BiggieCheese

If you're considering Canada, keep Montreal in mind. It has substantially lower rent prices than other major cities, and still has a healthy tech sector.

IMO, the only downsides are that it's substantially less multicultural than Toronto or Ottawa (which is a high bar to meet, tbh), and you'll sometimes miss out on things if you don't know French (though you can get by with English).

Most bigger Canadian cities really aren't that bad. Vancouver is particularly mild, and Toronto winters are fairly tame.

"Real" Canadian winter happens in places you won't find many tech jobs anyway.

Ottawa is nice, but I wouldn't recommend most companies in Kanata unless you're content with working in a cubicle farm in a bleak, suburban, commercial park hellscape.

The DevOps movement petered out because it solved most of it's technical problems with tools that have become industry standards.

As a sysadmin, you used to have to write scripts to solve EVERYTHING. Especially since tooling for ops people in the 2000s was a load of hot garbage. A lot of tools back then had GUIs, which weren't automation friendly.

Nowadays most ops problems have some easily automatable tool, which I think gives less incentive for sysadmins to reach for a programming language.