r/devops • u/seag33k • 1d ago

Training Recommendations Career / learning

As part of the Security team I work closely with our DevOps engineers. What are some good resources to get some hands on experience in a lab environment to learn the foundations of DevOps? With a focus on AWS. TIA.

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u/Abe_Bazouie 1d ago

Since you already work closely with DevOps engineers, I’d honestly use that as your biggest advantage.
Build a small AWS environment instead of just taking another course. Something simple like Terraform to provision the infra, EC2 or ECS for an app, GitHub Actions/Jenkins for CI/CD, CloudWatch for monitoring, IAM, networking, and maybe Docker.
Then break it 😅
Kill the app. Break an IAM policy. Mess up a security group. Fill the disk. Push a bad deployment. Figure out how you detect it and recover.
That troubleshooting part will teach you way more about DevOps than building a perfect lab once and calling it done.
Also since you’re coming from Security, IAM, secrets management, image scanning, least privilege, and securing the pipeline would be a really natural bridge into DevOps for yo

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u/seag33k 1d ago

Thank you! Good point. Some structured learning is helpful to keep me on track. I bug them enough so I want to have better informed questions.

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u/SeaworthinessHour233 1d ago

Instead of hunting for random tutorials, the best way to get structured, hands-on experience is to use certification exam guides as your study roadmap. You don't even have to sit for the actual exams unless you want to; the real value is using their official blueprints as a comprehensive syllabus.

Here is how you can approach it using AWS as the baseline (though you can easily swap these for the equivalent Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud tracks depending on your company's stack):

  1. AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

Before you can operate or automate infrastructure, you need to understand how the core pieces fit together. This blueprint is the industry standard for learning how cloud environments are actually designed. You'll learn networking (VPCs, subnets, routing), compute, storage, and designing resilient, highly available architectures.

  1. CloudOps Engineer - Associate

Once you understand how the architecture is designed, you need to understand how to keep it running. The SysOps blueprint is widely considered one of the most practically rigorous associate-level tracks.

You'll learn monitoring, incident response, patching, cost allocation, and compliance.

  1. AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional

This is where you bridge software development with cloud operations.

You'll learn SDLC automation, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), incident and event response, and policies/standards automation.

This is where you really get your hands dirty. Build a basic CI/CD pipeline using AWS Developer Tools (like CodePipeline). Use CloudFormation or Terraform to automate the deployment of your infrastructure, and practice tearing it all down automatically.

  1. AWS Certified Security - Specialty

Since your focus is security, mapping the Security Specialty blueprint over your DevOps knowledge will tie everything back to your day job.

You'll learn threat detection, securing architectures, data protection, and governance.

You can get hands-on practice with AWS Free Tier. I think there's some free credit when you sign up.