Additional Resources
A curated list of communities, tools, platforms, and resources to support your Platform Engineering/SRE/DevOps journey.
Online Communities
Slack/Discord Communities
SRE/Platform Engineering:
- Rands Leadership Slack - 20,000+ engineering leaders
- DevOps Chat - General DevOps discussions
- Kubernetes Slack - Official Kubernetes community
- CNCF Slack - Cloud Native Computing Foundation
- Platform Engineering Slack - Dedicated platform engineering community
Cloud-Specific:
Reddit Communities
- r/devops - 500k+ members
- r/sre - Site Reliability Engineering
- r/kubernetes - Kubernetes discussions
- r/aws - AWS community
- r/terraform - Infrastructure as Code
Forums & Discussion Boards
- DevOps Stack Exchange
- Server Fault - System administration
- HashiCorp Discuss - Terraform, Vault, etc.
- Elastic Discuss - ELK Stack
Learning Platforms
Free Interactive Platforms
- KillerCoda - Free scenarios for K8s, Linux, DevOps
- Play with Docker - Docker playground
- Play with Kubernetes - K8s playground
- Katacoda - Interactive learning (being sunset)
- Linux Journey - Linux fundamentals
Paid Platforms with Free Tiers
- A Cloud Guru - Cloud training with sandbox environments
- Pluralsight - Technical skills platform
- Linux Academy - Now part of A Cloud Guru
- Cloud Academy - Cloud-focused training
MOOC Platforms
- Coursera - University courses including Google/AWS
- edX - Free courses from top universities
- Udacity - Nanodegrees in cloud/DevOps
Hands-On Labs & Projects
Project Ideas for Portfolio
Beginner Projects:
-
Static Website Deployment Pipeline
- GitHub → CI/CD → S3/CloudFront
- Add monitoring and alerts
-
Container-based Blog Platform
- Dockerize a blog application
- Deploy to Kubernetes
- Add persistent storage
-
Automated Backup Solution
- Script automated backups
- Implement rotation policy
- Add restoration testing
Intermediate Projects:
-
Multi-Region Deployment
- Deploy app across multiple regions
- Implement global load balancing
- Add failover capabilities
-
Monitoring Stack Implementation
- Prometheus + Grafana setup
- Custom dashboards
- Alert routing with PagerDuty
-
GitOps Implementation
- ArgoCD or Flux setup
- Automated deployments
- Multi-environment management
Advanced Projects:
-
Service Mesh Implementation
- Istio/Linkerd deployment
- Traffic management
- Security policies
-
Chaos Engineering Platform
- Implement Chaos Monkey
- Automated failure injection
- Reliability reporting
-
Internal Developer Platform
- Self-service infrastructure
- Cost tracking
- Compliance automation
Open Source Contributions
Good First Contributions:
Documentation Contributions:
- Fix typos and improve clarity
- Add examples and use cases
- Translate documentation
- Create tutorials
Mock Interview Resources
Free Platforms
- Pramp - Peer mock interviews
- Technical Interview Guide - Comprehensive prep
Paid Platforms
- interviewing.io - Anonymous mock interviews
- Interview Kickstart - Bootcamp style
- Exponent - Video courses and mocks
Conferences & Meetups
Major Conferences
- KubeCon + CloudNativeCon - Premier Kubernetes/CNCF event
- AWS re:Invent - Largest AWS conference
- Google Cloud Next - Google's annual conference
- DevOps Days - Local events worldwide
- SREcon - USENIX SRE conferences
- HashiConf - HashiCorp tools conference
- DockerCon - Docker ecosystem
Finding Local Meetups
- Meetup.com - Search for DevOps/Cloud groups
- CNCF Meetups
- Company-sponsored groups (AWS/GCP/Azure user groups)
- University tech talks and seminars
Virtual Events
Podcasts
Technical Podcasts
- Google SRE Prodcast - Direct from Google SREs
- Kubernetes Podcast - Weekly K8s news
- The Cloudcast - Cloud computing trends
- DevOps Paradox - DevOps discussions
- On-Call Nightmares - Incident stories
Career-Focused
- Software Engineering Daily - Technical interviews
- The Changelog - Open source community
- Arrested DevOps - DevOps culture
YouTube Channels
Technical Content
- TechWorld with Nana - DevOps tutorials
- Jeff Geerling - Ansible, K8s, Pi
- DevOps Directive - Practical DevOps
- Viktor Farcic - DevOps toolkit
- Kelsey Hightower - K8s expert
Cloud Providers
Books & Reading Lists
Essential Books (Beyond Interview Prep)
- "Continuous Delivery" by Humble & Farley
- "The Art of Monitoring" by James Turnbull
- "Infrastructure as Code" by Kief Morris
- "Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes" by Arundel & Domingus
- "Distributed Systems Observability" by Cindy Sridharan
Free eBooks & Papers
- Google SRE Books - Free SRE series
- AWS Well-Architected - Free framework
- The Twelve-Factor App - Methodology
- CNCF Papers - Industry reports
Tools & Utilities
Local Development
- Docker Desktop
- Minikube - Local Kubernetes
- Kind - K8s in Docker
- Vagrant - VM management
- LocalStack - Local AWS
CLI Tools
- kubectl - K8s CLI
- aws-cli - AWS CLI
- gcloud - GCP CLI
- terraform - IaC tool
- helm - K8s package manager
Productivity Tools
- tmux - Terminal multiplexer
- oh-my-zsh - Zsh framework
- fzf - Fuzzy finder
- jq - JSON processor
- yq - YAML processor
Newsletters & Blogs
Weekly Newsletters
Must-Follow Blogs
Interview Specific Resources
System Design Resources
Coding Practice
- LeetCode - Filter by tags: Shell, Database
- HackerRank - DevOps specific challenges
- Codewars - Kata for various languages
Behavioral Prep
Stay Updated
RSS Feeds Worth Following
Twitter/X Accounts
- @kelseyhightower - K8s wisdom
- @jessfraz - Containers/Linux
- @brendangregg - Performance
- @rakyll - Distributed systems
- @copyconstruct - Observability
Remember: The Platform Engineering/SRE/DevOps community is collaborative and welcoming. Don't hesitate to ask questions, share your learnings, and help others on their journey!