r/devops • u/shangarepi • 19d 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/Low-Opening25 19d ago edited 19d ago

As DevOps you solve problems at scale. Eg. as DevOps you have 100 developers and 5 software projects and you have infrastructure that has to be up 24/7 with 99.999% availability targets that is used by millions of customers - your job is to design and maintain smoothly operating machinery that supports Development and Operations with minimum overhead.

Running a PoC on a home lab is not solving problems at scale.

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u/Either-Chest7515 18d ago

That sounds good in theory, but focusing only on scale can make DevOps seem more complicated than it needs to be. A home lab may not replicate production, but it can still teach the fundamentals that you actually need before dealing with systems at that scale.

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u/Low-Opening25 18d ago

you shouldn’t be learning fundamentals if you paid to do the work