DevOps Prerequisites Things to Learn Before (original) (raw)

Last Updated : 2 May, 2026

DevOps is changing the way software is built, tested, and delivered. It helps teams work faster, fix problems sooner, and release updates more often. Here are some important prerequisites you should know before starting your DevOps journey:

1. Operating Systems & Linux Fundamentals

In the DevOps world, Linux is king. While Windows is used in corporate environments, the vast majority of cloud servers, containers, and automation tools run on Linux. You don't need to be a kernel developer, but you must be comfortable in the terminal.

• **Shell Navigation: Moving through directories, listing files, and manipulating file structures (ls, cd, mkdir, rm, cp, mv).
• **File Permissions: Understanding chmod, chown, and the concept of users/groups (root vs. standard users).
• **Process Management: How to find running programs, kill stuck processes, and monitor system health (ps, top, htop, kill).
• **Text Manipulation: Editing files in the terminal using editors like Vim or Nano, and filtering logs using grep, awk, and sed.
• **Systemd: How to manage background services (starting, stopping, and enabling services).

2. Networking Fundamentals

You cannot debug a deployment if you don't understand how computers talk to each other.

• OSI Model, TCP/IP Stack,
• Types of Network Protocols and Their Uses,
• IP address, Subnetting, NAT,
• DNS, HTTP/HTTPS?
• Firewalls, VPNs, CDN,Port, and load balancers.

**Tip: Use tools like VirtualBox or online terminals to practice in real Linux environments.

3. Version Control with Git (VCS)

Version control is a must-have in DevOps. It helps track code changes and makes teamwork easy. Tools like Git let developers work on the same project without getting in each other’s way. Platforms like GitHub and GitLab also make it easier to collaborate and connect with CI/CD pipelines for automatic deployments.

• **Basic Commands: git clone, git add, git commit, git push, git pull.
• **Branching Strategies: Understanding main, feature-branches, and how to use Pull Requests (PRs) for code review.
• **Resolving Conflicts: What happens when two people change the same file, and how to fix it.
• **Git Platforms: Familiarity with GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.

**Tip: Try making a small project and share it on GitHub to get hands-on practice.

4. Programming & Scripting Skills

DevOps engineers are rarely "software developers" in the traditional sense, but they write code to automate tasks. You need to move away from manual "click-ops" to automation.

**Scripting :

• **Bash (Linux) / PowerShell (Windows): Used for quick automation tasks, such as "install this software," "move these logs," or "check if this server is up."

**Programming :

• **Python or Go: Used for more complex automation, interacting with Cloud APIs (like Boto3 for AWS), and writing custom scripts. Python is generally recommended for beginners due to its readability.
• **Data Formats: You must understand JSON and YAML. These are not programming languages, but they are the standard formats for configuration files in almost every DevOps tool (Kubernetes, Ansible, CloudFormation).

5. Cloud Computing Basics

Before learning a specific provider (like AWS), you need to understand the concepts of the cloud.

• **Virtualization: How one physical server can run multiple "Virtual Machines" (VMs).
• **IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): Renting raw servers (e.g., EC2).
• **PaaS (Platform as a Service): Renting a platform to run code (e.g., Elastic Beanstalk).
• **SaaS (Software as a Service): Using software over the internet (e.g., Gmail, Dropbox).
• **The Shared Responsibility Model: Knowing what _you are responsible for securing vs. what the cloud provider secures.

**Tip: Sign up for free-tier accounts on AWS or GCP and try creating a VM.

6. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Concepts

This is the philosophy that separates "SysAdmin" from "DevOps." It means managing your infrastructure (servers, networks, databases) using code files rather than manually configuring them.

• **Declarative vs. Imperative: Understanding the difference between telling the computer _what you want (Declarative) vs. _how to do it (Imperative).
• **Idempotency: The concept that running the same script multiple times should produce the same result without breaking things.

**Tip: get comfortable with Terraform and Ansible to set up infrastructure declaratively

7. Containerization with Docker

Before Docker, developers faced the "It works on my machine" problem. Code would run on a developer's laptop but fail on the production server due to missing libraries or different OS versions.

• **Isolation: Apps run in their own sandbox, not interfering with others.
• **Portability: A container runs exactly the same on a laptop, a test server, and the cloud.
• **Efficiency: Containers are lightweight and start in seconds (unlike Virtual Machines which take minutes).

**What to learn:

• **Dockerfile: Writing the recipe to build your image.
• **Images vs. Containers: Understanding the difference between the blueprint (Image) and the running instance (Container).
• **Volumes: How to persist data so it isn't lost when a container stops.
• **Networking: How containers talk to each other.

8. Orchestration with Kubernetes (K8s)

Docker manages individual containers, but what happens when you have hundreds of containers? How do you update them without downtime? How do you restart them if they crash? This is where Kubernetes comes in. Kubernetes is an orchestration tool that manages a cluster of computers to run your containers automatically.

• **Self-Healing: If a container crashes, K8s restarts it. If a server dies, K8s moves the work to a healthy server.
• **Auto-Scaling: K8s can automatically add more containers when traffic is high and remove them when traffic is low.
• **Zero-Downtime Deployments: Update your app gradually so users never experience an outage.

**What to learn:

• **Architecture: Master the Control Plane and Worker Nodes.
• **Core Objects: Pods (the smallest unit), Deployments (for scaling), and Services (for networking).
• **kubectl: The command-line tool used to talk to the cluster

Who Can Learn DevOps?

This Learning Path is ideal for:

• Beginners new to IT, cloud, or development
• Students or recent graduates
• Developers moving into operations
• QA engineers looking to automate
• System admins aiming to modernize skills

And no you don’t need a computer science degree or prior coding experience. Anyone can start learning DevOps who learn by seeing, enjoy practicing, or are excited to start learning something new.