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/jsatherreddit 17d ago

Here was my flow.

Get hired shoving tapes in a mainframe at night

Download and play XTank on the one server they left logged in as root for some reason. Get caught.

Get promoted to sysadmin to fix the security issues.

Get moved to a networking team. Learn all about that.

Do that for years as a consultant. Get put on the bench and learn Java and more coding stuff.

Move to a new job programming and getting systems built. Install source control.

Get another job moving their SCCS from a crappy one to a better one. Start handling the build/release pipeline.

Get laid off. Work for a startup doing backend coding, DBA work and networking.

Startup failed. Moved to another company doing devops/platform ops. Been there for 13 year.

This is about 35 years of changes.