Roadmap · Specialise
Platform engineering and SRE (Platform engineering)
Opens with creditsFor DevOps engineers who already deploy to the cloud and Kubernetes and want the next step, into site reliability or platform engineering. By the end you can set SLOs and alert on them, run an incident and its postmortem, operate Kubernetes and Terraform at scale with GitOps, and build or improve the internal platform other teams ship on.
Curated by Tauseef Fayyaz10 stages, 64 topics~10 months at a few hours a weekBy the end, you will be able to
- Define SLIs, SLOs and an error budget policy for a real service, and turn them into multiwindow burn-rate alerts that page only when users are hurt
- Debug a production issue from a dashboard to a trace to a log line, using PromQL and OpenTelemetry data you set up yourself
- Run an incident with clear roles, mitigate before diagnosing, and write a blameless postmortem with owned action items
- Operate Kubernetes, Terraform and Argo CD at team scale: disruption budgets, zone spreading, split state, policy as code and progressive delivery
- Design a golden path or internal developer platform with Backstage, and plan capacity, cost, chaos experiments and an on-call rotation people can sustain
The path
10 stages, in the order to learn them. Open one to start.
1Reliability basics: SLIs, SLOs and error budgetsLearn to describe reliability in numbers users would recognise: what to measure, what target to set, how much failure that allows, and what the team does when the budget runs out.7 topics · ~3 weeks
- 1Why 100 per cent is the wrong targetSite reliability engineering starts from an uncomfortable idea: a service should not be perfectly reliable.
- 2Choosing SLIs users would recogniseAn SLI (service level indicator) is a measurement of service quality from the user's side.
- 3Setting SLOs and SLAsAn SLO (service level objective) is a target for an SLI over a rolling window, such as 99.9 per cent of checkout requests succeed over 30 days.
- 4Error budgets and the nines tableThe error budget is 1 minus the SLO: the failure you are allowed.
- 5Error budget policiesAn error budget only changes behaviour if everyone agrees in advance what happens when it runs low.
- 6Dependencies and composite availabilityA request that needs several components in series can only be as reliable as all of them together: their availabilities multiply.
- 7SLOs for the platform itselfA platform is a service too, and its users are developers.
7 in this stageOpen this stage2Observability: metrics, logs and tracesGo past a first dashboard: choose the right signals, write PromQL fluently, keep cardinality under control, run the OpenTelemetry Collector and connect metrics, traces and logs so you can find a cause quickly.7 topics · ~6 weeks
- 1Golden signals, RED and USEYou cannot graph everything, so start from proven checklists.
- 2The Prometheus data modelPrometheus stores time series: a metric name, a set of labels and timestamped values.
- 3PromQL you use every weekPromQL is the query language behind Prometheus dashboards, recording rules and alerts.
- 4Cardinality and what belongs in metricsCardinality is the number of unique time series a metric creates.
- 5OpenTelemetry and the CollectorOpenTelemetry is the vendor-neutral standard for traces, metrics and logs: SDKs and auto-instrumentation in each language, the OTLP protocol, and the Collector.
- 6Sampling and correlating signalsAt scale you cannot keep every trace, so you sample.
- 7Observability as a platform defaultOn a platform team, your job is to make good telemetry the default for every service rather than a skill each team must learn.
7 in this stageOpen this stage- Incident response and postmortemsTurn SLOs into alerts that page for the right reasons, run an incident with clear roles, stop the damage before chasing the cause, and write postmortems that lead to real fixes.7 topics · ~4 weeksOpens with credits
- Kubernetes in productionWhat changes when a cluster runs real traffic: a fixed troubleshooting flow, disruption budgets, spreading across zones, graceful shutdown, resource classes, upgrades and policy guard rails.7 topics · ~6 weeksOpens with credits
- Infrastructure as code at scaleTake Terraform beyond one folder: split state by blast radius, version shared modules, plan in CI and apply from the pipeline, enforce policy as code and catch drift before it bites.6 topics · ~4 weeksOpens with credits
- GitOps and progressive deliveryMake Git the source of truth for what runs: Argo CD reconciling clusters, promotion between environments, secrets kept out of Git, and releases that roll out gradually and roll back on their own.6 topics · ~4 weeksOpens with credits
- Internal developer platformsLearn how platforms are built and run as products for internal developers: golden paths, a software catalogue, templates, docs and the measures that show whether the platform helps.6 topics · ~5 weeksOpens with credits
- Capacity, performance and costLearn the few sums behind capacity planning, why latency jumps near full utilisation, how to load test, how autoscaling works at each layer, and how to keep the cloud bill allocated and honest.6 topics · ~4 weeksOpens with credits
- Chaos and resilience testingProve the system copes with failure before real failure does: design chaos experiments, control the blast radius, run game days, and apply the patterns that stop one slow dependency taking everything down.6 topics · ~4 weeksOpens with credits
- On-call without burnoutDesign a rotation and escalation people can sustain, keep alerts actionable, write runbooks that work at 3 a.m., and measure and reduce toil so the pager gets quieter over time.6 topics · ~2 weeksOpens with credits
8 more stages, 50 more topics, free with an account.
