DevOps Engineer

A complete step-by-step roadmap to becoming a modern DevOps Engineer — from Linux fundamentals to advanced cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability.

Linux & Shell Scripting

Master the Linux OS — file system, process management, networking, and automate tasks with Bash scripting.

Linux Basics & File System

Navigation, permissions, users, processes, package managers (apt/yum).

Bash Scripting

Variables, loops, conditionals, functions, cron jobs.

Networking Fundamentals

TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, SSH, firewall basics (iptables / ufw).

Version Control — Git

External

Every DevOps workflow starts with Git. Learn branching strategies, pull requests, and GitOps fundamentals.

Git Branching Strategies

Git Flow, Trunk-Based Development, Feature Flags.

GitHub / GitLab

Pull Requests, code reviews, protected branches, webhooks.

Docker

Internal

Containerise applications — write Dockerfiles, manage images, run containers, and use Docker Compose for multi-service setups.

Dockerfile Best Practices

Multi-stage builds, layer caching, minimal base images, non-root users.

Docker Compose

Define and run multi-container apps locally. Networks, volumes, depends_on.

Container Registries

Docker Hub, AWS ECR, GitHub Container Registry — push, pull, tag images.

Kubernetes

Internal

Orchestrate containers at scale. Deploy, scale, and manage containerised workloads across clusters.

kubectl & Core Concepts

Pods, Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets. Master kubectl commands.

Helm

Package manager for Kubernetes. Charts, values, templating, repositories.

Optional Managed Kubernetes (EKS / GKE / AKS)

Run K8s on AWS, GCP or Azure without managing the control plane.

CI/CD Pipelines

Automate build, test, and deployment workflows. Deliver software faster and safer with continuous integration and delivery.

GitHub Actions

Workflow YAML, triggers, runners, secrets, matrix builds, reusable workflows.

GitLab CI/CD

.gitlab-ci.yml, stages, jobs, artifacts, environments, Auto DevOps.

Optional Jenkins

Pipelines as code (Jenkinsfile), plugins, agents, shared libraries.

ArgoCD (GitOps)

Declarative continuous delivery for Kubernetes using Git as the source of truth.

Cloud Platforms

Understand at least one major cloud provider deeply. AWS is the most in-demand, but GCP and Azure are also widely used.

AWS Core Services

EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, IAM, EKS, Lambda, CloudWatch, Route53, ELB.

Optional Google Cloud (GCP)

Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, IAM.

Optional Azure

VMs, AKS, Azure DevOps, App Service, Functions, Active Directory.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Internal

Manage infrastructure through code — reproducible, versioned, auditable. Terraform is the gold standard.

Terraform

Write, plan, apply infrastructure changes. State management, modules, workspaces.

Ansible

Agentless configuration management. Playbooks, roles, handlers, Ansible Vault.

Optional Pulumi

IaC with real programming languages — TypeScript, Python, Go.

Monitoring & Observability

You can't improve what you can't measure. Set up metrics, logs, and traces to gain full visibility into your systems.

Prometheus & Grafana

Scrape metrics, write PromQL queries, build dashboards, set up alerts.

ELK / OpenSearch Stack

Elasticsearch, Logstash/Fluentd, Kibana for centralised log aggregation and search.

Distributed Tracing

Jaeger, Zipkin, OpenTelemetry — trace requests across microservices.

Optional Datadog / New Relic

Managed APM solutions for teams that prefer SaaS observability.

DevSecOps & Security

Shift security left — integrate security scanning into pipelines, manage secrets safely, and harden infrastructure.

Secrets Management

HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, SOPS — never hardcode secrets.

Container Security

Trivy / Snyk image scanning, OPA/Gatekeeper policies, distroless images.

SAST / DAST in CI

SonarQube, Semgrep, OWASP ZAP — automated security testing in pipelines.

IAM & Least Privilege

Cloud IAM roles, RBAC in Kubernetes, service accounts, assume-role patterns.

Service Mesh & Networking

Optional

Manage microservice-to-microservice communication, mTLS, observability, and traffic control inside Kubernetes.

Optional Istio

Service mesh for traffic management, mTLS, telemetry, and policy enforcement.

Optional Linkerd

Lightweight service mesh — simpler than Istio, strong for observability.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Optional External

Learn SRE principles used at scale — SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, on-call practices, and blameless post-mortems.