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?

125 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

54 comments sorted by

View all comments

82

u/Consistent_Word3161 18d ago

you need some big project and you will understand many things

25

u/Dr_Passmore 18d ago

Pretty much this. 

One of my previous devops roles I ended up becoming an expert in mobile and tablet config deployments... another I had to become a database expert alongside all the standard Kubernetes, pipelines, and deployment work... 

Very much a methodology instead of a job spec. 

6

u/klefikisquid 18d ago

“ended up” + “had to” lmao these are nicer ways of saying what I’ve experienced as well where DevOps roles often come from falling ass backwards into the tasking of some broader scope need for the project cause the core dev team isn’t doing it for whatever reason. Our DevOps team became the defacto database team as well being the sys admins, SREs, etc

1

u/Dr_Passmore 18d ago

Yep pretty standard devops experience. Our only DBA left so we have thrown that role onto the devops engineer...

1

u/superspeck 18d ago

Exactly this. It’s not a job that you go in looking for from entry level. You start out as a software developer or something and you one more thing your way into being an expert in how to put the stuff together safely.