When I started learning DevOps, I kept running into the same two walls.
The free material was everywhere and nowhere: a YouTube video on Docker, a blog post on Kubernetes, a Linux cheat sheet, none of it in any order and none of it telling me what to learn next. The structured option, bootcamps in India, cost ₹1 lakh or more.
So I built the course I wish I'd had. It's called DevOps Academy, and it's free: no sign-up, no paywall, no video to sit through.
What's in it today
Five courses, 72 lessons, in the order DevOps work actually builds up:
| Course | Lessons | You finish able to… |
|---|---|---|
| 🐧 Linux & Bash | 16 | work on a server from the terminal, read logs, manage services and disks, debug the network |
| 🌱 Git & GitHub | 13 | branch, merge, rebase, undo mistakes safely and work through pull requests |
| ⚙️ CI/CD | 12 | build pipelines in GitHub Actions and Jenkins that test, build an image and deploy |
| 🐳 Docker | 14 | build small, safe images with multi-stage builds and run multi-service apps with Compose |
| ☁️ AWS | 17 | use IAM, EC2, VPC, load balancers, S3, RDS, ECS, Lambda, CloudWatch and IaC, with the bill in mind |
Every course opens with a roadmap (following roadmap.sh's order), and every lesson ends with a mission you actually run and a quiz. There are over 400 quiz questions in total.
Three rules I held myself to
1. Real output, never made up. Every command in a lesson was run, and the output shown is what came back. If a command fails in a confusing way, the lesson shows that error and explains it.
2. Show the real screen. The AWS course walks through the real console, screen by screen, with numbered highlights on exactly what to click. For example, the EC2 lesson goes:
- Launch instance → name it → pick Amazon Linux 2023
- Choose
t3.microand read what it costs per hour - Create a key pair
- Open SSH only from your own IP (and why
0.0.0.0/0on port 22 is a bad idea) - Paste a user-data script that installs nginx on first boot
- SSH in, read the instance metadata with an IMDSv2 token, and open the page in a browser
- Terminate it and delete the key pair and security group, so it stops costing money
All of this was done in a real practice account and deleted afterwards. In the scaling lesson I terminate a server on purpose, and you see the Auto Scaling group's Activity tab launch a replacement in the same second.
3. Visuals that show what actually happens. Git commits moving between branches, Docker's layer cache deciding what to rebuild, a container's DNS lookup, a pipeline going from push to production: these are animations, not walls of text.
Who it's for
- Students and freshers aiming for a first DevOps job, starting from little or no Linux.
- Developers, testers and support engineers switching into DevOps who want the tools teams really use.
- Junior DevOps engineers filling specific gaps: AWS networking, Docker security, pipeline security.
It's built for phones on mobile data too: pages are static, images are small, and there's a dark mode.
What's next
Kubernetes, Terraform and Monitoring are the next three courses. Everything that's free today stays free.
I'd love your feedback
This is early. If something is unclear, missing or wrong, tell me in the comments or at elonerajeev@gmail.com and I'll fix it. A learner already pointed out that the ECS lesson skipped Service Connect, service discovery and the deployment circuit breaker, and those are being added now.
Start here, free: devops.rajeev.pro
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