Most "how to become a DevOps engineer" posts are written from places where electricity and internet
are background assumptions. Mine isn't. I build and operate cloud infrastructure for teams across
six countries, from Buea, Cameroon. It works, and it's a genuinely good career. But it's not the
frictionless picture the highlight reels show.
Here's the honest version: what's hard, what I do about it, and why it's still worth it.
The power situation
Electricity is the first real constraint. Load shedding and unplanned outages are part of life in
Buea and much of Cameroon. When you're mid-deploy or on an incident call, the lights going out isn't
an inconvenience, it's a work-stopping event.
What actually helps:
- A laptop, not a desktop. Sounds obvious, but a desktop tower ties your work to mains power. A laptop gives you hours of buffer.
- A UPS and/or a power bank/inverter sized for your router too: a charged laptop is useless if the internet box is dead.
- A backup power plan for long outages: a small generator, a solar setup, or knowing which café or co-working spot has power.
- Designing work to be resumable. I lean heavily on Git, infrastructure-as-code, and CI so that if I drop offline mid-task, nothing is lost and a pipeline can finish what I started.
DevOps is actually well-suited to this: the heavy lifting runs in the cloud, not on my machine.
Internet: the real bottleneck
Connectivity has improved a lot, but it's still the thing most likely to bite you. Bandwidth is
variable, latency to US/EU regions is high, and a fibre cut can mean a bad day. For work that
involves pushing container images, pulling large dependencies, or screen-sharing during incidents,
that matters.
How I work around it:
- A primary connection plus a mobile-data backup (different carrier). When one drops, I tether.
-
Do heavy lifting in the cloud. I run builds, image pushes, and big
terraform applys from CI or a cloud VM/bastion close to the target region, not over my home link. My laptop just drives it. -
Cache aggressively. Local Docker layer caching, package mirrors, and
terraform planreview before apply cut the amount I transfer. - Async-first communication. I don't rely on a perfect video call to get work done; clear written updates survive a flaky connection.
The mindset shift: treat your local connection as unreliable by design, and architect around it.
Timezones: a hidden advantage, with discipline
Cameroon is on WAT (UTC+1). Working with US teams means they're 6-9 hours behind; with parts of Asia
I'm behind. That overlap gap is real, but it's also a feature if you're deliberate.
- The early morning is golden. Before the US wakes up, I get deep, uninterrupted work done: the best focus hours of my day.
- Overlap windows are for humans, async is for everything else. I protect the few overlap hours for the conversations that genuinely need to be live, and push status, reviews, and decisions to writing.
- On-call across timezones needs honesty. If a team needs 3am-my-time coverage, that has to be an explicit, compensated agreement, not an silent expectation. I've learned to negotiate this up front.
Being in a different timezone has won me work: I can cover hours the rest of the team can't.
Payments and the business side
This is the part nobody warns you about. Getting paid from abroad is harder than the work itself
some months:
- Not every international platform supports Cameroon cleanly; some payment processors and payout options just aren't available.
- I've had to get creative with a mix of services to receive funds reliably, and factor in fees and exchange rates.
- Invoicing, contracts, and proving legitimacy as a solo engineer from Cameroon takes extra effort, a professional website, a real GitHub, and references do a lot of the trust-building that a recognisable local employer would otherwise provide.
None of it is a blocker. It's friction you plan for.
Visibility: you have to be undeniable
When you're not in a hub city and don't have a FAANG logo on your CV, the burden of proof is higher.
A hiring manager scrolling past you needs an immediate reason to stop. For me that's been:
- Public, runnable projects that show I operate real systems.
- Writing (like this) that shows how I think.
- Community work: AWS Community Builder, and running Talent Forge to train other engineers here.
You can't control the bias; you can make yourself impossible to dismiss.
Why it's still absolutely worth it
For all of the above, I wouldn't trade it. I do interesting, well-paid, global-standard engineering
without leaving home. I get to build the local DevOps community I wish I'd had. And the constraints
made me a better engineer, when your power and internet can vanish, you build systems that are
resilient, automated, and observable by default. That's literally the job.
If you're an engineer in Cameroon, or anywhere with these same constraints, wondering whether a
remote DevOps career is realistic: it is. Plan for the friction, make your work undeniable, and ship.
*I'm a DevOps & Cloud Engineer based in Buea, Cameroon, working with teams worldwide and open to new opportunities.
