Why this section matters
Getting an app online once is a good start. Keeping it online for thousands of customers, rebuilding it after a disaster and knowing it is broken before customers call is the harder part, and it is where DevOps and cloud engineers earn trust. Ghanaian adverts for DevOps roles list Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana and disaster recovery alongside the cloud and containers.
What this section covers
- Infrastructure as code. Describing servers, networks and databases in files that can be reviewed, versioned, rebuilt and deleted with a command. Terraform is a common example.
- Kubernetes basics (optional). Running many containers across many machines, restarting them when they fail and scaling them up when traffic grows. It appears mostly in mid level adverts, so it is optional here, but knowing the main ideas helps in interviews.
- Monitoring, logs and alerts. Collecting numbers and logs, building dashboards and setting alerts that wake the right person for the right reason.
- Backups, security and incidents. Tested backups, patching, secrets management and a calm process when something goes wrong.
The common thread: repeatable and observable
Each topic answers one of two questions:
- If a server dies, a region has an outage or someone deletes something by mistake, can you recreate everything quickly and exactly? Infrastructure as code, containers and tested backups make the answer yes.