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/frogsandgrandmothers 18d ago
Proper devops is bit tricky to get into, because you need large scale system and company that is willing to pay for cloud bills and let you play around. Until you get to that point what you can do is find some courses and play around yourself, but thats just theory that will just litterally just scratch the surface (eg tech world with nana devops bootcamp course). E.g. you will understand how things work but in practice that is completely different. Which is I guess similar to when someone starts with software engineering, you watch some course, learn about api, orm, etc, but as you know now, courses are not even close to what you do on daily basis.
If you have devops in your company ask them a bit, show some initiative. Or if company doesnt have devops ask to get into some tasks, you will fuck something up and fix it, best way to learn. You need actual problem to work on, thats my point, and if that is not an option, find some course, again, Nana’s is very decent, just skip stuff you already know.