LEARNING PATH
DevOps Roadmap 2025
A practical, opinionated roadmap built from 8 years in production DevOps. Not every tool listed — the right tools in the right order. Each stage builds on the last.
How to use this roadmap: Don't try to learn everything simultaneously. Complete each stage before moving to the next. Hands-on practice beats theory — build real things at each stage before advancing.
PHASE 1 — FOUNDATION
BEGINNER
STAGE 01
Linux & Command Line
- File system navigation and permissions
- Process management (ps, top, kill)
- Package management (apt, yum, dnf)
- Shell scripting basics (bash)
- Cron jobs and scheduling
- SSH and key-based auth
- Log files and journalctl
⏱ 4–6 weeks to solid foundation
BEGINNER
STAGE 02
Networking Fundamentals
- TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/HTTPS
- Subnets, CIDR, routing
- Load balancers and reverse proxies
- Firewalls and security groups
- VPN and VPC concepts
- curl, netstat, nslookup, dig
⏱ 3–4 weeks
BEGINNER
STAGE 03
Git & Version Control
- Branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based)
- Pull requests and code review
- Merge vs rebase
- Git hooks
- Conventional commits
- Monorepo vs multi-repo
⏱ 2–3 weeks
PHASE 2 — AUTOMATION
INTERMEDIATE
STAGE 04
CI/CD Pipelines
- GitHub Actions — start here
- Jenkins for enterprise environments
- Pipeline as code concepts
- Build, test, deploy stages
- Secrets management in pipelines
- Artifact management
- Environment promotion strategies
⏱ 4–6 weeks
INTERMEDIATE
STAGE 05
Containers & Docker
- Container fundamentals
- Writing production Dockerfiles
- Multi-stage builds
- Docker Compose for local dev
- Container registries (ECR, DockerHub)
- Image scanning and security
- Layer caching optimisation
⏱ 3–4 weeks
INTERMEDIATE
STAGE 06
Kubernetes
- Pods, Deployments, Services
- ConfigMaps and Secrets
- Ingress and networking
- Persistent storage (PVC, PV)
- RBAC and service accounts
- Helm charts
- Troubleshooting (kubectl debug)
- EKS / GKE in production
⏱ 6–8 weeks
PHASE 3 — INFRASTRUCTURE
INTERMEDIATE
STAGE 07
Infrastructure as Code
- Terraform — start here
- Module design and state management
- Terraform Cloud / remote backends
- Ansible for configuration management
- Idempotency principles
- GitOps with ArgoCD
- Policy as code (OPA, Sentinel)
⏱ 6–8 weeks
ADVANCED
STAGE 08
Cloud Platform
- AWS (recommended starting point)
- IAM, VPC, EC2, S3, RDS core services
- EKS, Lambda, EventBridge
- Cost optimisation and FinOps
- Multi-region architecture
- Cloud certifications (AWS SAA)
⏱ 8–12 weeks for solid AWS foundation
ADVANCED
STAGE 09
Observability & Monitoring
- Prometheus metrics collection
- Grafana dashboards
- Alertmanager and on-call
- Log aggregation (ELK / EFK stack)
- Distributed tracing (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry)
- SLOs, SLAs, error budgets
⏱ 4–6 weeks
PHASE 4 — SECURITY & SCALE
ADVANCED
STAGE 10
DevSecOps
- SAST tools (SonarQube)
- SCA and dependency scanning
- Container image scanning (Trivy)
- Secret detection (Gitleaks)
- HashiCorp Vault
- IAM least-privilege patterns
- Compliance as code
⏱ 4–5 weeks
ADVANCED
STAGE 11
Platform Engineering
- Internal developer platforms (IDPs)
- Self-service infrastructure
- Developer experience (DX) design
- Service mesh (Istio, Linkerd)
- Chaos engineering
- SRE practices and incident management
⏱ Ongoing — never fully complete
Honest advice: Most engineers try to learn too many tools at once. Pick one cloud provider (AWS), one IaC tool (Terraform), one container orchestrator (Kubernetes), and go deep. Breadth comes naturally once you have depth in one stack.