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mike
mike

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I Built My DevOps Portfolio on a Killercoda Ubuntu Playground — And It Transformed My Learning

Why Every DevOps Engineer Should Deploy Their First Portfolio on Killercoda

Most DevOps tutorials begin with AWS, GCP, or Kubernetes.

But here’s my honest advice:

Start with Killercoda’s Ubuntu playground instead.

🔗 https://killercoda.com/playgrounds/scenario/ubuntu

I recently deployed my full DevOps portfolio website using nothing but this environment and Nginx — and it was one of the most valuable hands-on exercises I’ve done.

Here is the live server running my site:

🔗 https://411913816ee7-10-244-13-238-80.spch.r.killercoda.com/

Why this matters

When you deploy on Killercoda, you learn the fundamentals that cloud providers hide behind fancy panels:

  • creating and securing directories
  • Configuring Nginx from scratch
  • troubleshooting server errors
  • managing processes manually
  • deploying changes without automation crutches

It’s the closest experience to running a real Linux server — without paying for one.

My recommendation

If you're a beginner DevOps engineer or trying to build confidence:

Forget the cloud for a moment.

Deploy something raw.

Learn the ground truth.

Your terminal will become your greatest teacher.

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