DevOps Learning Path: Junior to Senior
Work through the levels in order — each stage assumes the skills from the one before it. Read in order within your current level and level up.
Level 1 — Junior: The Foundations
Be dangerous with a terminal, comfortable with containers, and able to read a pipeline.
- Essential Linux Commands Every DevOps Engineer Needs — disk, network, logs, processes
- Git for DevOps: The Commands and Workflows That Matter — branching, revert, reflog
- Bash Scripting for DevOps — safe scripting patterns
- Dockerfile Best Practices — small, secure images
- Docker Compose Tutorial — your first multi-container stack
- CI/CD Pipelines Explained — build → test → deploy
- Kubernetes for Beginners — Pods, Deployments, Services
- Terraform 101 — infrastructure as code basics
- AWS for DevOps Engineers — the services that matter
Checkpoint: you can containerize an app, push it through a pipeline, and deploy it to a cluster.
Level 2 — Engineer: The Daily Driver Skills
Run real workloads in production — networking, configuration, monitoring, and the tools teams actually operate.
- The Complete kubectl Cheat Sheet — CLI mastery
- Docker Networking Explained — bridges, DNS, ports
- WordPress on Docker Compose in Production — healthchecks, secrets
- Ansible for Beginners — agentless automation
- Helm Charts — packaging K8s apps
- Kubernetes Probes Done Right — liveness vs readiness
- ConfigMaps and Secrets — config without rebuilds
- Kubernetes Storage — PVs, PVCs, StatefulSets
- Kubernetes Ingress and TLS — exposing services
- Nginx Reverse Proxy and TLS — the production front door
- GitHub Actions Deep Dive — matrix, environments, OIDC
- Jenkins Pipeline Tutorial — declarative CI
- Actions vs GitLab CI vs Jenkins — choosing a platform
- Terraform Modules — reusable infrastructure
- Terraform AWS Modules — production AWS in 20 lines
- Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana — metrics that matter
- Grafana Loki — cheap log aggregation
Checkpoint: you can run, observe, and debug a production workload end-to-end.
Level 3 — Senior: Architecture and Ownership
Design systems other engineers build on — security, reliability targets, and platform-level thinking.
- Terraform State Explained — backends, locking, surgery
- Kubernetes RBAC — least privilege as code
- DevSecOps: Shifting Security Left — security in every stage
- Prometheus Alerting in Depth — alerts worth paging for
- SLOs and Error Budgets — reliability targets
- GitOps + Argo CD — git-driven deployments
- HashiCorp Vault — secrets that rotate
Checkpoint: you can design the platform, not just operate it — and explain the trade-offs.
Free Tools
- IP Subnet Calculator — CIDR, netmask, host ranges, subnet splitting
- Image Converter & Resizer — PNG/JPEG/WebP/PDF, batch, runs locally
How to use this path
- Do the examples. Every tutorial has runnable commands — none of this sticks by reading alone.
- Don't skip Level 1. Senior engineers lose hours to fundamentals they half-learned.
- Revisit upward. The senior topics assume the mid-level ones are muscle memory.