What’s the best way for a student to become a DevOps engineer?

Use a cloud account carefully and set spending limits or alerts before experimenting. A useful beginner project could be a simple application deployed to a cloud provider, with its infrastructure defined in Terraform or OpenTofu and its build and deployment handled by GitHub Actions. Keep the project small, understand every component, and write clear documentation so it can become part of your portfolio.

The best way to learn DevOps is by building things instead of only watching tutorials. Create a small project, put the code in Git, automate its testing and deployment, and document what you learned. You’ll understand the tools much faster when you have a real problem to solve.

Some programming experience will help a lot, especially scripting with Python or shell. Try to build a complete, realistic project rather than collecting certificates or following endless video courses. DevOps involves a lot of independent troubleshooting and experimentation, so focus on understanding how systems work and use tutorials only when you get stuck.

A home lab is a great option if you have the hardware or can run virtual machines. You can create a few Linux containers or virtual machines, configure networking, and then recreate the setup with Terraform. Later, deploy a small website on a lightweight Kubernetes cluster and use Prometheus and Grafana to monitor it. That gives you hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, containers, deployment, and observability.

Start with the fundamentals: Linux, networking, Git, basic programming or scripting, and how applications are deployed. After that, learn a cloud platform and tools such as GitHub Actions, Terraform or OpenTofu, containers, and Kubernetes. You don’t need to master everything before starting projects—learn each tool when your project requires it.