Scaler DevOps Review | From Support Desk to SRE
For many technology professionals, DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering remain difficult career paths to visualize. Software development has tangible outcomes that are easy to showcase, but the infrastructure work behind reliable systems often stays invisible until something goes wrong.
Akhil Thyadi's journey offers a closer look at what that transition can actually involve. Starting from a small town in Andhra Pradesh, Akhil moved through an unrelated supply chain role, entered technology as a Cloud Support Engineer at Amazon, and gradually built toward Site Reliability Engineering.
His journey was not built around a perfectly planned career roadmap. It developed through curiosity, hands-on experience, structured learning, and above all, consistency.
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Technology career stories often focus on what users can see. An application was built, a product was launched, or a developer moved into a new role. Infrastructure is different.
When DevOps and SRE work well, users may never notice it. Systems remain available, deployments happen smoothly, infrastructure scales and problems are resolved before they become larger incidents. Much of the work happens behind the scenes.
That makes DevOps career transitions harder to understand from the outside. Someone working in support, operations or infrastructure may already possess valuable systems experience, but the route from that experience to an SRE role is not always obvious.
Akhil Thyadi's story provides a practical example of that path, from cloud support and troubleshooting to infrastructure, automation and reliability engineering.
Akhil's Journey
Akhil grew up in Palasa, a small town in the Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh. His early experiences shaped a mindset that would later become important in his professional life.
While studying, he delivered newspapers in the mornings and occasionally worked at local events alongside his education. He was also passionate about cricket and became the captain of his college team.
He eventually pursued Electronics and Communication Engineering, graduating in 2020. But his first job after engineering was not in technology. He joined Jubilant FoodWorks in a supply chain role.
The position gave him professional experience and financial stability, while his interest in technology continued to grow. His curiosity eventually took him toward cloud computing.
In 2021, Akhil joined Amazon as a Cloud Support Engineer. This became the turning point in his technology career.
His role exposed him to Linux system administration, AWS cloud services, infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems. Rather than simply studying these concepts theoretically, he was working with systems that people depended on every day.
Investigating incidents, analysing logs and understanding how different components interacted helped him develop a practical understanding of infrastructure. He also began contributing to small automation projects and tools that made some team processes easier to manage.
But the experience raised a new question for him: if he understood how systems behaved when things went wrong, could he learn how those systems were designed, automated and made reliable in the first place?
That question led him toward DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering.
He recognised that moving into those roles would require deeper knowledge of DevOps practices, infrastructure automation and system architecture. In 2024, he joined Scaler's DevOps program while continuing his full-time role at Amazon.
The combination was demanding. His work involved rotational shifts, making it difficult to maintain a predictable learning schedule. Live classes were not always possible, so he relied on recorded lectures and studied whenever his schedule allowed.
His approach was straightforward:
"Managing this required only one thing, and that was consistency."
That consistency continued even when progress felt slow.
Mentorship became another important part of the process. Akhil worked closely with his mentor, Siddhartha, whose discussions helped him understand DevOps concepts and think through how experienced engineers approach infrastructure problems.
Projects gave that learning a practical dimension.
Akhil built an end-to-end DevOps project from scratch, setting up infrastructure, creating automation pipelines and managing the deployment process. Instead of treating the project simply as a course assignment, he used it to understand how the different pieces of a system fit together.
The project later became useful during interviews because he could explain the decisions he had made, the problems he encountered and how he approached solving them.
After nearly two years of continuous learning and preparation, Akhil reached the milestone he had been working toward.
In 2025, he secured a Site Reliability Engineer role with a compensation package of ₹11.5 LPA, almost twice his previous salary.
His current work focuses on reliability and observability for AI agent systems, bringing together the areas he had gradually moved toward: infrastructure, automation and system reliability.
For Akhil, however, the outcome was about more than compensation.
Looking back at the journey, the significance lies in the accumulation of small steps: moving into technology, learning cloud systems through support work, identifying the gap between support and engineering, developing DevOps skills, building projects and continuing to learn alongside a demanding job.
His next goal is to grow toward a Solution Architect role and eventually mentor aspiring engineers who come from backgrounds similar to his own.
The Support - SRE Path, Generalized
Akhil's transition proves why support and operations experience can provide a useful foundation for an SRE career.
A support engineer may already have exposure to systems troubleshooting, logs, incidents, infrastructure, and the behaviour of production environments. These experiences develop an instinct for asking what failed, why it failed, and how the system can be restored.
The next step is building the engineering depth required to move from responding to problems toward designing systems that are more reliable in the first place.
For someone considering a support-to-SRE transition, that bridge can include:
- Linux and systems: Understanding operating systems, processes, networking, and system behaviour.
- Cloud: Developing practical experience with platforms such as AWS and understanding how cloud infrastructure is structured.
- Scripting and automation: Moving beyond manual troubleshooting by automating repetitive operational tasks.
- CI/CD: Understanding how code moves from development to deployment through automated pipelines.
- Infrastructure: Learning how infrastructure is provisioned, managed and scaled.
- Observability: Working with monitoring, logging and other tools that help engineers understand system health.
- System thinking: Connecting individual incidents to larger questions of architecture, reliability and scalability.
A structured DevOps learning path can help organise these areas, particularly for professionals who have already encountered systems in their day-to-day work but want to build deeper engineering capabilities.
But this path is not for everyone. It requires comfort with technical problem-solving, willingness to work with systems rather than only application code, and the patience to keep learning across several interconnected areas. A course can provide structure and mentorship, but the learner still has to put in the practice.
Akhil's experience makes that distinction clear. His transition did not happen because he simply enrolled in a program. It happened because he combined structured learning with existing professional experience, hands-on projects and consistent effort.
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Akhil's story is the first feature in what can become a broader collection of DevOps and SRE journeys, covering different starting points and career paths.
If you have made a transition into DevOps, SRE, cloud engineering or infrastructure, your experience could help someone else see a path they had not considered.
Share your DevOps journey with us.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a support engineer become an SRE?
Yes. Akhil Thyadi's journey demonstrates one possible route. He moved from a Cloud Support Engineer role at Amazon into Site Reliability Engineering after building deeper expertise in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, automation and system reliability.
The transition is not automatic. Support experience provides a useful foundation, but aspiring SREs also need to develop stronger engineering, automation, cloud and systems skills.
Does Scaler have DevOps-focused learning?
Yes. Scaler offers a DevOps-focused learning path covering areas relevant to modern infrastructure and platform engineering. Akhil joined Scaler's DevOps program in 2024 specifically to strengthen his understanding of DevOps practices and develop the practical skills needed for infrastructure-focused roles.
How long can a support-to-SRE transition take?
There is no fixed timeline. Akhil's journey involved nearly two years of continuous learning and preparation before he secured his SRE role. The timeline for another professional will depend on their existing technical foundation, work experience, learning consistency and target role.
What skills are important for an SRE role?
SRE roles typically require a combination of systems knowledge, cloud infrastructure, automation, troubleshooting, monitoring and reliability engineering. Akhil's journey highlights Linux, AWS, infrastructure monitoring, distributed-system troubleshooting, automation pipelines and deployment as important parts of his own progression.
Akhil's journey started in Palasa, moved through supply chain and cloud support, and eventually led to Site Reliability Engineering.
It was not a straight line. And more often than not, there isn’t a linear path to success.
For Akhil it was a series of decisions to keep learning, identify the next gap and work toward it.
For professionals wondering whether a support or operations background can lead somewhere deeper in technology, that may be the most useful part of his story: the next role does not always have to be visible from the starting point.
Explore Scaler's DevOps learning path and start building toward your next role.
