Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

Hey guys,

I've been a developer for some time now, but I've never had to do anything with deployment, servers, and all these good things.

I'd really like to have the basics so would you guys have some nice resources to gain some general knowledge about it. Thanks!

I made a mind map for learning DevOps :

https://learn-anything.xyz/programming/software-development/...

Clicking on nodes with a map will go to other mind maps with resources.

Well, the best way to learn is to actually do something. Create a small service in your favourite framework. Something really small, an echo service will probably suffice.

Then stop "developing" and switch on "Ops mode".

Automate:

- builds (build & packaging scripts)

- deployments - try all 3 major approaches:

    - push deployment: running a command on a central server that orchestrates everything (Ansible, Salt, chef-solo, ...)

    - pull deployment: agents running on your target server, that pull the latest changes (Chef, Puppet, ...)

    - immutable infrastructure: VMs or containers that are never modified, only recreated (CloudFormation, Docker, ...)

  include database updates in your deployment orchestration and possibly include even environment pre-warming/pre-caching

- functional tests, especially fast smoke tests

Add:

- high availability/load balancing (Nginx, HAProxy, Apache, Elastic Load Balancer)

- detailed technical monitoring and graphing (Nagios, Zabbix, Cloudwatch)

- availability monitoring (Pingdom)

- a status page (can't give you a decent example; you can build your own, but host it somewhere else than your main "app")

- log collection and shipping (Splunk, Graylog)

Basically, for almost everything I listed google options and pick an "Ops stack". Then implement that as best you can.

Oh, and by the way, while working on the "Ops stack", only "develop" things in support of this Ops work in your "app".

This is a less general answer, but if you want to work with AWS and you have a Kindle, download the manuals for free and read them during down time. I did this and it helped me a lot.

Also, if you can afford it, the Site Reliability Engineering book is an excellent comprehensive resource on practices, theory, return from experience: https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html (and you can read it online for free, too).