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Swetha R K
Swetha R K

Posted on AI-assisted

Starting My DevOps Learning Journey: Learning by Building, Breaking and Fixing 🚀

#terraform #devops #aws

I've been exploring DevOps and Cloud Engineering, and I've decided to document the journey here on DEV.

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.

Where I'm starting

I've already spent some time getting hands-on with:

  • Python & FastAPI – building a small Employee API
  • Docker – containerising the application
  • Kubernetes – deploying and managing workloads locally
  • GitHub Actions – building CI pipelines and publishing Docker images
  • Jenkins – creating pipelines for testing, building and deploying the application

These experiments have helped me understand how different parts of a DevOps workflow fit together.

What I'm focusing on next

My next learning phase will focus on:

  1. Linux & Networking – strengthening the fundamentals.
  2. AWS – understanding cloud infrastructure and services.
  3. Terraform – learning Infrastructure as Code and automating infrastructure provisioning.
  4. CI/CD – improving automation and deployment workflows.
  5. Kubernetes – moving beyond local deployments and exploring AWS EKS.
  6. Monitoring & Observability – working with Prometheus and Grafana.
  7. Troubleshooting & SRE – learning incident investigation, monitoring and root-cause analysis.

My hands-on approach

I'll continue evolving my existing project, employee-api-devops, instead of starting a new project for every technology.

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.

I'll keep the distinction clear between local emulation and deployments on actual AWS.

What to expect from this series

I plan to share a weekly learning update covering:

  • What I studied
  • Resources that helped me
  • Hands-on exercises and implementations
  • Errors and issues I encountered
  • How I debugged and resolved them
  • GitHub updates and things I learned

I don't expect to know everything before sharing. The idea is to document the actual learning process, including the mistakes.

This is my starting point. Let's see how far consistent learning and hands-on practice can take me!

If you're also learning DevOps, AWS or Terraform, I'd love to connect and learn from your experiences.

Let's learn by building! 🚀

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