It’s well-known that Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS are all the rage these days, forming the core of many modern DevOps toolsets. What’s less well-known is that many developers have no idea what these technologies really are—and they are too afraid to ask.

This used to be me. While everyone around me was throwing around buzzwords like containerization, orchestration, IaC, and EC2, I had no idea what these meant, and I was worried that if I asked, I’d look stupid. In the years since, I’ve learned that there are many other devs like me, just as confused, just as afraid to ask, and struggling just as much to learn these technologies on their own because the resources out there tend to be either too high level (little more than buzzword soup) or too low level (assuming too much knowledge and losing you immediately).

Therefore, I’ve created this blog post series to help developers overcome the fear of DevOps by going through a series of lightning quick crash courses where you learn by doing. Each course is designed for newbies, starting at zero, and building your mental model step-by-step through simple examples you run on your computer to do something useful with one of these modern DevOps tools—in minutes:

You can go through the crash courses in order or, if you’re already familiar with some of the material, you can jump around to the ones that interest you. By the end of the series, you will be using Terraform to deploy a Kubernetes cluster and Dockerized apps in AWS—and you’ll even know what each of the words in that sentence mean! Each course focuses on the basics, but if you want to go deeper, there are also links at the end of each course to more advanced resources.

Ready to get started? Then head over to part 1, A crash course on Docker.

Note: most of the content in this blog post series is adapted from the “Working with Multiple Providers” chapter of Terraform: Up & Running, 3rd edition.