DevOps & Platform Engineering Roadmap
The highest-paying, cloud-agnostic lane, mapped end to end. From Linux and Git to Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, and SRE — the modern path into DevOps and platform engineering roles.
6 stages · about 12 weeks at 1–2 focused hours a day.
Each stage has a free path and a premium fast-track — your call.
1 · Linux & Git foundations
~2 weeksYou're fast on the command line and version everything with Git — the base every DevOps tool sits on.
Topics to learn
- Linux shell, files & permissions
- Processes, services & logs
- Git branching & merge conflicts
- Bash scripting basics
Hands-on practice
- Live in a Linux terminal for a week
- Resolve a real merge conflict by hand
- Write a bash script that automates a setup task
- Tail and grep logs to debug a failing service
Supporting kitDevOps & CI/CD Q&A →2 · Containers & Kubernetes
~3 weeksYou package apps in containers and orchestrate them on Kubernetes — the core skill of every platform role.
Topics to learn
- Docker images, layers & registries
- Pods, deployments & services
- ConfigMaps, secrets & volumes
- Scaling, probes & rollouts
Hands-on practice
- Containerize an app and push it to a registry
- Deploy it to a local kind/minikube cluster
- Add liveness/readiness probes and scale it
- Roll out a new version and then roll it back
Supporting kitKubernetes & Docker Q&A →3 · Infrastructure as code (Terraform)
~2 weeksYou provision cloud infrastructure in code, reviewable and repeatable — no more console clicking.
Topics to learn
- Providers, resources & state
- Variables, outputs & modules
- Remote backends & locking
- Plan / apply / destroy workflow
Hands-on practice
- Provision a VPC + compute stack in Terraform
- Move state to a remote backend
- Refactor repeated config into a module
- Wire terraform plan into a PR check
Supporting kitTerraform / IaC Q&A →4 · CI/CD pipelines
~2 weeksYou build pipelines that test, build, and deploy automatically — the daily work of the job.
Topics to learn
- GitHub Actions / GitLab CI
- Build, test & deploy stages
- Container build & push
- Environments, secrets & approvals
Hands-on practice
- Build a pipeline that runs tests on every PR
- Add a stage that builds and pushes a container
- Deploy to a Kubernetes cluster from CI
- Add a manual approval gate before production
Supporting kitDevOps & CI/CD Q&A →5 · Observability & SRE
~2 weeksYou can see what production is doing and reason about reliability — what turns a DevOps engineer into an SRE.
Topics to learn
- Metrics, logs & traces
- Prometheus & Grafana
- Alerting & on-call basics
- SLIs, SLOs & error budgets
Hands-on practice
- Scrape app metrics with Prometheus
- Build a Grafana dashboard for your service
- Define an SLO and an alert that fires on it
- Write a short postmortem for a simulated incident
6 · Interview prep & portfolio
~1 weekYou package it all: a portfolio repo, a sharp cloud resume, and answers you can deliver.
Topics to learn
- Polish your IaC + pipeline repo + README
- ATS-ready cloud resume
- Mock interviews out loud
- An architecture diagram of your platform
Hands-on practice
- Write a README that sells your DevOps project
- Diagram your container → K8s → CI/CD → monitoring flow
- Answer 10 DevOps interview questions out loud
- Apply to 3 roles with your repo link on top
Want this tailored to YOUR situation?
Answer 6 quick questions — experience, background, cloud platform, goal — and get a personalized week-by-week plan with topics, hands-on practice, and free resources for each step.
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