DevOps Engineer Roadmap: Skills to Learn Step by Step

The skill sequence

A DevOps engineer helps a team ship code to users quickly and reliably: automating builds, tests and deployments and keeping systems stable. Everything in this role rests on fundamentals, so order matters:

1. Linux.
2. Networking.
3. Scripting and Git.
4. Containers: Docker, then orchestration basics.
5. CI/CD.
6. Cloud and infrastructure as code.
7. Monitoring and logging.

Start with Kubernetes before Linux and networking, and every problem will look like magic.

Step 1. Linux

• File system, permissions, users and groups.
• Processes, services, systemd, reading logs.
• Package managers, SSH, access keys.
• Core utilities: grep, find, tail, df, top.

Lab: spin up a virtual machine, allow login by SSH key only, install a web server and find out where its logs live.

Step 2. Networking

• The TCP/IP model, IP addresses, ports, subnets.
• DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS certificates.
• Load balancers and reverse proxies.
• Diagnostics: ping, curl, dig, ss.

Lab: put a reverse proxy in front of a simple app, attach a domain and an HTTPS certificate.

Step 3. Scripting and Git

• Bash to automate routine tasks.
• One general-purpose language at a basic level, often Python or Go.
• Git: branches, merges, pull requests, teamwork.

Lab: a script that backs up a directory, archives it and deletes old copies.

Step 4. Containers

• Images and containers, Dockerfile, layers, volumes, networks.
• Docker Compose for a local multi-service environment.
• Orchestration basics: why Kubernetes exists, what pods, deployments and services are.

FROM python:3.12-slim
WORKDIR /app
COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt
COPY . .
CMD ["python", "app.py"]

Lab: package an app with its database in Compose, then run it in a local Kubernetes cluster.

Step 5. CI/CD

• The pipeline: build → test → build image → deploy.
• Secrets stored in CI, not in the repository.
• Rollout strategies and rollback on failure.

name: ci
on: [push]
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: docker build -t app .
      - run: docker run --rm app python -m pytest

Lab: every push gets tested and an image is built, and changes on the main branch deploy to a server automatically.

Step 6. Cloud and infrastructure as code

• Core services of any cloud: virtual machines, networks, storage, managed databases, IAM.
• Infrastructure as Code: describing infrastructure in files, for example with Terraform.
• Configuration management, for example with Ansible.

Lab: describe a network, a virtual machine and access rules in code, create them with one command and destroy them the same way.

Step 7. Monitoring and logging

• Metrics, logs, traces.
• Alerts that signal a real problem instead of making noise.
• Dashboards for a service's key indicators.

Lab: collect metrics from your app, build a dashboard and set up an alert for downtime.

How not to get lost