You have seen the open stages of the Platform engineering and SRE roadmap. Every topic it covers is listed above, and an account opens the rest: what each topic means, a question to check yourself, the courses, the practice and Tauseef's advice for every stage. Early access is open: sign up and your account is active shortly after.
Everything here is free to learn from. A few things, like adding a roadmap, keeping a cheat sheet or asking Tauseef a question, use credits. You get 15 when you join, your first roadmap is free, and if you are learning seriously and run out, you can ask for more. Credits only make sure the platform goes to people who are actually learning.
Build a project
A finished project proves more than a certificate.
- Start with this onebeginner1 semester · 2 studentsStatus Page with Multi-Region Uptime Checks for Small SaaS Teams
SLIs from real uptime checks, an SLO report and incident updates: the reliability basics end to end
- Node.js or Go
- PostgreSQL
- Cheap VPS in 3 regions
- Next.js for the status page
- Server-Sent Events
- intermediate2 semesters · 3 studentsLightweight Internal Developer Portal with Service Scorecards
A small internal platform with a catalogue and scorecards, the core of platform engineering work
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- PostgreSQL
- GitHub App and REST API
- YAML catalogue files
Related on Sefism
Picked from the other libraries by shared topics.
Best practices
See all- Kubernetes Best PracticesRun workloads on Kubernetes that schedule well, survive restarts and node drains, and stay locked down: resources, probes, PDBs, Pod Security and RBAC.
- Terraform Best PracticesWrite Terraform that teams can review and change safely: file layout, version pinning, remote state with locking, secrets, modules, refactoring and tests.
- CI/CD Best PracticesBuild pipelines that are fast, trustworthy and safe to deploy from: trunk-based flow, fast tests, locked-down workflows, signed artifacts, canaries and DORA metrics.
Checklists
See all- Incident Response ChecklistPrepare for and handle production incidents: on-call, severity levels, declaring, roles, mitigation, security containment, status updates and blameless postmortems.
- Production Readiness ChecklistCheck a service before it takes real traffic: ownership, SLOs, capacity, timeouts and retries, alerts, rollout and rollback, backups, security and on-call.
- Kubernetes Production ChecklistVerify a workload and its cluster before real traffic: requests and limits, probes, PDBs, spread, Pod Security, RBAC, network policies, secrets, images, autoscaling, upgrades and backups.
Project structures
See all- Terraform project structureAn infrastructure repository for a small app on AWS: reusable modules, one folder per environment with its own remote state, pinned providers, tests and security scans, with plan on every pull request and apply from CI. For students who have finished the Terraform tutorials and want to know how a real team lays out the files. The same layout works unchanged with OpenTofu.
- Kubernetes with Helm project structureA Helm chart repository for one app: the chart that
helm creategives you, grown into a tested, versioned package with per-environment values, unit tests, install tests in a kind cluster and releases to an OCI registry. For students who can write a Deployment by hand and want to know how a team organises charts. It is about the repo layout and what each file does, not about cluster design. - Spring Boot project structureA REST API in Java with Spring Boot 4, PostgreSQL, Flyway and Testcontainers, organised by feature the way the Spring docs suggest. It grows from the Initializr scaffold to a service with JWT security, problem-detail errors, MapStruct DTOs, slice and integration tests, CI, containers and observability, and finally Modulith boundaries, contract and load tests. For students who know some Java and want to see how a real service is organised.
Career questions
See all- Do I need Docker and Kubernetes as a junior developer?Docker, yes: learn the basics, because nearly every team uses containers and you will be expected to run the project locally and read a Dockerfile. Kubernetes, mostly no: understand what it does and a few core terms, but deep Kubernetes can wait until your job or a DevOps direction needs it.
- What is platform engineering, and how is it different from DevOps?DevOps is a culture and set of practices: developers and operations sharing responsibility for shipping and running software. Platform engineering is one way to put that into practice at scale: a team builds an internal platform, a paved road of tools and templates, so product teams can ship without becoming infrastructure experts.
- Can I become an SRE or platform engineer straight after graduating?Sometimes, but it is rare, because these roles expect you to have run production systems. The more reliable path is a first job in backend, DevOps or cloud support, where you learn production, then a move into SRE or platform work within a couple of years.
Cheat sheets
See allWork with me
Stuck on something specific?
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