🚀 Free DevOps course: the complete entry point
Welcome to the most pedagogical DevOps discovery course. It is the starting point of our entire track: in 7 short lessons, you will understand why DevOps exists, what it really is beyond job postings, and how to build your own learning path.
What this course aims for: answering once and for all the questions "what is DevOps, concretely?", "is it a job or a culture?", "how does it differ from SRE?", "which tool should I start with?", "how long until I'm hireable?" — with a clear roadmap and no marketing talk.
What this course does not do: teach you a particular tool. Each tool has its own discovery course, listed below, and its Premium version with exercises.
What you will discover
Course contents
| # | Lesson | Main objective | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The problem DevOps solves | Understand the wall of confusion and its causes | 7 min |
| 2 | What is DevOps? | Rigorous definition, what it is not, history | 7 min |
| 3 | The Three Ways and CALMS | The theoretical foundation, explained simply | 8 min |
| 4 | The lifecycle and the toolchain | The eight phases and the tool landscape | 7 min |
| 5 | Organizing teams | Conway's Law, Team Topologies, anti-patterns | 7 min |
| 6 | Becoming a DevOps engineer: skills and career | Roadmap, salaries, certifications | 8 min |
| 7 | Real transformations + FAQ | Amazon, Netflix, large enterprises + 14 questions | 6 min |
| 8 | Quiz and attestation | Validate what you learned with 5 corrected questions | 3 min |
Is this course for you?
- You are a complete beginner and you want to understand what everyone is talking about.
- You are a developer and you have been asked to "do DevOps" with no further detail.
- You are a system administrator and you want to evolve your role.
- You are changing careers and you are looking for a realistic learning roadmap.
- You are a project manager, CTO or HR director and you need to understand what this term covers before hiring.
No prerequisites. This is the course to read first — all the others build on the notions presented here.
The course at a glance
What you will know by the end
No commands to memorize. By the end of the course, you will be able to:
- Explain the wall of confusion and why it is not a people problem.
- Give a solid definition of DevOps, and clearly state what it is not.
- Present the Three Ways and the CALMS model as a diagnostic grid.
- Place every tool on the market within the complete lifecycle.
- Understand Conway's Law and why a reorganization changes software architecture.
- Follow a realistic learning roadmap, in the right order.
- Situate salaries and choose a useful certification.
- Choose which discovery course to read next, with full knowledge of the options.
⏱️ Estimated duration
About 50 minutes of reading in total. Each lesson is self-contained — you can read one per day, or go through everything in a single evening.
The complete discovery course track
This course is the entry point. Here is the recommended order for what comes next, from the most fundamental to the most specialized.
Direct links:
- Linux Discovery — the essential foundation
- Git Discovery — the concepts and Git in practice
- Docker Discovery — containers
- CI/CD Discovery — delivery automation
- Kubernetes Discovery — orchestration
- Terraform Discovery and Ansible
- Cloud Discovery — IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
- Observability Discovery — metrics, logs, traces
- DevSecOps Discovery — built-in security
Frequently asked questions in one answer
Is DevOps a job or a culture?
Originally, a culture — a set of practices and values, not a position.
In practice, in 2026, both. The "DevOps engineer" title exists everywhere and generally refers to someone who builds and operates automation chains and infrastructure.
The useful nuance in an interview: knowing that DevOps is first and foremost a culture, while acknowledging that the job exists, shows a real understanding of the subject. Lesson 2 goes deeper.
What does CALMS mean?
Five dimensions of DevOps, used as a diagnostic grid:
- Culture — collaboration and shared responsibility
- Automation — automating repetitive tasks
- Lean — reducing waste and work in progress
- Measurement — objective measurement of outcomes
- Sharing — knowledge sharing
Its practical use: diagnosing where your organization is weak. Most companies are strong on A and weak on C — and that is precisely why their transformations fail. See lesson 3.
Which tool should I start with?
Linux, then Git. In that order, before anything else.
Linux because virtually all server infrastructure runs on it. Git because it is the starting point of all automation.
Then: Docker, a CI tool, followed by Kubernetes and Terraform.
The most common learning mistake: starting with Kubernetes. Without Linux and containers, you learn commands without understanding what they do. Lesson 6 gives the complete roadmap.
DevOps, SRE, platform engineer — what's the difference?
- DevOps — a culture and practices: shared responsibility, automation, fast feedback loops.
- SRE — the concrete implementation defined by Google, with its own tools: SLOs, error budget, the 50% rule.
- Platform engineer — builds an internal platform consumed in self-service by product teams.
A useful formula: "DevOps is the goal, SRE is one method to reach it, the platform is a way to industrialize it". See lesson 5.
How long until I'm hireable?
- Starting from scratch: six to twelve months of regular learning for a first junior position.
- Coming from development or system administration: three to six months, since half of the skills are already in place.
The deciding factor is not the number of tools you know, but the ability to show a complete working project: code in Git, a pipeline that builds and tests, an automated deployment, a monitoring dashboard. A single finished project is more convincing than ten tools skimmed over. Details in lesson 6.
Is DevOps suitable for small organizations?
Yes, and often better than for large ones. In a five-person team, there is no wall between development and operations — the same people do both. You already have the culture; only the automation remains.
What changes: you don't need Kubernetes, an internal platform or an SRE team. A pipeline that deploys automatically and decent monitoring are enough. The tooling must be proportionate to your size, the culture doesn't have to be.
This discovery course provides the foundations and the roadmap. To build a complete pipeline, deploy on Kubernetes, manage infrastructure as code and earn certifications, check out the Premium Introduction to DevOps course and all our plans.
Ready? Start with lesson 1 →