10 GitHub Repositories That Will Actually Teach You DevOps in 2026

There are roughly a thousand "top DevOps repos" listicles, and most of them are the same five awesome-lists in a different order. The problem with awesome-lists is that they are link directories. They tell you where to look, not what to do. If you want to actually get better at DevOps, you need a different shape of repo: ones with exercises, opinionated learning paths, hands-on demos, and source you can read and learn from.

So here are ten GitHub repositories that have moved real engineers from "I have heard of Kubernetes" to "I run it in production." We will start with the one we maintain on this site, then walk through the rest in order of star count, with notes on who each one is for and how to get the most out of it.

TLDR

#	Repo	Stars	Best for
1	The-DevOps-Daily/devops-daily	1k+	Tutorials, exercises, and quizzes across the stack
2	nilbuild/developer-roadmap	354k	Visual roadmap to plan your learning
3	bregman-arie/devops-exercises	82k	Interview prep and practice questions
4	kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way	48k	Building Kubernetes from scratch
5	MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps	29k	A structured 90-day plan
6	milanm/DevOps-Roadmap	19k	Roadmap with linked study resources
7	ramitsurana/awesome-kubernetes	16k	Curated Kubernetes deep-dive material
8	dastergon/awesome-sre	13k	SRE-specific reading list
9	stefanprodan/podinfo	6k	A real microservice to deploy with GitOps
10	wmariuss/awesome-devops	4k	Broader DevOps tooling and practices

Star counts are pulled fresh from the GitHub API as of May 2026.

1. The-DevOps-Daily/devops-daily

github.com/The-DevOps-Daily/devops-daily. the source for everything you read on this site, fully open source.

We did not put ourselves at the top because we own the site. We put ourselves at the top because the way the repo is structured is a fast loop: every blog post, exercise, quiz, flashcard, checklist, and interview question is a markdown or JSON file you can read, fork, and PR into. If you find a typo, a broken command, or an outdated CLI flag, you can fix it. If you have a better explanation of how kubelet eviction works, you can add a card to the relevant flashcard deck.

How to use it:

• Browse the content/ directory. Pick a topic you want to get better at and run through the exercise.
• Use the quizzes for spaced retrieval. Repeat until you stop getting things wrong.
• Submit a PR when you find something to improve. The maintainers (us) review fast and merge most of the time.

Best for engineers who learn by doing, contributing, and seeing the underlying source of every lesson.

2. nilbuild/developer-roadmap

github.com/nilbuild/developer-roadmap. 354k stars. Originally kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap, now under the nilbuild org. The DevOps roadmap is at roadmap.sh/devops.

This is a visual map of the skills, tools, and concepts that make up a DevOps career. It is the single best document on the internet for answering "what should I learn next?" without reinventing your own learning plan from scratch.

How to use it:

• Open the DevOps roadmap. Identify the area you are weakest in.
• Click any node to get a short explanation, links, and a checklist.
• Mark items as you go. The site keeps your progress in localStorage if you do not sign up.

Best for people who feel scattered and want a single picture of the field.

3. bregman-arie/devops-exercises

github.com/bregman-arie/devops-exercises. 82k stars. Maintained by Arie Bregman, ex-Red Hat.

This repository is the reason a lot of engineers passed their DevOps interviews. It is hundreds of practical questions and exercises across Linux, Jenkins, AWS, SRE, Prometheus, Docker, Python, Ansible, Git, Kubernetes, Terraform, OpenStack, SQL, NoSQL, Azure, GCP, and more. Each topic has a mix of explanation questions ("What is X and when do you use it?") and hands-on exercises ("Write the Terraform module that does X").

How to use it:

• Pick a topic. Try to answer the questions out loud or in writing without looking at the answers.
• Star the ones you got wrong. Come back to them in a week.
• Use it as a barometer. If you can answer most of the Kubernetes section without help, you know your Kubernetes is solid.

Best for interview preparation and finding gaps in your knowledge.

4. kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way. 48k stars. The repo description is honest: "Bootstrap Kubernetes the hard way. No scripts."

If you have only ever used gcloud container clusters create or eksctl, you have used Kubernetes. You have not learned it. This walkthrough has you stand up a control plane and worker nodes by hand, with TLS certificates you generated yourself, etcd you configured yourself, and a kubelet you registered yourself.

It is also a primary reason Kelsey Hightower has the reputation he has, which is its own kind of education.

How to use it:

• Block out a weekend. The full walkthrough takes 6 to 10 hours the first time.
• Do not copy commands. Type them. Read what they do before you run them.
• When something breaks (and it will), debug it. That is the entire point.

Best for engineers who want a deep mental model of Kubernetes internals.

5. MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps

github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps. 29k stars. Three years of community-curated 90-day plans.

This started as one engineer's public learning project: 90 days, one DevOps topic per day, write what you learned. It exploded, and is now a structured tour through Linux, networking, programming, containers, Kubernetes, IaC, observability, databases, and serverless across three different yearly cohorts. The format is one folder per day with notes, diagrams, and links.

How to use it:

• Treat it as a TV series, not a textbook. Watch one "episode" a day for 90 days.
• Skip topics you already know. Spend extra time on the ones that feel uncomfortable.
• Read previous cohorts' notes when you finish a day. The 2022, 2023, and 2024 versions cover slightly different angles on the same material.

