I've been working as a software engineer for about 1.5 years and want to move toward a DevOps role. I'm already comfortable with Docker, Python, and Azure. What skills should I focus on next, and which certifications, courses, or video series would be worth taking?
3 Answers
A useful way to think about the transition is to look for repetitive work or common sources of human error and automate them. In your current engineering role, improve build pipelines, testing, deployments, environment setup, and observability. That practical experience can be just as valuable as a certification.
It may be worth learning AWS as well as Azure because it has a broad range of services and can expose you to more infrastructure patterns. You don’t necessarily need to master every service—focus on core compute, storage, networking, IAM, containers, databases, and deployment automation. For certifications, choose one cloud associate-level certification and consider Kubernetes or Terraform training after you’ve built a few hands-on projects.
Build a strong foundation in Linux, networking, scripting, cloud infrastructure, and Kubernetes. You should also get comfortable with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, monitoring, logging, and security. Try to learn these by automating real deployment and operational tasks rather than only studying theory.
That makes sense. I’ll keep building on Azure while learning the AWS fundamentals, then use a small project to compare the two.