Top 10 practical resources to learn DevOps (for working devs):
1) Google SRE Book + Workbook (free)
Ops principles, error budgets, and realistic incident math.
2) Kubernetes docs + kubectl exercises
Stop at Deployments, Services, Ingress, HPA, PDB. Ship one app, break it, fix it.
3) Terraform docs + a real module repo
Write modules for VPC/network + EKS/GKE + RDS. Learn state, drift, imports.
4) AWS Well-Architected Framework
Good for tradeoffs: cost vs reliability vs operability. Use it as a design checklist.
5) Linux Upskill Challenge (free)
If you can’t debug disk, memory, perms, and systemd, you can’t debug prod.
6) The Phoenix Project (book)
Not technical, but it explains why pipelines and WIP limits matter in real orgs.
7) GitHub Actions or GitLab CI docs
Build a pipeline with: test, build, SBOM, scan, deploy, rollback. Make it fast (<10 min).
8) Prometheus + Alertmanager docs
Instrument one service. Write alerts that page on symptoms, not CPU spikes.
9) Incident writeups (GitHub: Shopify, Cloudflare, GitHub, etc.)
Read for failure modes: bad deploys, thundering herds, expired certs, quota limits.
10) Practice project: one microservice, real ops
Run it on k8s, add tracing/logs/metrics, blue-green deploys, chaos test (kill pods), restore from backup in <30 min