DevOps and Cloud Engineer Roadmap: Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS

What DevOps and cloud engineers do

DevOps engineers help teams build, test, release and run software reliably. They automate deployments, manage infrastructure, monitor systems and respond when things break. Cloud engineers focus on designing and operating systems on platforms like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. In many companies the work overlaps, and titles include DevOps Engineer, Cloud Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and Platform Engineer.

This is rarely a first-day career for complete beginners: you need to understand how software is built before you can automate it. Many people start as developers, system administrators or support engineers.

Stage 1: fundamentals (weeks 1–8)

• Linux: file system, permissions, processes, services (systemd), package managers, shell scripting with Bash
• Networking: IP addressing, DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, TCP vs UDP, ports, firewalls, load balancers, TLS basics
• A programming language: Python (or Go) for scripts and tooling (Python guide)
• Git and branching workflows (guide)
• How applications work: build a small web app and a database (backend roadmap)

Stage 2: cloud basics (weeks 6–14)

Pick one provider first. AWS has the largest market share in India; Azure is strong in enterprises.

• Compute (virtual machines), storage (object and block), networking (VPC, subnets, security groups)
• Identity and access management: least privilege, roles, policies
• Databases and managed services, DNS, load balancers, auto scaling
• Cost awareness: budgets, tagging, shutting down unused resources

A foundational certification (such as AWS Cloud Practitioner or Solutions Architect Associate) can structure your learning, but hands-on labs matter more than the badge.

Stage 3: containers and CI/CD (weeks 12–22)

• Docker: images, layers, Dockerfiles, volumes, networks, Docker Compose
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Jenkins: build, test, scan and deploy pipelines
• Artifact repositories and versioning strategies
• Deployment strategies: rolling, blue-green, canary

Stage 4: orchestration and infrastructure as code (weeks 20–32)

• Kubernetes: pods, deployments, services, ingress, config maps, secrets, probes, resource limits, scaling. Practise locally with kind or minikube.
• Terraform (or Pulumi/CloudFormation): describe infrastructure in code, manage state, use modules
• Configuration management: Ansible basics
• Helm for packaging Kubernetes apps

Stage 5: observability and reliability (weeks 28–40)

• Metrics, logs and traces; Prometheus and Grafana; centralised logging
• Alerts that matter, on-call habits, runbooks and incident reviews
• SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, backups and disaster recovery
• Security: secrets management, image scanning, patching, basic DevSecOps

Projects that show real skill

1. Deploy a two-tier app (frontend, API, database) on a cloud VM with Docker Compose, HTTPS and a domain.
2. CI/CD pipeline: on every push, run tests, build an image, push it to a registry and deploy automatically.
3. Infrastructure as code: recreate your whole environment with Terraform from scratch with one command.
4. Kubernetes project: deploy the app with autoscaling, health checks and monitoring dashboards.

Keep everything in Git with a README that explains design choices, cost and how to tear it down.

Interview topics

• Linux troubleshooting: "A server is slow. What do you check?"
• Networking: what happens when you type a URL
• Docker and Kubernetes concepts and commands
• CI/CD pipeline design and rollback
• Terraform state and drift
• Scenario questions about outages, scaling and security

Also prepare scripting and basic coding questions (technical interview checklist).

Next steps

Add cyber security knowledge for DevSecOps, or specialise in data platforms via data engineering. Check experienced openings to see which cloud and tooling combinations employers request.