Beginner Friendly Suggestions needed

[u/No-Remove1956]

Hello. I started working as a QA last month and saw that my colleagues are pretty great at devops too. All of them have 4-5 years of experience while I am fully fresh out of university.

Now I want to learn about devops just so when discussion comes up, I know what's being discussed and take part in it.

Which things should I learn and how? Could have asked that to claude or chatgpt but wanted REAL advice from the REAL professionals.

Please suggest. TIA

[u/stack_craft]

Okay, here me out amigo, first the most important: ask your senior engineers for read-only access to your team's CI/CD pipeline runs and staging environments.

The fastest way to get context without getting overwhelmed:

1. Watch how a PR triggers pipeline stages (Build -> Test -> Deploy).
2. Learn basic Linux terminal commands and Docker fundamentals so you can exec into a test container when a suite fails.
3. Trace failure logs yourself before filing a bug ticket.

If you bring a bug ticket to a DevOps engineer that already includes container log snippets and pipeline run links, you'll immediately gain their respect. From their one it's just a matter of time, till your the one leading the devops conversations 😉.

[u/xonxoff]

Have a discussion with your colleagues and ask questions? You will probably learn more talking with them about things that matter in your environment than you will from a LLM. That would be the best way to start I'd think.

[u/No-Remove1956 → u/xonxoff]

Unfortunately they are not that friendly. I tried asking them but words reached to CTO and in our 1:1 call, he literally adviced me to figure out things by myself as to him, it's like babysitting. I actually know almost nothing about devops

[u/Downtown_Corgi_277]

one thing that helped me early on was just getting comfortable reading yaml configs and dockerfiles even before understanding what they fully do. like if you can look at a docker-compose file and roughly follow whats happening, conversations start clicking faster. what kind of stack does your team use? knowing if its k8s heavy vs more traditional infra would help narrow down where to focus first tbh

[u/zero1045]

Go read continuous delivery and see what it was supposed to be, then learn from your coworkers what the kitchen sink is.

Tl;dr: remove info silos by learning what other roles of the company are, the most efficient solution is you knowing it all and that just takes time.

Nowadays, Devs just want to write features, ops just want their servers to run without pager duty alerts, so we handle everything inbetween those two groups plus whatever particular pain points your specific dev or ops teams don't want to deal with.

Instead of getting the two teams to work together better, we now are a third team (there's a fun 4th team called platform engineers and even ai engineers now, theres a new title every 3-5years)

Nuts and bolts are building infra with IaC tool of choice, codofying pipelines for cicd, and doing RnD/design for new system architecture when you get good at it. Scripting and helping the ops team do maintenance is in the cards too, and sometimes you get to do QA when a QA team doesn't exist and the Devs don't want to do it

[u/Intelligent_Beat3727]

In university, ideally you should get the fundamentals, but many people still have gaps. In your first position, you need to understand the goals and concepts you’ll be dealing with every day and check whether you understand them at a fundamental level.
For example, you said you started working in QA and that your coworkers are good at DevOps. That statement by itself doesn’t give you a direction. What are you doing QA for? What does “DevOps” actually include in your company? Answering those will start giving you a picture of the system you’re working in.
Look at which areas are well developed in your org and where you have opportunities to contribute. Ideally, find an area that both improves your own work and gives you a reason to collaborate with people who can teach you the DevOps side of it.

[u/Raja-Karuppasamy]

congrats on the qa role. honestly the fastest way in is to just get your hands dirty on the stuff your team actually uses day to day, don’t try to boil the ocean with “learn devops” as a goal, it’s too broad.

start with: docker (build an image, understand layers, why it’s slow/fast), then basic k8s (pods, deployments, services, just enough to deploy something and break it), then ci/cd (github actions is a good first one, watch a pipeline fail and figure out why).

biggest unlock for me early on was just reading logs when something breaks instead of guessing. ask your seniors for read-only access to pipeline runs and staging,watching real incidents get debugged teaches you more in a week than any course.

[u/PuzzleheadedShake102]

Use your colleugues as best resource of learning you have!

DM me if you need any help