DevOps Engineer
You make shipping software boring — automated, repeatable, and safe to undo.
No degree needed Moderate to hard, and the hard part is that mistakes are public.
Can I actually do this?
Rarely a first job, commonly a second or third. It assumes you have already operated or built something — the material below starts at containers and pipelines, not at fundamentals.
Who it suits. People who would rather fix the process than the incident, and who take pleasure in something that just runs.
Runway. Realistic from support, sysadmin or development work. Months on top of one of those.
Already doing sysadmin or backend work? This is a sideways step you can take on the job by automating something nobody asked you to. Systems Administrator Backend Developer Help Desk / IT Support
Also advertised as
The route
Four stations, in order. Each one is a thing you finish before the next matters.
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Station one
Learn it free
Only the best few, deliberately. Every one of these is free to use — the pill on each card says exactly what is and isn't free.
Docker — Get started
Free to learn · no certificate
Containers are the unit everything else assumes. Docker's own guide is free; note Docker Desktop has paid licensing for larger companies while the engine and docs are free.
Verified 2026-07-27
GitHub Actions — quickstart
Free to learn · no certificate
CI/CD you can practise on a free account today. Free tier has generous minutes for public repositories; private repos consume a quota.
Verified 2026-07-27
HashiCorp — Terraform tutorials
Free to learn · no certificate
Infrastructure as code, from the vendor. Free to read and follow; the cloud resources you create in them can cost money, so mind the teardown step.
Verified 2026-07-27
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Station two
Attest strategically
A Kubernetes credential carries furthest here because the exam is performance-based — you do real tasks rather than answer questions. Note we have NOT verified CKA's current price or validity and the card says so. Terraform Associate is the other common target.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
CNCF · CKA
Free to learn · paid certificate Recognized
The honest cost Cost $445
$445, and CNCF states this includes one free retake.Validity Not stated on the certification page. CNCF does not print a validity period there, so we record it as unknown rather than repeat a figure from elsewhere. Renewal Not stated on the certification page. Assessment Performance-based, hands-on exam in a live environment (not multiple choice) Proctored Yes Verify via unknown Cost per active year Unknowncannot be computed — CNCF publishes the $445 fee but not a validity period The standard Kubernetes credential, and AI infrastructure runs largely on Kubernetes.
Read this before you buyThe $445 fee includes one free retake, which is unusual and worth weighing against cheaper exams that charge again on a resit. HONEST GAP: CNCF does not print a validity period on this page, so we cannot tell you the cost per active year. Check before you budget. It is listed because a performance-based exam is a stronger signal than a quiz.
Verified 2026-07-28 · Official page
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Station three
Prove it
A certificate says you passed a test. These say you can do the job.
A pipeline that blocks bad code
Wire tests, linting and a deploy into one pipeline, then push something broken and show it being stopped.
Infrastructure defined entirely in code
Create and destroy real infrastructure from a repository. Document the teardown — proving you can turn it off matters as much as turning it on.
A rollback you actually performed
Ship a bad version deliberately and roll it back, with timings. Almost nobody brings this to an interview.
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Station four
Get hired
Search these exact titles
Who hires for this. Any company shipping software regularly — product firms, consultancies, banks, and every cloud-native startup.
Interviewers probe failure handling more than tooling knowledge, so evidence of a rollback or a caught bad deploy travels well. That is our reasoning about the role's content, not a hiring statistic we have verified.
On salaryWe don't publish salary estimates. Numbers copied between blogs drift from reality, and a wrong number costs you real negotiating power. When we have a verified public source, it goes here with its date.
Where this route continues
- Cloud Engineer — deeper into infrastructure
- AI Infrastructure Engineer — toward GPU and training platforms
- MLOps Engineer — the same discipline applied to models
- Cloud Engineer — sideways move
- Systems Administrator — sideways move
This page last verified 2026-07-27 · How we verify
Docker, GitHub Actions and Terraform docs all fetched and READ 2026-07-27 (8,506 / 13,702 / 5,745 chars visible). Free-tier boundaries stated per resource rather than implied.