Top 10 DevOps courses that merit your attention
There are three main ways of becoming a true DevOps engineer: through reading the right books and blogs, completing the right online courses and applying your theoretical knowledge to practical tasks to ensure you gained the right skills. Let’s take a closer look at all of these 3 ways to become a DevOps, including 10 best online courses on DevOps.
Read the right DevOps books and blogs
There is a ton of various literature and articles showcasing multiple aspects of DevOps workflows and practices. We even highlighted 3 must-read DevOps books for your convenience — these are in constant use by our newest DevOps team members. These books provide many theoretical explanations backed up by practical examples of IT infrastructure design and provisioning using the DevOps approach.
There are also multiple blogs on popular DevOps-related websites like HackerNoon, Medium, DZone, DevOps.com, etc. We recommend following these to learn of the latest DevOps trends.
Complete the right online courses
Online courses are rapidly becoming the most popular and convenient way to obtain knowledge, DevOps skills included. You can usually enroll for free and the course completion certificates are cheap — $25-$50, while the materials remain available to you for life.
These courses are provided by Microsoft, IBM, Kubernetes, Google Cloud, AWS, Red Hat, world-leading universities and other reputable DevOps industry experts. To make it even better, you do not have to finish the course at once. You can try even the paid courses for free for a month and can drop out if the material is too complex for you right now — and come back to it later once your technical background is better.
There are also some advanced paid courses from the cloud computing providers themselves, required to obtain the Certified AWS (GCP, Azure, IBM) DevOps Engineer status. However, these can be left for later, and the first steps in DevOps can be easily done by completing the following self-paced massive open online courses:
- Coursera DevOps courses
- Open edX DevOps courses
- Udemy DevOps courses
- Udacity DevOps course
- Youtube DevOps videos
The list above is quite comprehensive and covers most of the topics a fledgling DevOps engineer must explore. However, there are 10 main online courses to complete the most necessary basics of DevOps workflows and best practices.
Top 10 online DevOps courses to complete
- Introduction to DevOps: Transforming and Improving Operations is probably the best course to start your DevOps journey. From the basic DevOps terms and concepts up to ensuring infrastructure resilience and site reliability engineering, this course from Linux Foundation will be a great trampoline into the world of DevOps.
- DevOps for Developers: How to Get Started will be a good help for developers that aim to gain skills in software delivery and testing automation, using latest DevOps tools and best practices. This is one of introductory courses from Microsoft and it will help better grasp the DevOps principles and building blocks.
- Infrastructure as Code will be a good help to engineers that begin learning DevOps with MS Azure. This course teaches the basics of cloud infrastructure provisioning using various configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet, as well as MS Azure features.
- Version Control with Git from Atlassian is one of the fundamental courses required for understanding the DevOps workflows. This course helps understand and learn to use the functions and features of Git for building the CI/CD software delivery pipelines, which are essential for DevOps engineers.
- Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals is a basic course from Google Cloud intended to help the System Administrators learn the ropes of using GCP, its architecture and features.
- Getting Started with GKE is a week-long intensive course that helps new DevOps practitioners to understand the essentials of working with Kubernetes — the cornerstone of modern cloud infrastructure. It also explains the basics of building CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and provides a ton of links for additional useful guides and materials.
- Architecting with Google Cloud Platform developed by QwikLabs provides a decent level of explanation and practical application of Google Cloud functionality and architecture. This course is intended for IT Engineers and aspiring DevOps talents with some experience, so it definitely should not be the first course you take.
- Ansible for the Absolute Beginner — Hands-On-DevOps is a PAID course on Udemy that teaches the basics of working with Ansible, one of the most important DevOps tools for enabling continuous integration and delivery of code.
- DevOps Practices and Principles is an Intermediate level course from Microsoft, covering the basics of automating the software builds, configuration deployments, code testing and production environment monitoring using MS Azure tools and features.
- DevOps training videos from Edureka are a great cycle of educational videos, covering all aspects of DevOps workflows and tools, as well as advice on pursuing the DevOps engineer career and receiving further DevOps training. They are explained by DevOps experts and illustrated with easy to comprehend presentations.
All this goldmine of knowledge will be of little use, however, should it not be supported by practical application of the skills and knowledge gained. Thus said, practice makes perfect.
Practice your skills
The only way to become a DevOps Engineer with a hands-on experience is to deploy an infrastructure with some cloud provider. As AWS, Azure and GCP have multiple types of free trials, and you can easily subscribe for a minimal package for a year for free — you will have all the resources needed to make your personal sandbox. You can even apply for some Upwork DevOps jobs to get hands-on experience with designing and provisioning the IT solutions.
You will be able to learn and practice with continuous integration and delivery pipelines, lay your hands on managing a Kubernetes cluster and creation of Jenkins jobs. The skills like these are the basics required to get a job at any Managed Service Provider. However, the DevOps training never stops, as new versions of popular DevOps tools are released from time to time, so you have to keep up with the news to remain ahead of the competition. Quora and Reddit groups along with specific channels in messengers like Telegram and Slack can be very helpful for that.
Final thoughts on the must-complete DevOps courses
Thus said, becoming a self-trained expert in DevOps workflows, practices and tools is quite possible. The only question is — how long is it going to take you? The answer is — it depends on your devotion, how much time you can spare daily and how quickly you can progress. Nearly all of the aforementioned DevOps online courses require 2–6 hours a week, so completing them all in a couple of months is quite possible.
However, one needs a clear understanding of the system components and processes required to run the project. You need to understand how the infrastructure must look in a week, in a month, in a year, you need to split the process of reaching the desired infrastructure state into daily tasks and complete them slowly, but steadily.
In all honesty, nothing beats the real work experience. However, a decent understanding of what is required and how various DevOps tools work is an essential requirement for getting a DevOps position.
Good luck with that!
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