How to Learn Devops
How to learn and stay up to date with DevOps and Cloud Native technologies
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
Bejnamin Franklin
Know what is important to know
A famous Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC — 322 BC) has been called the last person to know everything there was to know in the science. Since than science grown exponentially, became divided and subdivided into specialized, narrow disciplines.
Similarly modern technology landscape is evolving in neck breaking pace and unlike Aristotle, we don’t have a luxury to know “all there is to know”. In modern day, especially in the field of practical application of technology, the problem moves from “how to know all there is to know”, to “how to filter information efficiently and know what is important to know”.
Learn and stay up to date
In the context of DevOps and Cloud Native technologies, there are two types of activities:
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Learning new skills/technologies
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Staying up to date with industry trends
Learn
It is important to relay on proven information sources and find the ones that resonate with you the most. Here is a very abbreviated list of resources that I tend to come back to over and over to hone my practical skills.
DevOps Toolkit is a relatively new YouTube channel, but the person behind it is a very experience DevOps engineer. This is my go to channel to learn about new trends and tools. DevOps Toolkit *We want to help you learn the tools and the processes that you should be using and applying in your day-to-day job. We…*www.youtube.com
Just me and Open Source is a great YouTube channel with lots of practical examples especially around Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies. Just me and Opensource *Learn and share opensource software tools and technologies. Online tutorial for Linux administrators, DevOps, SysOps…*www.youtube.com
Azure specific channel with very clear explanations. Geert Baeke *I post tech videos on all things cloud and cloud-native. Focus on Azure and Kubernetes! The videos are usually recorded…*www.youtube.com
In my experience one of the best learning platforms for Cloud Native technologies Learn DevOps with Kode Kloud *The True Learn-By-Doing platform! Mumshad is passionate about sharing his knowledge and teaches over 180,000 students…*kodekloud.com
Explore awesome lists on GitHub. An awesome list is a list of awesome things curated by the community. There are awesome lists about everything from CLI applications to fantasy books. The main repository serves as a curated list of awesome lists. Build software better, together *GitHub is where people build software. More than 65 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over…*github.com
Stay up to date
Staying up to date means knowing what is happening in the industry, what are new trends and changes that we should be aware of.
Follow CNCF YouTube channel CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] *To provide educational and informative content on cloud native computing, which uses an open source software stack to…*www.youtube.com
Subscribe to DevOps and Cloud Native mailing lists:
Cloud Native News.
DevOps’ish.
CNCF newsletter about Kubernetes
Learn what is important
At the end getting access to information is almost trivial nowadays. The only prerequisites are having access to internet and curiosity to learn.
What is difficult is how to discriminate important information from less relevant.
Here are is an example process and tools that I use on a daily basis to great success.
# Have a plan
Learning must be directed towards a goal. Having a clear plan helps a lot. If you don’t have a plan yet, don’t worry, discover what is interesting you and start researching until you can formulate a plan.
Plan must have a goal, it can be for example
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Obtaining certain skill
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Passing a certification
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Changing careers
Once you have a plan, follow any system to organize your tasks and work. I like the PARA method: The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information - Forte Labs *Series Navigation: The P.A.R.A. MethodPARA Part 2: Operations Manual >> This article is also available in Dutch Imagine…*fortelabs.co
Another simple and useful method is OKRs (Objective Key Results), popularized by Google OKR - Wikipedia *Objectives and key results ( OKR) is a goal-setting framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes…*en.wikipedia.org
Use simple mechanisms to track your progress. For this Trello works really well. Trello *Infinitely flexible. Incredibly productive for teams of all sizes. Trello manages everything, from big project details…*trello.com
# Gather information
Gathering information is first step. On top of the above mentioned resources, I use Weava to highlight passages of text and images on web pages. Think about it as an intelligent clipboard that helps you organize initial information. Weava Highlighter - Free Research Tool for PDFs & Webpages *Students and researchers rely on Weava to organize their academic research and studies Keep track of what is important…*www.weavatools.com
# Expand your knowledge base
Information acquisition and retention happens naturally by association and linking new information to existing structures. This is best represented by graph data models. Unfortunately, most of the available software like One Note or Ever Note etc does not offer this type of experience.
Once such tool I found recently and I’m really happy with is Obsidian Obsidian: A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files. *In our age when cloud services can shut down, get bought, or change privacy policy any day, the last thing you want is…*obsidian.md
Obsidian is described on their web site as
A second brain, for you, forever. Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
One of the key aspects of how Obsidian and similar software is different is a concept of backlinks. Backlinks associate information bi-directionally and thus mimic how brain works and acquire information.
The goal of this part is to keep adding new information in an associative manner and expand you DevOps and Cloud Native knowledge base.
Those tools are of course not DevOps or Cloud Native specific and can be used in any context.
Get Involved
What we’ve done so far:
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Discovered useful high quality resources for learning and staying up to date.
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Learned how to acquire and retain information in an efficient way.
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Have a plan for learning.
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Grow and expand your knowledge base.
Last, but I think most important point of learning is purpose. For me the purpose of learning Cloud Native technologies and DevOps is to enrich the community and give back.
Get involved and share what you learn/work on. Teaching someone is the best ways to learn. Start writing blogs, make content on YouTube or engage with open source community on GitHub or GitLab.
This way learning will not only improve chances for getting better job, but will became part of your daily routine and will benefit everyone around you.