Best for engineers early in their career who want a forced curriculum.

6. milanm/DevOps-Roadmap

github.com/milanm/DevOps-Roadmap. 19k stars. A different style of roadmap from #2.

Where the nilbuild roadmap is a visual node graph, this one is a long markdown document with curated links, books, courses, and YouTube videos for every step of the path. It is heavier on resources, lighter on the conceptual map.

How to use it:

• Read the introduction. Identify which "phase" of the roadmap you are at.
• Pick one resource per concept. Do not read all five linked resources for the same topic. Pick the format that matches how you learn best.
• Use the prompts at the end of each section as a checklist before moving on.

Best for self-taught engineers building their own curriculum.

7. ramitsurana/awesome-kubernetes

github.com/ramitsurana/awesome-kubernetes. 16k stars. The most thorough Kubernetes-specific awesome-list.

If your day job is Kubernetes-heavy and you want to specialize, this is the link directory you want. It has sections for everything: storage, networking, monitoring, security, multi-cluster, GitOps, service mesh, FinOps. Each link is annotated.

How to use it:

• Bookmark the page. Use it as a research starting point when you need to evaluate tools in a category.
• Watch the commit log. New tools get added regularly, so it doubles as a "what is happening in Kubernetes" feed.

Best for Kubernetes-track engineers and platform teams researching tools.

8. dastergon/awesome-sre

github.com/dastergon/awesome-sre. 13k stars. The SRE-flavored cousin.

DevOps and SRE overlap, but the SRE side weights toward reliability theory, incident response, observability, and the social engineering of running production systems. This repo is the curated reading list for that side: books (Google's SRE book, Charity Majors' work), papers, postmortems, blog posts, conference talks, training courses.

How to use it:

• Read at least one published postmortem a week. The "Postmortems" section is gold.
• The conference talks list is more useful than most paid SRE courses.
• Pair it with kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way if your SRE work is on a Kubernetes platform.

Best for engineers moving into SRE or platform-engineering roles.

9. stefanprodan/podinfo

github.com/stefanprodan/podinfo. 6k stars. A small Go web app that exists to be deployed.

This one is different from the others. podinfo is not a learning resource in the read-and-take-notes sense. It is a real microservice (Go, REST + gRPC, metrics, tracing, health checks) that is purpose-built to be the demo target in tutorials. It is what every Flux, Argo CD, Linkerd, Istio, and Cilium tutorial uses when they need a service to deploy. If you want to actually try a GitOps tool end-to-end, you build the platform, point it at podinfo's helm chart, and ship.

How to use it:

• Stand up a kind or k3d cluster locally.
• Install Flux or Argo CD and point it at the podinfo chart.
• Roll out a canary. Add Linkerd. Add Prometheus. Each thing you add lets you exercise a different platform skill on a service that already works.

Best for engineers who learn by deploying, not reading.

10. wmariuss/awesome-devops

github.com/wmariuss/awesome-devops. 4k stars. Smaller than awesome-kubernetes, broader in scope.

This is the everything-DevOps awesome list: chaos engineering, configuration management, container orchestration, log management, monitoring, package management, secret management, service discovery. The size of the list is approachable, which is its main strength. You can scroll the whole thing in 15 minutes and have a real mental map of the DevOps tooling landscape.

How to use it:

• Read the section headings before clicking any links. The taxonomy itself is a learning aid.
• When evaluating a new category of tool (say, you have to pick a secret manager), use this as your starting set rather than Googling.

Best for engineers who want a manageable map of the whole DevOps tools world.

How to Actually Use a List Like This

Lists are starting points, not learning plans. The mistake people make is to star all ten repos and never come back. Avoid that:

1. Pick exactly one starting repo today. If you have no plan, start with #2 (the roadmap) to get one. If you have a plan, start with #4 (kubernetes-the-hard-way) to deepen it. If you are interview-prepping, start with #3 (devops-exercises).
2. Block calendar time. "I will learn DevOps in my spare time" does not work. "I will spend Thursdays from 7 to 9 PM on the kubernetes-the-hard-way walkthrough" works.
3. Build something. Pick one of the awesome-list categories you do not understand (say, "service mesh") and use podinfo (#9) plus a tool from the list to build a working setup. You will learn more in two hours of building than two weeks of reading.
4. Teach what you learned. Write a blog post. Submit a PR to #1 with a flashcard you made. Give a brown-bag at work. Teaching is the fastest way to find the gaps in what you thought you knew.

Bookmark this page and come back when you finish one repo. The list is not going anywhere.

Key Takeaways

1. Awesome-lists are link directories, not learning plans. Pair them with hands-on repos like #1, #4, and #9.
2. Star counts are not the same as quality, but they are a decent first filter. Anything above 5k stars in this space has been read by enough people to be roughly trustworthy.
3. The single best learning loop is read → build → teach. Most engineers do step one, skip step two, and never reach step three. The repos in this list are picked to support all three.
4. Start one. Finish one. Do not collect ten tabs and never close any of them.
5. Contribute back. Every repo in this list takes PRs. Even small ones (typo fixes, broken-link fixes) count. They also get you GitHub history that future employers can see.

If we missed a repo you think belongs here, open an issue on our repo and tell us which one. We update this list when something deserves to be on it.