The latest articles on DEV Community by Swetha R K (@swetha_rk). https://dev.to/swetha_rk https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4216725%2F8c879663-5522-4b21-ad1d-4e614525f601.png https://dev.to/swetha_rk en Swetha R K Sun, 15 Nov 2026 15:40:19 +0000 https://dev.to/swetha_rk/starting-my-devops-learning-journey-learning-by-building-breaking-and-fixing-5900 https://dev.to/swetha_rk/starting-my-devops-learning-journey-learning-by-building-breaking-and-fixing-5900 <p>I've been exploring DevOps and Cloud Engineering, and I've decided to document the journey here on DEV.</p> <p>Rather than just going through tutorials and collecting notes, I want to learn by building things, experimenting with tools, troubleshooting failures and sharing what I discover along the way.</p> <h2> Where I'm starting </h2> <p>I've already spent some time getting hands-on with:</p> <ul> <li>Python &amp; FastAPI – building a small Employee API</li> <li>Docker – containerising the application</li> <li>Kubernetes – deploying and managing workloads locally</li> <li>GitHub Actions – building CI pipelines and publishing Docker images</li> <li>Jenkins – creating pipelines for testing, building and deploying the application</li> </ul> <p>These experiments have helped me understand how different parts of a DevOps workflow fit together.</p> <h2> What I'm focusing on next </h2> <p>My next learning phase will focus on:</p> <ol> <li>Linux &amp; Networking – strengthening the fundamentals.</li> <li>AWS – understanding cloud infrastructure and services.</li> <li>Terraform – learning Infrastructure as Code and automating infrastructure provisioning.</li> <li>CI/CD – improving automation and deployment workflows.</li> <li>Kubernetes – moving beyond local deployments and exploring AWS EKS.</li> <li>Monitoring &amp; Observability – working with Prometheus and Grafana.</li> <li>Troubleshooting &amp; SRE – learning incident investigation, monitoring and root-cause analysis.</li> </ol> <h2> My hands-on approach </h2> <p>I'll continue evolving my existing project, employee-api-devops, instead of starting a new project for every technology.</p> <p>For AWS practice, I'm planning to use Floci as a local AWS sandbox. This will let me experiment with AWS-compatible services and Terraform without immediately provisioning paid cloud resources.</p> <p>I'll keep the distinction clear between local emulation and deployments on actual AWS.</p> <h2> What to expect from this series </h2> <p>I plan to share a weekly learning update covering:</p> <ul> <li>What I studied</li> <li>Resources that helped me</li> <li>Hands-on exercises and implementations</li> <li>Errors and issues I encountered</li> <li>How I debugged and resolved them</li> <li>GitHub updates and things I learned</li> </ul> <p>I don't expect to know everything before sharing. The idea is to document the actual learning process, including the mistakes.</p> <p>This is my starting point. Let's see how far consistent learning and hands-on practice can take me!</p> <p>If you're also learning DevOps, AWS or Terraform, I'd love to connect and learn from your experiences.</p> <p>Let's learn by building! 🚀</p> devops aws terraform