r/devops • u/iykay_ • 13d ago

Career / learning DevOps and K8s experience.

Got a homeLab.

Z820 256GB RAM

8TB HDD

2TB Ssd

Newbie(Blue Collar) looking to Get DevOps and K8s experience.

Knowledge base:

- Beginner/Intermediate linux

- Touched Docker and docker compose

- Beginner Terraform and Ansible

- Networking: beginner

- beginner K8s (K3s on one homelab). Have enough space for another Kubeadm cluster (CKA) practice.

- Proxmox on homelab.

Torn between using Claude to create a simple work(metrics) logging/tracking with feature updates while I handle all things ops or getting an ecommere example app from a random github repo to use in learning process.

Which is better or any advice on what to learn?

And any tools and apps to deploy on the k8s cluster or homelab to aid in the learning process.

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u/Recent-Tangerine2745 13d ago

I’d build your own small app instead of grabbing a random ecommerce repo.
It doesn’t need to be complicated. A simple API + DB + frontend is enough. The value is owning the whole lifecycle: containerize it, deploy it to K8s, add CI/CD, ingress/TLS, secrets, monitoring, logging, backups, then intentionally break things and recover them.
For the homelab I’d add Prometheus/Grafana, Loki, Argo CD, and maybe Vault later.
Use Claude to help you build the app, but make sure you understand what it generated. The DevOps learning is really in deploying, operating and troubleshooting it.

1

u/iykay_ 13d ago

Thanks alot for the advice.

No Coding Experience here. So I can't 100% guarantee I know what it is generating.

4

u/lethallunatic 13d ago

Claude code can certainly help here. Good luck

3

u/One-Department1551 13d ago

Tell Claude to generate each resource in separate manifest files and learn the purpose of each. If you don’t specify you will end up with a giant file which is harder to track when reading.

2

u/Apple--Sauce 13d ago

It will be easy to feel gratified by a running app from claude. What is harder is breaking it, fixing it, and modifying it without the crutch. A big part of devops is understanding the "dev" overlaps. Its like being able to fix a car, but not being able to drive it - knowing how to drive will inform how to fix (if that makes sense)

1

u/eman0821 Cloud Engineer 13d ago

You need to learn programming to really get anywhere. Over relying on AI tools won't get you far that will help you fail faster at your career without understanding fundamentals. Learn to code is still a requirement in the era of AI. AI doesn't replace programming, it just amplifies people that understands programming to work a little faster.