[lbrindze]

Im very much a bottom up sort of learner so I wanted to post something I haven’t seen yet in any of these comments. Go through and build Linux from scratch https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

You don’t have to do all of it, just enough to feel comfortable with the problem space that containers in part are trying to solve for. In doing so you will learn about the fundamentals of the stacks you are working with. Then go learn about cgroups at the lowest level. Again you don’t need to master these things but setting up a container from scratch will then give you a more intuitive understanding of what container apis like docker are trying to solve for. Install a hypervisor on your local workstation and set up a few vms networked to each other. Use a tool like netcat to talk across them. Once you have these basics, and yes it is a long and round about way, I think the cloud stuff becomes a lot easier and more approachable since you will have a more in depth understanding of what cloud providers are actually giving you in terms of configurations and managed services. I came into software development from doing sysadmin work at a NOC during a graveyard shift. So I had a lot of time on my hands to mess around with this stuff. I don’t think that tools like docker should be a substitution for the fundementals, but rather something you add to your tool belt later to make these sorts of configurations easier to set up.

Yeah this isn’t going to be a 1-2 day crash course but if you are diligent you can get a basic understanding of what these tools do in under a month. Only after you have a complete understanding of single node use case (e.g. multiple containers running on a single host) would i recommend starting to learn k8. Good luck!

* edit to fix small typos