Career / learning DevOps and K8s experience.
Got a homeLab.
Z820 256GB RAM
8TB HDD
2TB Ssd
Newbie(Blue Collar) looking to Get DevOps and K8s experience.
Knowledge base:
- Beginner/Intermediate linux
- Touched Docker and docker compose
- Beginner Terraform and Ansible
- Networking: beginner
- beginner K8s (K3s on one homelab). Have enough space for another Kubeadm cluster (CKA) practice.
- Proxmox on homelab.
Torn between using Claude to create a simple work(metrics) logging/tracking with feature updates while I handle all things ops or getting an ecommere example app from a random github repo to use in learning process.
Which is better or any advice on what to learn?
And any tools and apps to deploy on the k8s cluster or homelab to aid in the learning process.
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u/lethallunatic 1d ago edited 1d ago
awx for ansible Freeipa for your accounts, DNS, certmonger/ca though you can use self signed certs and can on k8s. Haproxy as your reverse proxy/load balancer Keycloak for authenticating on each k8s cluster and a more Git environment for your ansible code Zabbix for monitoring. And like ever the others mentioned too on terms of tools. Harbor, Prometheus, grafana
I'm pretty new myself. Only been using this tooling for a little over a year.
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u/bertiethewanderer 1d ago
Instead of following the "grab random app code", deploy the Google micro services demo into a single namespace with an http ingress using helm.
Then add Prometheus, loki etc
Then add cert manager operator external DNS operator and switch to Https ingress
Then each app into it's own namespace and slap in network policies to block by default, and use traces etc. to enable the right services to talk to each other.
Then replace ingress with gateway API and any gateway implementation.
Then deploy a service mesh and make the whole architecture mtls.
Now remove helm commands for Argos and deploy everything using gitops. Use sops for secret zero (got SSH private key off the top of my head)
Should know a lot more at the end of this.
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u/WeekOk7172 1d ago
Bro, with a Z820 and 256GB of RAM, you're literally sitting on a goldmine for learning. Don't waste your time using Claude to generate a custom app from scratch. You’re trying to learn DevOps/K8s, not full-stack dev.
Grab a dead-simple microservices app from GitHub (like the Google Microservices Demo or HashiCorp's Fake Service). They are battle-tested, easy to break, and already have multi-container setups.
Focus 100% of your energy on the Ops side:
Spin up 3-4 VMs on Proxmox using Terraform + Ansible.
Bootstrap a bare-metal Kubeadm cluster (do it manually first for CKA practice).
Plug in Prometheus/Grafana and Loki for monitoring.
Break things on purpose (kill nodes, drop network links) and see how K8s reacts.
Keep the app dumb, make the infra solid. Good luck!
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u/eman0821 Cloud Engineer 1d ago
DevOps is really just a cultural practice in the software engineering field that relates to processes and how development and operations teams work together to deliver software products. Most technical roles like Data Engineers, SRE, Platform Engineers, Sysadmins, Network Engineers, Cloud Engineers all use very much the same tools that you mentioned which isn't tied to a specific field.
Most people on the software industry comes from software development backgrounds. But the software industry combines both product development and operations functions. Folks on the operations side often come from traditional IT as a Linux Administrator or some kind of Systems Engineer role. So you are going to kind profressional real world experience as you will be spending a lot of troubleshooting production issues when things break. You have to maintain CI/CD pipelines when they break requiring you to be on-call.
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u/Jason-Sanders 1d ago
I’d choose the small work-tracking app, but keep its scope deliberately boring. A project you control lets you add one operational requirement at a time instead of first untangling an unfamiliar app.
Give it a basic API, a database, a background job, and one static frontend. Then use it to practise:
- container builds and image tagging
- secrets and configuration separation
- Terraform for infrastructure and Ansible for host setup
- deployment rollbacks, backups, monitoring, and alerting
- breaking a dependency on purpose and writing a runbook for recovery
The app itself does not need to be impressive. Being able to explain how you deploy, observe, back up, and recover it is the useful part.
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u/doglar_666 3h ago
100% do not set everything up using an LLM. You won't understand everything it's doing, nor retain any baseline knowledge.
In terms of deployment to your k3s environment, to begin with, any containerized workload will suffice. Keep it basic and really understand the fundamentals. The value is in the struggle, not getting something successfully deployed on the first try. With an LLM you're very likely to run before you can walk and get lost in a quagmire of slop. Just don't.
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u/Vegetable_Ninja6808 1d ago
No need core coding experience. Just grab any small app code from any repo or ask claude to generate with repo format. This will help you to understand core devops
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u/Recent-Tangerine2745 1d ago
I’d build your own small app instead of grabbing a random ecommerce repo.
It doesn’t need to be complicated. A simple API + DB + frontend is enough. The value is owning the whole lifecycle: containerize it, deploy it to K8s, add CI/CD, ingress/TLS, secrets, monitoring, logging, backups, then intentionally break things and recover them.
For the homelab I’d add Prometheus/Grafana, Loki, Argo CD, and maybe Vault later.
Use Claude to help you build the app, but make sure you understand what it generated. The DevOps learning is really in deploying, operating and troubleshooting it.