DevOps Engineer Roadmap

The reason DevOps feels impossibly broad is that most lists of it are unordered. Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus, CI/CD, AWS — presented flat, as though you could start anywhere. You cannot, and trying is what makes people bounce off it twice.

The ordering here is not arbitrary. Linux comes first because every later abstraction leaks into it: a container is a process with namespaces, a pod is a container with a lifecycle, and when either misbehaves you are reading `ps`, `ss` and journal output. Networking comes before Kubernetes because a Service is a load balancer over an IP range, and "the pod cannot reach the database" is a subnet question wearing a Kubernetes hat.

Cloud comes after containers rather than before, because managed container services assume you already know what they are managing. Observability comes last of the technical stages, not because it matters least but because you cannot instrument a system you cannot yet reason about — alerting on a system you do not understand produces noise you then learn to ignore.

Expect it to take months rather than weeks, and expect the middle to be the hardest part. The stages are sized so each one is useful on its own: you are employable somewhere partway through, not only at the end.