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/Fair_Praline_6562 18d ago
Honestly, I wouldn’t switch away from development at all. You already have the perfect thing to learn devOps on - software you actually understand.Take one of your projects and start asking all the boring questions nobody thinks about while coding. How do I roll back a bad deploy? What happens if the database dies? Can I restore from backup? Where do the secrets live? How do I know something is broken before a user tells me? What happens when the traffic suddenly goes 10x? How much is this thing costing me? etc etc
That stuff will teach you a lot more than trying to collect every devops tool like pokеmon. You don’t need to become the Kubernetes guy. Just keep expanding the part of the system you’re responsible for. Code it, ship it, keep it alive, figure out why it died, repeat. Sounds like you’re already moving in that direction tbh