🟢 Beginner Projects
Project 1: Automated Server Setup Script
Skills: Linux, Bash scripting
Write a Bash script that automates setting up a fresh Ubuntu server — installs packages, creates users, configures SSH hardening, sets up a firewall, and enables automatic updates.
- Create a user with SSH key-based authentication
- Install and configure Nginx
- Set up UFW firewall rules
- Configure fail2ban
- Set up log rotation
Project 2: Containerize a Web Application
Skills: Docker, Docker Compose
Take a full-stack web app (Node.js + React + PostgreSQL) and containerize it with Docker Compose.
- Write optimized, multi-stage Dockerfiles for frontend and backend
- Configure Docker Compose with all services
- Set up volumes for database persistence
- Configure networking between containers
- Add health checks
Project 3: Static Website Hosting on S3
Skills: AWS (S3, CloudFront, Route 53)
Deploy a static website to AWS using S3 for hosting, CloudFront for CDN, and Route 53 for DNS.
- Create an S3 bucket with website hosting
- Configure CloudFront distribution
- Set up HTTPS with ACM certificate
- Configure custom domain in Route 53
🟡 Intermediate Projects
Project 4: CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions
Skills: Git, GitHub Actions, Docker, AWS ECR
Build a complete CI/CD pipeline that lints, tests, builds a Docker image, pushes to ECR, and deploys to ECS.
- Multi-job pipeline with dependencies
- Run tests and generate coverage reports
- Build and push Docker image to ECR
- Deploy to staging automatically on PR merge
- Manual approval gate for production
- Slack notifications on success/failure
Project 5: Infrastructure with Terraform
Skills: Terraform, AWS (VPC, EC2, RDS, ALB)
Provision a complete 3-tier architecture on AWS using Terraform with modular code.
- VPC with public and private subnets across 2 AZs
- Application Load Balancer in public subnets
- Auto Scaling Group with EC2 instances
- RDS PostgreSQL in private subnets
- Remote state in S3 with DynamoDB locking
- Reusable Terraform modules
Project 6: Configuration Management with Ansible
Skills: Ansible, Linux
Create Ansible roles to configure a fleet of web servers with Nginx, deploy an application, and set up monitoring agents.
- Roles: common, webserver, app-deploy, monitoring-agent
- Jinja2 templates for Nginx configuration
- Ansible Vault for secrets
- Handlers for service restarts
- Idempotent playbooks
Project 7: Monitoring Stack
Skills: Docker Compose, Prometheus, Grafana, Node Exporter
Deploy a monitoring stack using Docker Compose with Prometheus for metrics, Grafana for dashboards, and Alertmanager for alerts.
- Prometheus with scrape configs
- Node Exporter for system metrics
- Grafana with pre-configured dashboards
- Alert rules for CPU, memory, and disk
- Alertmanager with email/Slack notifications
🔴 Advanced Projects
Project 8: Kubernetes Microservices Deployment
Skills: Kubernetes, Docker, Helm
Deploy a microservices application on Kubernetes with proper resource management, ingress, and scaling.
- Multiple microservices with Deployments and Services
- Ingress controller with TLS termination
- ConfigMaps and Secrets management
- Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
- Helm chart packaging
- Network policies for security
Project 9: GitOps with ArgoCD
Skills: Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Git, Helm
Implement a GitOps workflow where Git is the single source of truth for Kubernetes deployments, using ArgoCD for automated sync.
- Separate app repo and K8s manifests repo
- ArgoCD application definitions
- Automated sync with self-healing
- Promotion workflow (dev → staging → production)
- Rollback procedures
Project 10: EKS Production Cluster
Skills: Terraform, AWS EKS, Kubernetes, Monitoring
Provision a production-ready EKS cluster with Terraform, including networking, RBAC, monitoring, and a full CI/CD deployment pipeline.
- EKS cluster with managed node groups via Terraform
- VPC with private subnets for worker nodes
- AWS Load Balancer Controller
- Prometheus + Grafana monitoring stack
- External DNS for automatic Route 53 records
- Cert-Manager for automatic TLS
- GitHub Actions pipeline for full deployment
Project 11: Disaster Recovery & Multi-Region
Skills: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes
Design and implement a disaster recovery strategy with cross-region replication, automated failover, and backup procedures.
- Multi-region infrastructure with Terraform
- RDS cross-region read replicas
- S3 cross-region replication
- Route 53 health checks and failover routing
- Automated backup and restore testing
- Documented runbooks for incident response
🏆 Capstone Project
Project 12: Complete Production Platform
Skills: Everything above combined
Build a complete production-grade platform that combines all DevOps skills into a cohesive, production-ready system.
- Infrastructure provisioned with Terraform (VPC, EKS, RDS, S3)
- Server configuration with Ansible
- Microservices deployed on Kubernetes with Helm
- CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions) building, testing, and deploying
- GitOps with ArgoCD for Kubernetes deployments
- Full monitoring stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki)
- Alerting with PagerDuty/Slack integration
- Documented architecture and runbooks