How Learning Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Jenkins, and Cloud Change Your Life

In order to have a successful career in technology, you need to align your personal skill set and areas of continued learning with wider business trends. While these trends can be hard to predict in the short term, over the long term they are often clear. For example, Cloud Computing has been steadily growing as a portion of IT spending for over a decade. But it still has a lot of room to grow, and Covid has made the transition even more urgent: Forrester predicts that the global cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% in 2021.

But who is going to set up and manage the technology that is powering all of this rapid and extensive cloud growth? In short, skilled DevOps engineers. DevOps is already a highly compensated role in tech but the value of these engineers will only grow in the future. In fact, 80% of respondents to the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey believe that DevOps is “at least somewhat important” and 44% work at companies with at least one full-time DevOps employee.

Read on if you’d like to learn how to become one of these highly valued tech workers.

The Sharp Rise Of DevOps Between 2009–2020 (11 Years)

The Stack Overflow Trends graph above shows that the DevOps open-source and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) properties in our title have all experienced increased query volume over the past decade, with a sharper slope upwards in the past five years or so. Of course, we are discussing the leading options in each area: AWS and Azure for infrastructure, Docker for containerization, Kubernetes for container orchestration, Ansible for infrastructure automation, and Jenkins for continuous integration and some cool new tools like Weaveworks FluxCD for continuous delivery. (Linux, while a subject of this article, was left off of the chart since it’s clear that all current and future DevOps engineers need and will need to know it.) In any case, given the amount of existing infrastructure that has presumably been created around these queries over the years, it is certain that you wouldn’t go wrong learning any of the technologies from the list.

However, learning DevOps doesn’t just consist of mastering a series of technologies, but rather you also need to come to terms with an entire operational philosophy and culture. This culture specifically focuses on constant and good communication between a product’s development, operations, and quality control teams, and its best practices include continuous integration and delivery (with careful versioning), automated testing, monitoring and logging. DevOps ultimately facilitates modern application structures like containerization and microservices.

AN EFFECTIVE WAY TO LEARN DEVOPS, EVEN FOR THOSE WITH NO TECH BACKGROUND — PBL & Mentorship

Online courses abound in the DevOps space but simply watching videos or going through tutorials is about as effective as reading a textbook or sitting through the classic “chalk and talk” method of instruction. In fact, the unique DevOps mixture of tech and culture requires two proven learning methods that will effectively lead you to sophisticated tech skills: Project-Based Learning and Mentoring by real-world engineers.

PROJECT-BASED LEARNING (PBL)

Project-based learning means that you get the opportunity to work on exciting projects while simultaneously acquiring advanced tech skills, skills that would be much harder to learn by simply sitting still and listening to an expert. A 2019 analysis of 30 academic articles testing PBL as a pedagogical approach definitively concluded that it has “a medium to large positive effect on students’ academic achievements compared with traditional instruction.” PBL is often group-based, which can increase your levels of motivation through social cohesion and can also grow your “soft skills” like teamwork and communication — which are themselves extremely important to DevOps. However, a key challenge in PBL is finding the right project. Your project should be at the proper level of difficulty and should correspond to real-world problems. Thus in order to be successful, your online school featuring PBL must have administrators who are knowledgeable and experienced with its unique challenges.

MENTORS AND THE EXPERIENCE LOOP

Another proven pedagogical approach is mentoring, one that is particularly important here, given that you’ll need to learn DevOps culture in addition to technology. Mentoring is one of the most ancient methods of teaching a subject but given its high human-capital overhead, it can be the hardest element to find in today’s online courses. And mentors need to be carefully chosen, as poor mentoring can be worse for you than not having a mentor at all. Additionally, mentors should be actively working in the industry. This is so that they can provide you with a critical link to real-world projects, which completes the quintessential “experience loop” that is essential to job seeking. Seeking a tech job with real-world experience leads to more successful outcomes than seeking a job armed with only Education, Certifications and a CV.

As one of the DevOps mentors at Darey.io, I am always proud every time our students graduate from the Bootcamp with awesome testimonials on how they smashed the job interview; Only after intensive hands-on projects and mentorship.

DAREY.IO

Our program at Darey.io combines both of the above methods in a manner that is effective and that has already had a lasting impact on many former students. We combine instruction on DevOps technologies and culture with mentorship, and our mentors are some of the best DevOps and cloud engineers in the field. Through our approach, you’ll learn more than just operating systems, network management, and the cloud environment. What we offer is more than just knowledge because you’ll gain experience, work on projects, and belong to a learning community to holistically advance your DevOps skills.

Attend one of our webinars to learn more about how you can become a DevOps engineer, and give your career an amazing boost.