DevOps, From First Principles

A first-principles guide to DevOps. We build understanding in dependency order — each topic only uses ideas already covered. For every tool and practice, keep asking one question: what manual, error-prone step does this remove — and how does it make production safer? That single thread runs through the whole book. Read in order, and after each page answer the Check your understanding questions in your own words. Depth over speed.

Part 0 · Foundations — Why DevOps Exists

Part 1 · Linux, Processes & the Shell

Part 2 · Networking for DevOps

Part 3 · Containers

Part 4 · Orchestration with Kubernetes

Part 4½ · Kubernetes in Depth

The senior track for Kubernetes — the internals beneath the intro: how the API, scheduler, kubelet, networking, storage, security, and autoscaling actually work, and how to operate and debug a cluster.

Part 5 · CI/CD

Part 6 · Infrastructure as Code

Part 7 · Observability & SRE

Part 8 · Security (DevSecOps)

Part 9 · Cloud & Scaling

Part 10 · Advanced & Rare Concepts

The senior-level track — the patterns and failure modes most engineers learn the hard way.

Part 11 · Hands-On — Ship It

The capstone — take a real service (“Snip,” from the System Design book) and ship it commit → production: containerize, CI/CD pipeline, observability, and a canary deploy.

Part 12 · Frontier & Field Notes

Where DevOps is heading as of 2024–2025 — platform engineering, FinOps, AIOps/LLMOps, WASM at the edge — paired with field notes from the decade’s real outages, read as missing-guardrail lessons.