DevOps Roadmap

• Languages: Python, Go, or JavaScript for automation and tooling
• Scripting: Bash scripting for system automation
• Infrastructure as Code: YAML, JSON configuration

You need to be able to write scripts. Not full applications, just enough to automate things and understand what developers are doing.

• Process Management: Understanding processes, threads, and scheduling
• Memory Management: Virtual memory, paging, and swapping
• File Systems: File permissions, storage, and I/O operations

Know what your system is actually doing when things go wrong. You'll need this for debugging performance issues.

• Command Line: Navigation, file manipulation, and text processing
• System Services: systemd, service management, and logging
• Package Management: apt, yum, package installation and updates

Most servers run Linux. Get comfortable in the terminal because that's where you'll spend most of your time.

• Basic Operations: clone, add, commit, push, pull
• Branching: Feature branches, merge strategies, and workflows
• Collaboration: GitHub/GitLab workflows and pull requests

Everything is in Git. Code, infrastructure, configs. Learn it properly, not just the basics.

• Protocols: TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, DNS, and SSL/TLS
• Load Balancing: Distribution strategies and health checks
• Security: Firewalls, VPNs, and network segmentation

Half of DevOps debugging is 'why can't this thing connect to that thing'. Know your protocols.

• AWS/Azure/GCP: Core services like EC2, S3, VPC, and IAM
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates
• Managed Services: Databases, monitoring, and serverless computing

Pick one cloud provider and learn it well. AWS is the biggest market, but any of the big three works.

• Docker Basics: Images, containers, Dockerfile, and registries
• Multi-stage Builds: Optimizing image size and security
• Networking & Storage: Container networking and volume management

Containers are how you ship software now. Start with Docker, understand images and layers.

• Core Concepts: Pods, Services, Deployments, and ConfigMaps
• Scaling & Updates: Horizontal scaling and rolling updates
• Monitoring & Logging: Health checks, metrics, and centralized logging

The industry standard for container orchestration. Complex but necessary for most teams at scale.

• Pipeline Design: Build, test, deploy stages. Parallelism and caching.
• GitHub Actions: Workflows, reusable actions, matrix builds, OIDC auth
• Artifact Management: Container registries, package publishing, versioning
• Deployment Strategies: Blue-green, canary, rolling updates, feature flags

If you're deploying by hand, you're doing it wrong. Automate everything from commit to production.

• Metrics: Prometheus, Grafana dashboards, alerting rules
• Logging: Centralized logging with Loki, ELK, or CloudWatch
• Tracing: Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, Tempo, or Jaeger
• Alerting: PagerDuty, OpsGenie, alert fatigue management, runbooks

You need to know when things break before your users do. Set up proper monitoring, alerting, and dashboards.

• Secret Management: Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, SOPS. Never hardcode secrets.
• Vulnerability Scanning: Snyk, Trivy, SonarCloud in CI pipelines
• IAM and Access: Least privilege, RBAC, OIDC, service accounts
• Compliance: SOC 2, ISO 27001 basics, audit trails

Security is not someone else's job. Bake it into your pipelines, scan your images, rotate your secrets.

• GitOps: ArgoCD or Flux for declarative deployments from Git
• Helm: Kubernetes package management, chart templating
• Configuration Management: Ansible for server provisioning and config
• Policy as Code: OPA, Kyverno for enforcing cluster policies

Stop SSHing into servers to change things. Define everything in code, store it in Git, let the tooling sync it.