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Kubernetes retired ingress-nginx in March 2026. About half of cloud-native environments relied on it. If your DevOps roadmap is older than that, it's out of date. Here's the 12-stage DevOps roadmap I'd follow in 2026: Stage 1: Linux & Networking ❯ Learn ➟ Linux CLI, permissions, systemd, DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP ❯ Practice ➟ Host a web app on a Linux VM with Nginx, a custom domain and HTTPS ❯ Why ➟ Every DevOps tool runs on Linux and talks over a network Stage 2: Git & Version Control ❯ Learn ➟ Branching, pull requests, code review, trunk-based development ❯ Practice ➟ Set up branch protection and required reviews on a repo ❯ Why ➟ Everything in DevOps starts with a commit Stage 3: Scripting & Automation ❯ Learn ➟ Bash, Python, cron, REST APIs ❯ Practice ➟ Write a script that backs up a database and alerts you when it fails ❯ Why ➟ If you do it twice, automate it Stage 4: Docker & Containers ❯ Learn ➟ Dockerfiles, multi-stage builds, image layers, registries, non-root users ❯ Practice ➟ Shrink a Node.js image from 1GB+ to under 100MB ❯ Why ➟ Smaller images build faster, ship faster and expose less Stage 5: CI/CD Pipelines ❯ Learn ➟ GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, caching, test gates ❯ Practice ➟ Build a pipeline that tests, builds, scans and deploys on every merge ❯ Why ➟ Every manual step is a place for mistakes Stage 6: Infrastructure as Code ❯ Learn ➟ Terraform or OpenTofu, remote state, modules, Ansible ❯ Practice ➟ Provision a VPC, a VM and a database from code, then destroy it with one command ❯ Why ➟ If you can't rebuild it from code, you don't control it Stage 7: Cloud Fundamentals ❯ Learn ➟ AWS, Azure or GCP: IAM, VPC, compute, storage, managed databases ❯ Practice ➟ Deploy a 3-tier app with private subnets and least-privilege IAM roles ❯ Why ➟ Most cloud mistakes are permission mistakes Stage 8: Kubernetes ❯ Learn ➟ Pods, Deployments, Services, Helm, autoscaling, Gateway API ❯ Practice ➟ Run an app on a local cluster with health probes, autoscaling and a Gateway API route ❯ Why ➟ ingress-nginx is retired, and Gateway API is where Kubernetes routing is heading Stage 9: GitOps & Release Strategies ❯ Learn ➟ Argo CD, Flux, blue-green, canary, feature flags ❯ Practice ➟ Make Git the source of truth, then roll back a bad release with one revert ❯ Why ➟ Git becomes your audit trail and your undo button Stage 10: Observability ❯ Learn ➟ Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, logs, traces, alerting ❯ Practice ➟ Instrument an app and alert on latency and error rate ❯ Why ➟ You can't fix what you can't see Stage 11: SRE & Delivery Metrics ❯ Learn ➟ SLOs, error budgets, incident response, postmortems, DORA metrics ❯ Practice ➟ Define an SLO, break it on purpose and write a blameless postmortem ❯ Why ➟ DORA now tracks 5 metrics, including rework rate, so you measure speed and stability together Stage 12: DevSecOps & Supply Chain ❯ Learn ➟ Secrets management, image scanning, SBOMs, SLSA, image signing, pinned dependencies ❯ Practice ➟ Add secret scanning, image scanning and signed images to your pipeline ❯ Why ➟ Your pipeline holds the keys to production Bookmark and Repost!