Fundamentals

Ansible is configuration management and orchestration over SSH — no agents, no PKI infrastructure, no central daemon. You write YAML describing the state you want, run it from your laptop or CI, and Ansible pushes that state to every node you point it at. Where Chef and Puppet pull configuration on a schedule, Ansible pushes on demand — which means nodes only need to be reachable, not registered. This guide follows the official Ansible documentation's path — concepts → inventory → ad-hoc commands → playbooks → roles — using the same vocabulary you'll find in the docs.

AWS has 200+ services, but DevOps work concentrates on about a dozen. Learn these well and you can run real production infrastructure; the rest you can pick up when a project demands it.

Bash is the glue language of DevOps — glue scripts, cron jobs, CI steps, container entrypoints. You don't need to be a shell wizard; you need reliable patterns and an allergy to sharp edges. Here's the working set.

DevOps runs on Git: infrastructure code, pipeline definitions, Kubernetes manifests — all of it lives and dies by commits. This isn't a beginner tutorial; it's the subset of Git that matters when you're shipping infrastructure.

DevOps runs on Linux. Whether you're debugging a container, checking why a disk filled up, or tailing logs during an incident, these are the commands you'll reach for daily — grouped by the job they do.

Nginx is the Swiss Army knife sitting in front of most production stacks: TLS termination, reverse proxying, static files, caching, rate limiting. This tutorial takes a fresh Nginx install to a hardened TLS reverse proxy.