Steps To DevOps : Complete Roadmap for Beginners
Learn concepts step by step for getting ready for the Interviews .
Important DevOps Concepts (Interview-Focused)
DevOps Fundamentals
✦ DevOps principles, culture, and lifecycle
✦ Agile, Lean, and collaboration practices
✦ Differences between DevOps, SRE, and traditional IT
✦ Key benefits and challenges of DevOps adoption
Linux & Operating Systems
✦ Linux command-line basics and shell scripting
✦ File system hierarchy, permissions, and process management
✦ Package management and system services
✦ User/group management and security basics
Networking for DevOps
✦ OSI and TCP/IP models, core protocols (TCP, UDP, HTTP/HTTPS, DNS, SSH)
✦ IP addressing, subnetting, CIDR notation
✦ Routing, switching, VLANs, and load balancing
✦ Ports, NAT, and firewall basics
✦ HTTP methods and status codes (1xx, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx)
✦ Troubleshooting tools: ping, traceroute, netstat, ss, tcpdump, wireshark, nmap
✦ DNS and DHCP configuration and troubleshooting
✦ Proxy servers and VPNs
Scripting and Basic Automations
✦ Using Bash to automate basic tasks like backups , old log files deletion , cron jobs , scheduled server maintenance etc.
✦ Using Python to automate basic tasks like Application Health checks , Reporting and Monitoring of spaces , processes etc.
Version Control Systems
✦ Git basics : init, clone, commit, push, pull, merge, rebase
✦ Branching strategies and workflows (GitFlow, trunk-based)
✦ Conflict resolution and code review
✦ Hosting platforms : GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket
Programming & Scripting
✦ Scripting with Bash and Python for automation
✦ Writing reusable scripts and handling errors
✦ Parsing logs, manipulating files, and integrating APIs
✦ Basic programming concepts : variables, loops, functions
Continuous Integration (CI)
✦ CI concepts and benefits
✦ Tools : Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI
✦ Pipeline stages : Maven/Gradle build, selenium test, Jfrog/Nexus artifact, deploy
✦ Automated testing and code quality checks
Continuous Deployment/Delivery (CD)
✦ Understand basic difference between Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery
✦ CD principles and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rolling)
✦ Rollbacks and automated release management
✦ Integrating CD with CI pipelines
✦ Deployment to multiple environments (dev, staging, prod)
AWS or Azure Cloud Platforms
✦ Cloud concepts: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
✦ Providers: AWS, Azure, GCP - core services (compute, storage, networking)
✦ IAM, VPC, subnets, security groups , ASG , LB , DNS , Containers and others
✦ Cloud CLI and SDK usage
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
✦ IaC concepts : idempotency, versioning, automation
✦ Tools : Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Pulumi
✦ Writing and managing infrastructure code
✦ State management and drift detection
Configuration Management
✦ Tools: Ansible, Puppet, Chef, SaltStack
✦ Managing system state and consistency
✦ Playbooks, manifests, and modules , Dynamic Inventory
✦ Secret management and environment variables
Containerization
✦ Concepts: containers vs. VMs, images, registries
✦ Docker : building, running, networking, volumes
✦ Docker Compose for multi-container apps
✦ Container security best practices
Container Orchestration
✦ Kubernetes : pods, deployments, services, ingress
✦ Helm for package management
✦ Scaling, rolling updates, and self-healing
✦ Kubernetes networking and storage
Monitoring, Logging & Observability
✦ Metrics collection : Prometheus, CloudWatch
✦ Visualization : Grafana, Kibana
✦ Log management : ELK/EFK Stack
✦ Tracing : OpenTelemetry, Jaeger
✦ Setting up alerts, dashboards, and incident response
Security & DevSecOps
✦ Principles : least privilege, secrets management, compliance
✦ Tools : HashiCorp Vault, Trivy
✦ Container and cloud security practices
✦ Vulnerability scanning and remediation
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
✦ SRE principles : SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets
✦ Incident management and postmortems
✦ Chaos engineering and resilience testing
✦ Performance tuning and scalability
Frequently Asked Questions
Find quick answers to common questions about DevOps
DevOps is a cultural and technical methodology combining development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to accelerate software delivery, improve collaboration, and maintain system reliability. It bridges between automating manual tasks and empowering teams to deliver high-quality software faster.
- Collaboration: unify development, operations, and QA
- Automation: script builds, tests, and deployments
- CI/CD: automate integration and delivery workflows
- Monitoring: track performance and user experience
- Feedback loops: iterate quickly based on metrics
- Learn fundamentals: Linux, Git, scripting (e.g. Bash/Python)
- Set up a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions or Jenkins
- Create a small cloud app (e.g. Node.js) and deploy it to AWS/GCP
- Practice using Infrastructure-as-Code (Ansible/Terraform)
- Strong Linux/sysadmin background
- Scripting in Python/Bash
- CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI)
- Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Cloud platforms: AWS/Azure/GCP
- Monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana)
- Docker: packaging and running containers
- Kubernetes: automating containerized infrastructure
- Terraform/Ansible: provisioning and config management
- Jenkins/GitLab CI: pipeline automation
- Git: version control and collaboration
- Prometheus/Grafana: performance monitoring
- DevOps extends Agile by focusing beyond code - on deployment, operations, and monitoring
- Traditional IT often has different roles and batch deployments; DevOps emphasizes continuous delivery, shared accountability, and fast feedback.
- Linux & scripting basics
- Version control and git workflows
- CI/CD setup
- Containerization + orchestration
- Infrastructure-as-Code
- Monitoring, logging, and security basics
Start with Bash for CLI tasks, then Python for Automation , Monitoring and others. Optionally, pick up Go or Ruby depending on the ecosystem you work with.
Focus on automation: script tasks you’d do manually, build CI/CD pipelines, leverage containers and infrastructure as code. Shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive, automated deployment
Begin with CI/CD basics, because deployment automation gives quick wins. Then learn cloud fundamentals to scale your pipeline and application delivery.
Python can generate dynamic IaC templates, invoke CLI tools (Terraform, Ansible), and validate config before deployment.
To automate builds, deployments, health checks, post-deploy tasks, notifications, and interact with APIs or artifacts.
Yes, for complex logic, error handling, and cloud/API tasks. Bash is great for small jobs; Python is better for scale.
Yes, for writing health checks, monitoring scripts, automating recovery, and integrating with observability tools.
Python can parse logs, detect patterns, trigger alerts, and integrate with tools like Grafana, Slack, or Prometheus.
Use kubernetes-client or docker Python SDKs to control containers, deploy apps, manage resources, and scale clusters.
Basic syntax, loops, conditions, file I/O, exception handling, modules, API calls, and automation examples.
Mention real scripts/tools you've built, libraries used (boto3, paramiko, etc.), and how they improved automation.
