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).
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.
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).