteria, risk monitoring, etc.

T6 and Above Required Capabilities

Require deeper technical accumulation, advanced and cross‑disciplinary knowledge: system fundamentals, programming efficiency, design principles, testing, software quality, reasonable vs unreasonable operational tools, aesthetic system design, minimalistic problem solving, understanding of advertising keyword flows, evaluation of operational design decisions, data‑driven reasoning.

Discussion of listhost design trade‑offs, service tree, data transmission methods (push vs pull), impact of gingko on kfp scripts, etc.

Enough accumulation + problem solving + influence on others = T6, T7…

Correcting Misunderstandings

About Good Products

A successful product (system, tool, especially low‑level) initially satisfies personal needs. After solving one’s own problem, it may turn out to be great (e.g., Linux, Git, Perl, Ruby). However, aiming to please everyone from the start leads to a feature‑heavy, compromised product. The ideal is to solve your own problem well while considering others’ similar needs.

Defending Scripts

“Scripts” (Python, Perl, Ruby, Shell) are often viewed negatively as low‑quality, non‑reusable solutions. This bias is unfair. No language is inherently good or bad; suitability depends on context, proper parameter handling, documentation, exception handling, and testing.

Dispelling the Illusion of “Platforms”

The term “platform” is vague; any engineering interface can be a platform (e.g., Linux OS, Git). Often “platform” refers to web‑based solutions with fancy UI but lacking programmatic interfaces. Before building a web platform, consider if a simple tool suffices. If a web solution is needed, think about resource‑oriented or RESTful design, appropriate frameworks, and realistic project timelines.

Recommendation: the book “Is Your Light On?” (Chinese title “你的灯亮着么？”) teaches problem definition, analysis, and thinking.

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