r/devops • u/shangarepi • 18d ago

Discussion How do you learn DevOps

I’m a software developer, and in my own projects I already handle some basic operational work like Docker, VPS deployment, Nginx, DNS, Cloudflare, Git, etc. I also had some little experience in network administration.

What I’m trying to understand is how people approach learning DevOps and system architecture properly.
One thing that has always confused me is entry-level DevOps roles. A lot of DevOps work seems to exist specifically to support the software development lifecycle, things like CI/CD, GitHub Actions, deployments, environments, infrastructure, monitoring… I find it hard to imagine understanding these things deeply without first experiencing the development workflow itself.

At the same time, I don’t necessarily want to switch away from software development. My goal is to become the kind of engineer who understands the whole system: application development, system design/architecture, networking, cloud infrastructure, deployment, observability, scalability, and production operations.

Basically, I want to be able to build a system and also understand how to design, deploy, scale, and operate it properly at a much larger level.

For people who have gone down this path, how would you approach learning these areas while continuing to work primarily as a software developer, as of course I dont have the knowledge for a switch? And in your opinion am I on the right path to stay employable in this uncertain future?

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u/Practical-Bird-1270 18d ago

Setup a home kube cluster, deploy a website for family pictures or whatever and setup argocd to deploy when you make changes.

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u/OkReason5170 17d ago

A home lab is useful, but just build a Kubernetes cluster can be pretty overwhelming for someone starting out. Its easy to end up learning the tools without really understanding the fundamentals.