Learn DevOps The Hard Way: Part I
Back in 2015, i woke up and found myself being a Junior DevOps Engineer. I wanted to be on this train and i got lucky to board it.
But the question was: what is “DevOps” and how do you cook it?
Truth is, I had no idea what DevOps was, its purpose, assumed little-to-none knowledge about the toolset that demanded mastering(except pretty good Linux knowledge i’ve already had), though company was fine with it and i got the job anyway.
Beyond working hours, it was a time of relentless grinding of the countless documentation, forums and posts, literally my personal “Age of Discovery”, where every single day you were to explore new unknown fields for yourself.
You had to learn all of it and learn it quick, starting from CI/CD toolset like Git or Bamboo/Jenkins, Mythical Clouds, Configuration Management & “Infrastructure as a Code” toolset till Docker Containers and even early Kubernetes, with slim-to-none documentation it had back in the days.
In other words, it was an entirely Different World, especially in comparison with “regular” Linux Engineer role i’ve assumed prior the “DevOps Epoch” and it was extremely exciting & rewarding, felt great!
Of course, as of year 2021, it’s all De Facto standard tools, entry level “DevOps” specialists are working with on daily basis.
Never the less, time passed by, the toolset knowledge, practices, concepts, processes, designs, even mindset - all were shaping, mutating and growing in my head exponentially.
But One Thing remained absolutely the same: it was still unclear what “DevOps” is 
I am called “DevOps” engineer. Is “DevOps” about toolset or some kind of set of practices?
Logo in the beginning of this post perfectly represents my idea of “DevOps” in 2015: obscure, vague and dull.
Sure, there was a Wikipedia, numerous Posts & Slides across the Web, explaining their vision & people with their opinion on the subject.
However, none of those sources were compelling nor complete for me.
There was always a feeling that some mythic core component is missing and it blocks the puzzle from being resolved so “DevOps” word would finally make complete sense.
And i was intended to discover it.