DevOps
Overview
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten the development lifecycle and deliver high-quality software continuously. It emphasizes automation, monitoring, collaboration, and iterative improvement.
Why this category matters: DevOps practices enable teams to ship faster, recover from failures quickly, and maintain reliable systems at scale. Understanding CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability is essential for modern software delivery.
TL;DR
- DevOps bridges development and operations for faster, safer delivery
- Core practices: CI/CD, IaC, monitoring, incident response
- Tools automate building, testing, deploying, and operating software
Featured Topics
Containers & Orchestration
- Docker — Container platform for packaging applications
- Kubernetes — Container orchestration at scale
- Podman — Daemonless Docker alternative
- Helm — Kubernetes package manager
- Docker vs Kubernetes — Why they aren't alternatives, and whether you need an orchestrator
CI/CD & Delivery
- GitHub Actions — CI/CD built into GitHub
- GitLab CI — Integrated CI/CD in GitLab
- Jenkins — Established open-source automation server
- CircleCI — Cloud-native CI/CD platform
- GitOps — Git as the source of truth for deployments
- Platform Engineering — Internal developer platforms and golden paths
Infrastructure as Code
- Terraform — Multi-cloud infrastructure provisioning
- OpenTofu — The open-source Terraform fork
- Pulumi — IaC with programming languages
- Ansible — Configuration management and automation
- CloudFormation — AWS-native IaC
Networking & Reliability
- Nginx — Reverse proxy, load balancer, web server
- Service Mesh — mTLS and traffic management between services
- eBPF — Programmable kernel for networking, observability, security
- Chaos Engineering — Verifying resilience by injecting failure
Observability
- Prometheus — Metrics collection and alerting
- Grafana — Visualization and dashboards
- Datadog — Full-stack observability platform
- OpenTelemetry — Vendor-neutral observability standard
Core Practices
Learning Path
Beginner
Learn Linux basics, Git, and basic scripting. Set up a simple CI pipeline.
Intermediate
Learn Docker, write Dockerfiles, set up multi-stage CI/CD. Understand cloud basics.
Advanced
Kubernetes, Terraform, observability platforms, SRE practices.