DevOps Roadmap: Step-by-Step Learning Guide

Hello, I am Gaurav Bharane a Red Hat Certified Engineer and a DevOps enthusiast, in this blog, I have created a step-by-step guide to help you navigate the DevOps landscape, illustrated in the above diagram is a roadmap covering essential tools and concepts.

Introduction

DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It aims to shorten the system development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.

Step 1: Understanding the Basics

What is DevOps?

• DevOps is a culture, movement, or practice that emphasizes collaboration and communication between software developers and IT professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.

Key Goals of DevOps:

• Improve deployment frequency
• Achieve a faster time to market
• Lower failure rate of new releases
• Shorten lead time between fixes
• Improve mean time to recovery

Step 2: Learn a Scripting Language

A scripting language helps you automate your DevOps tasks

• Python: Widely used for scripting and automation tasks.
• Bash/Shell Scripting: Essential for managing Unix/Linux systems.

I suggest starting with Python if you are a complete beginner or a non-IT person.

Step 3: Get Comfortable with Linux

Understanding Linux is fundamental as many DevOps tools are designed to run on Linux.

• Distributions to Explore:
• Ubuntu: User-friendly and widely used.
• CentOS/RHEL: Common in enterprise environments.
• SUSE Linux: Another enterprise-grade distribution.

I suggest starting with Ubuntu/CentOS if you are a beginner with Linux-based Operating Systems.
Once you are comfortable with the OS & Command line interface start Learning administrator tasks like Networking, System configurations, Storage handling, backup Strategies, Task Scheduling, migration of Data, and other essential tasks & commands.

Step 4: Version Control with Git

• Learn Git:
• Basic commands: clone, commit, push, pull, merge.
• Branching strategies: Gitflow, Feature Branch, etc.
• Platform to Practice:
• GitHub
• GitLab
• BitBucket

Once you have hands-on with git and Github start with learning CI/CD which is continuous integration and continuous deployment

CI Pipeline Integration:

Start learning with Github actions and then further move to Jenkins.

• Jenkins: A widely used open-source automation server.
• GitHub Actions: Automate workflows directly within GitHub.

Step 5: Configuration Management

Tools to manage and automate the configuration of your infrastructure:

• Ansible: Agentless and uses YAML for configuration.
• Chef: Uses Ruby and is flexible but more complex.
• Puppet: Uses its declarative language and is widely adopted.

My suggestion will be to learn Ansible due to its vast community and Features.

Step 6: Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC allows you to manage and provision computing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files.

• Terraform: A powerful tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Step 7: Virtualization

Understand virtualization concepts and tools.

• VirtualBox and VMware: Popular for creating virtual machines for development and testing purposes.

Virtualization is running a guest OS on your Running Host OS, there are two types of Virtualization type-1 and type-2, we will cover Virtualization in the upcoming blog post.

Step 8: Containers and Container Orchestration

First of all, start with concepts like what are containers, why are they used, and how it is different from virtual machines.

Start your Container journey with Containerization tools like Docker and Podman.

• Docker: Learn the basics of creating, managing, and orchestrating containers.
• Podman: An alternative to Docker, especially in environments that require better security features.

Container Orchestration Tools:

After learning Containers you need to manage multiple containers and to manage them you need a Container Orchestration tool called Kubernetes.

• Kubernetes: Automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
• Helm: A package manager for Kubernetes.

Step 9: Cloud Providers

Familiarize yourself with at least one major cloud provider.

• AWS (Amazon Web Services)
• Azure (Microsoft)
• GCP (Google Cloud Platform)

I would suggest using the Certification paths of these cloud providers so that you would have an in-depth knowledge of Cloud services provided by the cloud providers.

Step 10: Monitoring and Logging

Monitoring and logging are crucial for maintaining and troubleshooting applications.

• Prometheus: An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.
• Grafana: A powerful tool for visualizing metrics.
• Nagios: A classic monitoring solution.
• Zabbix: Another popular monitoring solution.

Conclusion

By following this step-by-step guide, you’ll be able to build a solid foundation in DevOps. Start with the basics, progressively move towards more complex tools and practices, and always keep learning. The DevOps field is dynamic and continuously evolving, so staying updated with the latest trends and technologies is crucial.

For more detailed guides and resources, you can follow my LinkedIn.

.

Thank You for viewing my blog!