Creating a Dev Server
Creating a Development Server from an Unused Laptop
How did I break into DevOps without any prior experience?
How do I become better at my craft?
What can make me marketable?
How do I do this in the shortest amount of time?
aws.amazon.com
I first started studying by aiming to get all AWS exams. AWS / cloud knowledge is asked in almost all modern job postings. My goal was to pass all of the associate and professional exams.
The holy trinity of prep is Stephane Maarek on 1.5x speed (getting to know AWS), Jon Bonso practice tests and the Jon Bonso cheat sheets.
The order in which I completed the exams were:
- Associate Solutions Architect
- Associate Developer
- Associate SysOps Administrator
- Professional DevOps Engineer
- Professional Solutions Architect
You can read about them here
You can buy the appropriate courses on Udemy, go through the material from Stephane Maarek, do the practice tests from Jon Bonso and then cap off the night before with his cheat sheet.
- Do not book the exams from AWS all at once because they give you a coupon code for half off after every exam you pass which will save you a LOT of money.
- Do not buy any course for full price because they have sales running at the beginning of every month (right now I think it’s $15 for each course, which is great).
The AWS SA Pro is definitely two tiers above in difficulty, while the other four are generally pretty fair and well paced.
hashicorp.com
Terraform made my life much easier and took the exam for it. I also took the Vault exam. I used this material:
HashiCorp has a bunch of material on their site to learn and play around with the products locally. The tests are very easy and shouldn’t take you more than a week or two each to run through them.
docker.com
When Docker was shown to me for the first time, I was blown away. This was the single coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Run a one line command, and you can stand up a web server instantly. To learn about it, I took this course:
github.com/kubernetes
After studying and going back to Docker numerous times, I decided my specialty was going to be DevOps. I passed the Linux Foundation CKA exam using this material:
- Essentials of Linux System Administration (a bit pricey but 100% worth if you have no fundamental knowledge in linux)
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator with Practice Tests
The CKA exam is performance based, meaning you will literally be scripting and working in the command line during the exam. The Kubernetes course has practice exams and quizzes, which is the best course I’ve ever bought. The LFCS course doesn’t have useful quizzes but has a lot of good material, better than any other Linux course in my opinion.
Learn vim. There’s a fun little game that helps out with learning it: vim-adventures (I haven’t paid for it yet but everyone recommends it)
algoexpert.com
I started preparing for my interviews using these two sites:
I highly recommend both because there’s no real architecture course that is this complete I’ve seen, and the coding site is linear and provides great video explanations.
I looked at pay scales at levels.fyi
I interviewed at several companies and eventually got a position as a DevOps engineer!
