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Hello all. I’m a Windows heavy systems engineer. I have experience spinning up servers, setting up firewalls, switches, routers, group policy, etc. Everything you’d think a Windows Systems Engineer would do. I would like to move towards DevOps Engineering. I find more satisfaction in learning new things than I thought initially.

I am learning Linux as my first step. I have heard kubernetes, ansible, jenkins, CI/CD, docker, Git, on top of Linux would put me in a great spot.

Any suggestions on order? Any recommendations on a complete course on Udemy or CBTNuggets or Plural Sight? Small courses broken down? Any advise.

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This is the order I would take - Bash, Git, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, CI/CD. There’s a lot to learn here. I put the simpler topics first.

Udemy is good. I haven’t used the others, but any of them should be good. There’s a lot of good and free videos on Youtube too.

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Nana has some good videos to start with, in your spare time. Her channel is all dev-ops centric.

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I’d also recommend looking at Azure Devops if you’re from a windows background. It’s pretty impressive and can hook in with everything else on your list.

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Based on those technologies (which I think is a really good list for the DevOps role) this is exactly the order I would choose as well as each technology builds on the next.

I also second Udemy. Not every course is created equal, so watch the teaser and trailers, and look out for the ratings, but the pro is that you pay once and own the content rather than the perpetual subscription model. You can also find quite a few resources on YouTube as well. Aside from that, ITProTV I’ve heard in addition to CBTNuggets and Pluralsight as mentioned. LinkedIn Learning (Formally Lynda.com) is another one I’ve used in the past that had really good content. Also, you’re likely going to want to tie in cloud hosting at some point as well. Azure DevOps would be a good one from a Windows background. AWS is very popular. Also, Terraform is a good one to tack on when you get to that point at the end. Terraform isn’t cloud hosting, but it can declaratively provision resources in the cloud, similar to how Ansible can provision servers (amongst other infrastructure). Like many technologies in DevOps, you’ll see overlap, (Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes), but Ansible and Terraform actually work really well together.

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edX has courses from The Linux Foundation, Red Hat and IBM for learning Linux, that was where I started since most of their courses you can take for free (if you don’t care about a certificate). TCM Security also has a good Linux 101 course, and they have Python 101 and 201 as well, but those focus more on using them for hacking.

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Just to highlight Azure Devops is not only for cloud hosting. You can use it to build, test and deploy to whatever / wherever you want, they have agents and integrations for just about anything.

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You may also want to study Podman in parallel with Kubernetes. I’m seeing some articles in the RHEL world which focus more and more on migrating between the two.

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Previous Company used CBTNuggets. I cannot recommend this enough…

I went from an Intern Technician, to a Database Administrator using CBT Nuggets…

Highly Recommend, given the cost…

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Pick a distro and install it and play around. Lots of free resources. Bash scripting will be a valuable tool!

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CBTNuggets is good, but pretty expensive. A lot of companies tend to avoid it.

If you can, use udemy or if your company is stingy with training, check out some youtube videos. A lot of people straight up dump popular (such as CCNA, COMPTia, etc) udemy and CBT training videos onto Youtube in a long 12 hour video

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There’s been a lot of good information shared already. One thing I just wanted to point out was I wouldn’t spend much time on Jenkins, it’s been widely regarded as tech debt for companies for several years now. You will absolutely see it in big shops that have been using CICD tooling for many years, so it very much exists but typically in much older/matured environments. Not to say it’s not still valid, there are just other tools out there that have taken its place as a bit more modern.