DevOps Roadmap

Complete beginner friendly

The free DevOps roadmap people actually finish: Linux, Git, networking, CI/CD, GitOps, IaC, monitoring, and platform engineering, in the right order. Videos and articles from our own catalog.

5 stages · 24 resources ready · 2 in the works, all free · every stage ends with a checkpoint you can verify on a real cluster

Your journey: 24 steps. Check them off as you go, this page remembers.

The ground floor

~2-4 weeks

Every tool later in this path assumes you are comfortable in a terminal. Build that comfort first.

DevOps Roadmap 2025 (video guide)video
Introduction to DevOps (Simplifying DevOps #1)video
Essential Linux commands (video)video
Shell scriptingarticle
Networking fundamentalsarticle

✓ Checkpoint: you can now

Live in a terminal: navigate, script, and debug basic networking without copy-paste.

⚡ Prove it

Write a shell script that health-checks a service and alerts when it goes down.

Version control & automation

~2 weeks

Git is the center of everything modern delivery does. Automate around it.

Get good at Gitarticle
CI/CD concepts and pipelinesarticle
GitHub Actions 101article
CI/CD week (playlist)playlist
Hands-on Dagger workshop (with Solomon Hykes)workshop
Supply chain security: SLSA fundamentalsarticle

✓ Checkpoint: you can now

Ship code through a pipeline you built yourself.

⚡ Prove it

Build a GitHub Actions pipeline that tests, builds, and pushes an image on every commit.

Infrastructure as code

~2-3 weeks

Clicking through consoles does not scale and does not repeat. Make infrastructure a git repo.

Terraform: introductionarticle
Terraform best practicesarticle
The Complete OpenTofu Workshopworkshop
Ansible: let's talkarticle
Secrets management: getting started with Vaultarticle

✓ Checkpoint: you can now

Recreate your entire environment from a git repo, on purpose, twice.

⚡ Prove it

Provision and destroy a full environment twice; the second time should be boring.

GitOps & Kubernetes

~2-3 weeks

Combine the last two stages: git becomes the source of truth for what runs in the cluster.

GitOps with Argo CD: complete hands-on workshopworkshop
GitOps demystifiedarticle
Argo CD overviewarticle
Continue with the Kubernetes Roadmappath

✓ Checkpoint: you can now

Explain why git is the source of truth and make a cluster converge to it.

⚡ Prove it

Set up Argo CD to deploy an app, then break the live state and watch it heal itself.

Observe & platform

~ongoing

Shipping is half the job. Now measure it, and pave the road so others ship faster.

Kubernetes Observability 101: metrics, logs, dashboards, traces (workshop)workshop
Prometheus explainedarticle
Prometheus monitoring for Kubernetes (video)video
Platform engineering: the basicsarticle
SRE fundamentals: SLOs, error budgets, on-callguide coming
Build an internal developer platform: golden paths and Backstageguide coming

✓ Checkpoint: you can now

Answer 'is it healthy?' with dashboards and SLOs, not vibes.

⚡ Prove it

Instrument one service end to end: metrics, logs, one dashboard, and one alert that actually matters.

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