Top 10 DevOps resources I’d actually point working devs to:
1) The Phoenix Project (book)
Good mental model for flow, bottlenecks, and why ops work keeps derailing roadmaps.
2) The DevOps Handbook (book)
Concrete practices: CI/CD, trunk-based dev, change mgmt, metrics that matter.
3) Google SRE Book (free online)
SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response. Turns outages into an engineering loop.
4) Kubernetes docs kind/minikube (docs practice)
You don’t learn K8s from slides. Deploy, break DNS, debug probes, read events.
5) Terraform docs a small AWS/GCP lab (docs practice)
Write modules, remote state, locking, plan/apply discipline. Learn drift the hard way.
6) Docker docs (docs)
Images, layers, networking, volume semantics. Fix your own Dockerfile instead of copy/paste.
7) GitHub Actions (or GitLab CI) docs (docs)
Build a pipeline: test, lint, build image, scan, deploy. Learn secrets, caching, artifacts.
8) Prometheus Grafana docs (docs)
Instrument one service, build 3 dashboards, and alert on symptoms not CPU%.
9) OpenTelemetry docs (docs)
Traces change how you debug distributed systems. Add spans, propagate context, sample sanely.
10) Practice project: run a tiny service in prod-like mode (project)
API Postgres Redis, IaC, CI/CD, canary deploy, rollback, on-call runbook, 2 failure drills (kill a node, expire cert)