₦airaland Forum

Wow, glad to see this community and i have to say you guys rock.

A bit of a back story from me and my Devops journey

Back in 2023, I started out with DevOps because I thought that was the fastest way to break into tech. The course I took threw me straight into setting up multiple Ubuntu and Debian VMs on VirtualBox. That was my first real contact with Linux.

We were taught to install and run servers like Nginx, Apache Tomcat, and WildFly inside these VMs, then SSH into them to configure things. From there, I learnt how to install tools like Git, Maven, Nexus, SonarQube, and Jenkins across different VMs and make them talk to each other — Git as the source, Maven pulling code, Nexus handling artifacts, SonarQube checking quality, and Jenkins orchestrating the whole pipeline.

Then the course shifted everything to AWS. I repeated the same setups on EC2 instances (Ubuntu), with S3, VPCs, dynamic volumes, security groups, etc. After that came Terraform and Docker. That’s where I got completely lost, because even though I could follow the videos, I didn’t understand why I was spinning things up or what problem it was solving. And eventually, I couldn’t afford to continue the paid course, so I stopped. I still have all the videos till today.

Instead of forcing it, I switched into programming. I spent the past year learning to build applications with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, then moving into React and Node.js. That part gave me some real clarity, because now I could see what applications actually do and how services support them.

Fast forward to now, I stumbled on this Ubuntu thread, and it clicked for me, the problem back then wasn’t Ubuntu or DevOps, it was me trying to skip the understanding part.

I’m now restarting my VMs, but this time with a clearer head. The goal is to grow step by step, scripting, automating, containerizing, but with actual context of what’s happening.

Let’s see how it goes.
Big thank you to everyone here, this community is giving me the clarity I didn’t have two years ago.