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DevOps & Cloud thumbnail

DevOps & Cloud

136 courses 19 categories

DevOps and cloud infrastructure is the practice of building, deploying, and operating systems at scale. The topic covers the substrate every modern application runs on — virtual machines and containers, networking, the cloud-provider services (AWS, Azure, GCP) that have replaced most on-prem infrastructure, the CI/CD pipelines that ship code to production, and the observability layer that tells you when something is wrong before users report it.

The dominant tools have stabilized. Docker for containers, Kubernetes for orchestration when you have enough services to justify it, Terraform (or its OpenTofu fork) for infrastructure-as-code, GitHub Actions and GitLab CI for pipelines, Prometheus + Grafana + Loki for the metrics-logs-traces stack, OpenTelemetry as the vendor-neutral instrumentation API. Most companies use 70% of the same stack with brand-specific differences (EKS vs GKE, Datadog vs Honeycomb vs in-house Grafana).

What you'll find under this topic

  • Cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, the choice criteria between them
  • Containers and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux
  • Infrastructure-as-code: Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, AWS CDK
  • CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, deployment patterns
  • Configuration management: Ansible, the legacy Chef/Puppet world
  • Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing
  • Networking: nginx, load balancing, CDNs, VPNs, service mesh (Istio, Linkerd)
  • Linux fundamentals: process management, systemd, performance debugging, eBPF

The career track splits between SREs (focused on reliability, on-call, postmortems), platform engineers (building internal tooling for other engineers), and infrastructure engineers (provider-specific deep work on AWS / Azure / GCP). Compensation in this track tends to be at parity with senior software engineering roles at scale-up and large companies.

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Categories (19)

Ansible thumbnail
Ansible
Ansible is an agentless configuration management tool developed by Michael DeHaan and maintained by Red Hat. It…
AWS thumbnail
AWS
AWS is the largest public cloud by revenue and the deepest by service catalog. Amazon launched it in 2006 with S3 and…
Azure thumbnail
Azure
Azure is a cloud computing platform and service created by Microsoft, designed to build, deploy, and manage…
Bash thumbnail
Bash
Bash Interpreter — Command-Line Interface and Shell Explained A Bash interpreter is a command-line processor that…
DevOps Fundamentals thumbnail
DevOps Fundamentals
DevOps Fundamentals refers to the set of practices and tools that aim to automate and integrate the processes of…
Docker thumbnail
Docker
Docker packages an application and everything it needs to run into a single image, then runs that image as an isolated…
Git thumbnail
Git
Git is a distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 to efficiently manage the Linux kernel…
GitHub thumbnail
GitHub
GitHub is a platform for version control and collaboration, created by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ…
Gitlab thumbnail
Gitlab
Gitlab is an integrated DevOps platform developed by GitLab Inc., providing a comprehensive suite of tools for version…
Google Cloud thumbnail
Google Cloud
Google Cloud refers to the suite of cloud computing services offered by Google, known collectively as Google Cloud…
Grafana thumbnail
Grafana
Grafana is an open-source dashboard and observability platform developed by Grafana Labs. It is renowned for its…
IoT & Embedded thumbnail
IoT & Embedded
IoT & Embedded refers to the domain of technology focused on creating and managing interconnected devices that…
Jenkins thumbnail
Jenkins
Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration (CI) server initially developed by Kohsuke Kawaguchi. It became a…
Kubernetes thumbnail
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is the open-source container orchestrator that grew out of Google's internal Borg system. It schedules…
Linux thumbnail
Linux
Linux is an open-source operating system kernel created by Linus Torvalds in 1991. It forms the backbone of many…
Networking & Protocols thumbnail
Networking & Protocols
Networking & Protocols form the backbone of digital communication, providing the rules and conventions that enable…
Nginx thumbnail
Nginx
Nginx is a high-performance web server and reverse proxy developed by Igor Sysoev. It is renowned for its ability to…
Operating Systems & CS thumbnail
Operating Systems & CS
Operating Systems & CS encompasses both the theoretical and practical aspects of how computers manage hardware and…
Terraform thumbnail
Terraform
Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool developed by HashiCorp, designed to manage and provision cloud resources…

Courses (136)

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Frequently asked questions

DevOps vs Platform Engineering — what's the difference?
DevOps is the broader practice — bridging dev and ops, automating CI/CD, owning deploy pipelines and observability. Platform engineering is the newer specialty of building internal developer platforms (golden paths, self-service infra, paved roads) so application teams ship without filing tickets. Most 'platform' job postings are senior DevOps roles with stronger product-thinking expectations.
Do I need to learn Kubernetes for a DevOps career?
Strongly recommended but not strictly required. Kubernetes is the default container orchestrator at any company with non-trivial scale, and platform engineering roles almost always require it. Smaller shops still run on plain ECS, App Runner, Fly, or Heroku-style PaaS — those teams want Terraform, observability, and CI/CD fluency more than Kubernetes depth.
Which IaC tool should I learn — Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK?
Terraform (now OpenTofu in many shops) is the broadest market by a wide margin. CDK is excellent when an org is AWS-only and the team already writes TypeScript or Python. Pulumi has a quieter but loyal user base. Learn Terraform first; pick up the others if a specific employer uses them.
How important is observability for DevOps work?
Central. Metrics, logs, traces, and alerting are not extras — they're the difference between debugging an incident in minutes and chasing ghosts for hours. Plan on at least one mature stack: Prometheus + Grafana, or one of the SaaS platforms (Datadog, Honeycomb, Grafana Cloud, New Relic). Senior interviews probe this aggressively.
Is a DevOps role still a coding job?
Yes, more than people expect. Modern DevOps work involves writing Terraform, Helm charts, Go or Python tooling, GitHub Actions, and internal CLI utilities — often more code than the average frontend role. Pure GUI-driven cloud admin jobs have largely disappeared. Treat coding fluency as a baseline, not a stretch.