Home/Learn/DevOps / SRE Engineer/30-day plan
30-day lab plan · 🔁 DevOps / SRE Engineer

Become job-ready as adevops / sre engineer in 30 days.

One focused task a day, four weeks, ending with a portfolio and a mock interview. Built for students and engineers in India who learn by doing — about 2 hours a day on weekdays, a little more on weekends.

What you needInterview questions →Role path →
Your kit

Set up before day 1

A Linux VM, Docker, a K3s cluster (or kind), GitHub/GitLab, and our Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Ansible and alert-rules generators. Everything here is free or has a free tier; a laptop with 16 GB RAM is enough for most labs (32 GB for nested clusters).

  • Daily ruleFinish the task, write 5 lines of notes, commit to Git. Notes become your interview stories.
  • Weekend ruleDay 7 of each week is a review: redo the hardest task from memory.
  • Stuck rule30 minutes max, then ask in a community or our engineer network.
Week 1

Containers & CI

  1. Day 1Dockerise a sample app; multi-stage Dockerfile; Trivy scan
  2. Day 2Compose stack with DB + cache (our generator)
  3. Day 3Git workflow: branches, PRs, protected main
  4. Day 4CI pipeline: lint, test, build, push image
  5. Day 5Semantic versioning and tags; changelog
  6. Day 6Artifact registry (GHCR/GitLab) with retention
  7. Day 7Review: README with architecture diagram
Week 2

Kubernetes

  1. Day 8Install K3s; deploy the app with our manifest generator
  2. Day 9Ingress + cert-manager with Let’s Encrypt (or self-signed)
  3. Day 10ConfigMaps/Secrets; External Secrets concept
  4. Day 11HPA with metrics-server; load test
  5. Day 12Helm chart for the app
  6. Day 13Argo CD: GitOps deploy from the repo
  7. Day 14Review: cluster runbook (upgrade, backup etcd, node drain)
Week 3

Observability & reliability

  1. Day 15Prometheus + Grafana + Loki stack (our Compose generator)
  2. Day 16Instrument the app with metrics and traces (OpenTelemetry)
  3. Day 17Alert rules with our generator; route to a Telegram/WhatsApp hook
  4. Day 18Define SLIs/SLOs; error budget dashboard
  5. Day 19Chaos: kill pods, fill disk; verify alerts and recovery
  6. Day 20Postmortem template; write one for a chaos test
  7. Day 21Review: on-call handbook v1
Week 4

IaC & portfolio

  1. Day 22Terraform for the VM/cluster (Proxmox or cloud)
  2. Day 23Ansible roles for node hardening (our generator)
  3. Day 24Policy as code (Kyverno) + image signing (cosign)
  4. Day 25DORA metrics from your repo; dashboard
  5. Day 26Blue/green or canary with Argo Rollouts
  6. Day 27Mock interview with our question bank
  7. Day 28Publish everything; write a blog post on the stack; update resume
After day 30

What you will have

  • A portfolio repoDiagrams, configs, scripts and runbooks a hiring manager can read in five minutes.
  • Interview storiesReal faults you fixed — the answers to “tell me about a time…”.
  • A certification targetSee the role path for which exam to book next.
  • A place in our networkFinish the plan, share the repo, and apply — we mentor and place engineers who complete it.

Finished the plan? Show us.

Share your repo and notes; completed plans get a technical conversation with our architects and first paid tasks through the engineer network.

Apply to the networkPractice interview questions