People ask me all the time. What certs should I get? What skills do I need? Where do I even start with Cloud, DevOps, or SRE? It comes from everywhere. Beginners trying to break in, career changers pivoting from other fields, senior engineers looking to fill gaps or pick up something new. For a while I would tell them I’d put together a learning plan for them. And then I wouldn’t. Life gets busy, things slip, and I’d end up feeling guilty about promises I didn’t keep.
So I finally did the thing. I built The Infrastructure & Operations Academy.
It’s a structured curriculum of free and low cost courses covering Cloud, DevOps, and SRE from the ground up. Everything is online, most of it is free, and you can jump in wherever you are in your career. How far you go depends on how much work you’re willing to put in.
Why This Exists
I got tired of pointing people to awesome lists. You know the ones. 400 links, no structure, no progression, no guidance on what to learn first. You open the README, get overwhelmed, and close the tab. I’ve done it. You’ve probably done it too.
The real problem is that Cloud, DevOps, and SRE have a learning order. You can’t understand Kubernetes if you don’t understand containers. You can’t understand containers if you don’t understand Linux. You can’t debug networking issues in your VPC if you never learned how TCP/IP works. But most resource lists just throw everything at you with no sense of where to begin.
I was heavily inspired by LinkedIn’s School of SRE, which does a great job of teaching SRE concepts in a structured way. But I wanted to go further and cover the full Cloud, DevOps, and SRE skill set, using real courses from the vendors we actually use every day. AWS teaching you AWS. HashiCorp teaching you Terraform. The Linux Foundation teaching you Linux. Learning from the source.
Stop Overpaying for Knowledge
Here’s something that bothers me. People think learning this stuff is expensive because they see $15,000 bootcamps and $500 Udemy bundles everywhere. The reality is that almost everything you need to learn is available for free, directly from the vendors who build the tools. AWS has free training. Google has free training. The Linux Foundation has free courses. The knowledge is out there. The only things you should be paying for are certifications and platforms that offer continuous, updated learning. Everything else is a markup on information that’s already freely available.
How It’s Structured
The academy is organized into 13 skill tracks, ordered so each one builds on what came before:
Foundations — Tech fundamentals, Linux, Git, Python and Bash scripting, and your first Cloud certifications. The stuff that makes everything else click.
Core Skills — Cloud platforms, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, containers and Kubernetes, and observability. This is where you start building real systems.
Advanced — Security and DevSecOps, AI and ML, API development, and project management. The stuff that separates senior engineers from everyone else.
There’s no timeline, no cohort, no deadlines. You go at your own pace. Pick up where you are in your career and work through whatever tracks are relevant to you. Each track maps to industry certifications with the free resources to get you there, plus study guide recommendations for folks who prefer to learn that way.
What It’s Not
This is not another awesome list. I’m not dumping every DevOps course on the internet into a README and calling it a day. Every course is curated, and it fits into a logical progression. Quality over quantity.
It’s also not a bootcamp, not a paid program, and there’s no upsell. It’s just a GitHub repo with a structured curriculum. That’s it.
Browse the Academy
The academy lives at infraopsacademy.com. Dark mode, search, tabbed navigation, and each skill track on its own page. Every track includes a suggested learning path — where to start, what free resources to use, and what order to take the certs in. I also added study guide recommendations from Sybex, O’Reilly, and Pearson wherever they’re available. Sybex for CompTIA and AWS certs, O’Reilly for the cloud-native stuff like Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, and Prometheus, and Pearson for Red Hat. If you like sitting down with a proper study guide and working through it chapter by chapter, you’ll find the right book for each cert.
Go Learn Something
The repo is at github.com/SamuelTillman/infra-ops-academy. Stars and contributions are welcome. If you know of a great free course that fits the curriculum, open a PR.
You don’t need a $15,000 bootcamp. You don’t need to wait for someone to build you a learning plan. The path is right there. Go.
I’m a Staff Site Reliability Engineer and I get busy with AWS, GitHub, Terraform, and VS Code, among other things. If you’re feeling it, subscribe below. Want to connect? Find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, or X.