DevOps is a cultural shift for any organization, and it is more than just tools and technologies; it is a continuous practice required for building and maintaining scalable web applications. When properly implemented, DevOps practices bring agility to a modern organization. However, DevOps is not easy, and with so many tools and practices available, it can be difficult for a DevOps engineer to choose the right path.
In this article, I’ll walk you through a well-known DevOps roadmap that you can use as a reference guide on your journey to becoming a fantastic DevOps engineer.
Let’s go over each milestone in greater detail.
Study a programming language (just enough)
There is no end to the number of concepts that can be learned and practiced in any programming language. However, the question is how much is sufficient to get started. Programming skills are required in DevOps, but not to the extent of a software developer.
Companies that hire DevOps engineers look for expertise in a single programming language. As a DevOps engineer, you will be in charge of writing scripts in languages such as Python. After learning the fundamentals of a language, you can begin practicing scripting. Python is a great language for DevOps engineers to learn.
Recognize various OS concepts
As a DevOps engineer, you will collaborate with clients and developers to build servers and manage infrastructure. I/O management, process management, threads and concurrency, sockets, file systems, and other concepts will help you with your role and interview preparation.
System of Operations
You must gain some operating system administration knowledge. Because you will mostly be working with Linux machines, you can use any Linux distribution for this, such as Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, and so on.
Working at the terminal
Most businesses will not provide you with a graphical user interface (GUI) to use in your Linux environment. As a result, you should become very familiar with working on terminals. You should concentrate on bash scripting, text manipulation tools such as grep, awk, sed, sort, uniq, and so on, process monitoring, network and power shell.
Protocols, Networking, and Security
In an interview, concepts such as HTTP, HTTPs, and SMTP are critical. You should also be familiar with caching servers, reverse proxies, forward proxies, and load balancers.
The Web Server
To learn web server concepts, you can concentrate on one web server, such as Nginx.
Learn how to code infrastructure
This is one of the most important aspects of a DevOps engineer’s learning path. You must learn about app containerization and be well-versed in container tools such as Docker and Kubernetes. Ansible, Chef, Salt, and Puppet are configuration management tools. Container orchestration and infrastructure provisioning are two other areas.
Discover some CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Delivery) tools
Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment is now an essential component of establishing a DevOps culture. As a result, you should become acquainted with CI/CD tools such as Gitlab, Jenkins, Github actions, and so on.
I would recommend that you become acquainted with Jenkins and Gitlab CI/CD.
Understand how to monitor software and infrastructure
When you have thousands of services running, it’s critical to ensure that the system is in good working order. Both your infrastructure and your application should be monitored in real time. Tools such as SigNoz can assist you in establishing a robust monitoring system for your applications.
Find out more about Cloud Providers.
The majority of apps today are built to be cloud-native. As a result, you should become acquainted with the major cloud providers. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are the market leaders, and they all offer free training on their products.
I hope this roadmap helps you on your way to becoming a DevOps engineer. There is a lot to learn in this field, but with a good foundation and practice, you can build a solid career in this rapidly growing field.
