Preparing for a DevOps / SRE role in 2026?
Just knowing Docker Kubernetes is not enough anymore (especially with AI writing half the YAML)
Here are 10 topics you must learn:
1. Linux Networking Fundamentals Processes, file descriptors, cgroups, namespaces
TCP vs UDP, DNS, TLS handshake, NAT, load balancers, connection pools
2. Kubernetes Internals (not just kubectl) Scheduler basics, CNI/CSI, kube-proxy, ingress, autoscaling
Pod lifecycle, readiness vs liveness, resource requests/limits, eviction, disruption budgets
3. Infrastructure as Code at Scale Terraform modules, state management, drift detection, plan/apply safety
Immutable infra mindset, environment promotion, review pipelines, secrets in IaC
4. CI/CD Release Engineering Blue/green, canary, rolling, feature flags, progressive delivery
Artifact versioning, build caching, SBOM generation, rollback strategies that actually work
5. Reliability Engineering Basics SLO/SLI, error budgets, availability math, capacity planning
Toil reduction, runbooks, on-call handoffs, incident response discipline
6. Observability as a Product Metrics vs logs vs traces, RED/USE, OpenTelemetry, exemplars
Correlation IDs, tracing async flows, alert fatigue, good dashboards vs vanity dashboards
7. Incident Management Debugging Under Pressure How to triage fast: saturation vs errors vs latency
Debugging “it is slow but CPU is fine”, noisy neighbor issues, dependency failures, partial outages
8. Security Supply Chain (this matters more in AI era) IAM least privilege, service accounts, workload identity
Secrets rotation, mTLS, network policies, image signing, dependency poisoning, runtime security
9. Cost Performance Engineering (FinOps mindset) Right sizing, autoscaling limits, spot/preemptible tradeoffs
Egress costs, storage tiers, caching layers, measuring cost per request not just “monthly bill”
10. Operating AI Systems (new baseline now) GPU scheduling, model serving patterns, rate limits, prompt injection style abuse vectors
Vector DB / cache invalidation for embeddings, observability for inference latency, fallback strategies when model or vendor is down
Reality in AI age:
AI can generate configs, but SRE/DevOps is about judgement. When things break at 2 AM, nobody cares who wrote the YAML. They care who can restore service and prevent it from happening again.
Preparing for a Backend Engineer role ?
Just DSA isn't enough
Here are 10 topics that you must learn :
1. Concurrency & Parallelism
Threads vs async, race conditions, locks, deadlocks, queues
2. System Design : Design scalable systems (e.g., Dropbox, URL shortener), talk trade-offs: CAP, consistency, availability, latency.
3. Databases & Caching : Normalize vs denormalize, secondary indexes, Redis vs Memcached, cache invalidation, eventual consistency.
4. Distributed Systems Fundamentals :
Leader election, replication, partition tolerance, distributed locking, failure recovery.
5. Reliability Patterns: Retries with backoff, circuit breakers, bulkheads, graceful degradation, chaos testing.
6. Message Queues & Async Flows :
Kafka, RabbitMQ, or SQS : delivery guarantees, deduplication, replay strategies, ordering.
7. Security : OAuth2, JWT pitfalls, mTLS for internal traffic, securing webhooks & service-to-service calls.
8. Observability: Structured logs, tracing (OpenTelemetry), metrics, alerting : debug distributed requests across services.
9. Common Coding Challenges : LRU cache, rate limiter, task scheduler, producer-consumer, flatten nested data structures
10. Performance Tuning : Memory leaks, CPU bottlenecks, slow DB queries, N 1 problems