DevOps Engineer Roadmap

Everything else runs on top of this. Before Kubernetes or Terraform you need to read logs, manage services, and know what is listening on which port - because most production incidents are diagnosed from a Linux shell, and an interviewer can tell in two minutes whether you have actually lived there.

nginx sits in front of almost every web stack, so the day-one outage is usually a misrouted upstream or an expired cert. Learn to read the error log and trace a 502 to its real cause and you can put out the most common production fire on any team.

Containers are how code ships now, so 'it works on my machine but the container exits immediately' is a rite of passage. Understand images, layers, and entrypoints well enough to build a lean image that actually runs in production.

Most teams run on Kubernetes, and most Kubernetes problems are a pod that will not start or traffic that will not arrive. Getting fluent at diagnosing these from events and logs is the single most asked-about DevOps skill.

Clicking around a cloud console does not scale and does not get you hired. Terraform is how infrastructure is declared and reviewed, so learn to get a plan to pass, read what it will change, and reconcile drift between state and reality.

Shipping safely and knowing when prod is on fire is what separates a scripter from an engineer. Build a pipeline that builds, tests, and deploys, and wire the metrics and traces that surface a problem before a user does.