Domain Map

Everything under DevOps, SRE & Platform Engineering

Not a sequence — a map. 18 domains, each broken into the tools, platforms, and certifications that actually live inside it. Expand a domain, then expand a category inside it — go as deep as you need.

18 domains82 categories382 tools & concepts
Linux
The OS every server, container, and pipeline ultimately runs on.
Windows Server
Bash
Shell scripting — the glue between every other tool in this tree.
ZshPowerShellPython for automation

TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing — debugging anything above this layer starts here.

Wireshark
Packet-level capture and analysis.
Cisco Networking
Enterprise routing and switching fundamentals.
TCP/IPDNSHTTP(S) / TLSSubnettingLoad Balancingnmapdig / curl
Certifications
CompTIA Network+→Cisco CCNA
systemdcroncgroupsLinux namespaces
Git
Distributed version control — branching, merging, rebasing, bisecting.
GitHub
The default home for open source and most modern teams.
GitLab
Source control plus CI/CD and security scanning, built in.
Bitbucket
Common in Atlassian-centric organizations.
Trunk-Based DevelopmentGitFlowGitHub FlowCode Review / Gerrit
Docker
The container format and tooling nearly everyone learns first.
Podman
Daemonless, rootless alternative to Docker.
containerd
The industry-standard low-level container runtime.
CRI-OLXC / LXD
BuildahKanikoBuildKitDocker BuildxPacker
Docker HubAmazon ECRGoogle Artifact RegistryAzure ACRHarborQuayJFrog Artifactory
Kubernetes
The de facto standard for running containers at scale.
k3sk0sMicroK8skindminikube
Certifications
KCNA — Kubernetes & Cloud Native Associate→CKA — Certified Kubernetes Administrator→CKAD — Certified Kubernetes Application Developer→CKS — Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist
Amazon EKSAzure AKSGoogle GKEDigitalOcean DOKS
Red Hat OpenShift
Kubernetes with a full enterprise platform layer built in.
RancherVMware Tanzu
Certifications
Red Hat Certified OpenShift Administrator (EX280)
Docker SwarmHashiCorp NomadApache Mesos
Helm
The package manager for Kubernetes manifests.
KustomizeOperator SDKKubebuilderk9skubectx / kubensstern
Terraform
The industry-standard, cloud-agnostic IaC tool.
OpenTofu
The open-source fork of Terraform after its license change.
Pulumi
Infrastructure as code in real programming languages, not HCL.
AWS CloudFormationAzure BicepAWS CDKARM TemplatesGCP Deployment Manager
Certifications
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
TerragruntTerratestAtlantisTerraform Cloud / EnterpriseSpaceliftenv0
Vagrant
Reproducible local development virtual machines.
Ansible
Agentless, YAML-based — the easiest on-ramp of the four.
Chef
Ruby-based, built for very complex enterprise environments.
Puppet
Model-driven configuration with a master/agent architecture.
Salt
Built for speed across extremely large fleets.
AWX / Ansible TowerAnsible Galaxy
Certifications
Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation
Jenkins
Still the backbone of CI/CD in most Fortune 500 companies.
GitHub Actions
The default choice once your code already lives on GitHub.
GitLab CI
Pipelines built directly into GitLab.
CircleCI
Cloud-native CI focused on raw build speed.
Travis CITeamCityBambooAzure PipelinesAWS CodePipeline / CodeBuild / CodeDeployBitbucket PipelinesDrone CIBuildkiteHarness
MavenGradlenpm / YarnMake
JFrog ArtifactorySonatype NexusGitHub Packages
Argo CD
The GitOps engine most Kubernetes platforms are built around.
Flux
CNCF's other major GitOps operator.
Spinnaker
Multi-cloud continuous delivery, originally built at Netflix.
Argo Rollouts
Blue-GreenCanaryRolling Updates
LaunchDarklyFlagsmithUnleash
AWS
Widest adoption, by far the deepest service catalog.
EC2S3VPCIAMLambdaEKSRDSDynamoDBCloudFrontRoute 53CloudWatch
Certifications
Cloud Practitioner→Solutions Architect – Associate→SysOps Administrator – Associate→DevOps Engineer – Professional→Solutions Architect – Professional
Azure
The default in Microsoft-centric enterprises.
Virtual MachinesBlob StorageVNetEntra IDFunctionsAKSAzure SQLCosmos DB
Certifications
AZ-900 Fundamentals→AZ-104 Administrator→AZ-400 DevOps Engineer Expert→AZ-305 Solutions Architect Expert
Google Cloud
Strong GKE and data-platform story.
Compute EngineCloud StorageVPCIAMCloud FunctionsGKEBigQuery
Certifications
Associate Cloud Engineer→Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer→Professional Cloud Architect
DigitalOcean
Simple, developer-friendly cloud for smaller teams.
Alibaba Cloud
The dominant cloud provider across Asia-Pacific.
Oracle Cloud (OCI)IBM Cloud
VMware
The default enterprise on-prem virtualization stack.
OpenStack
Open-source private cloud infrastructure.
ProxmoxNutanixHyper-V
Prometheus
The open-source default for metrics collection and alerting.
Grafana
The visualization layer for Prometheus, Loki, and almost everything else.
VictoriaMetricsThanosCortexMimirInfluxDBGraphite
Elastic Stack (ELK)
Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana — log search at scale.
Fluentd
Unified logging layer and log forwarder.
Fluent Bit
Lightweight log/metrics shipper built for containers.
OpenSearchGrafana LokiGraylog
Jaeger
Distributed tracing purpose-built for microservices.
OpenTelemetry
The vendor-neutral instrumentation standard everything is converging on.
ZipkinGrafana Tempo
Datadog
Full-stack SaaS observability, billed by usage.
New Relic
APM-first commercial observability platform.
Splunk
The most powerful — and most expensive — log search platform.
DynatraceAppDynamicsHoneycombSumo Logic
PingdomUptimeRobotCheckly
Istio
The richest feature set: traffic control, security, and observability.
Linkerd
Lightweight, Kubernetes-native, the lowest operational overhead.
Consul
HashiCorp's mesh — strong for hybrid VM plus Kubernetes environments.
Envoy
The high-performance proxy powering Istio and Consul underneath.
Kuma
KongApigeeAWS API GatewayAmbassador / Emissary
NGINX
The most common ingress controller and reverse proxy.
Cloudflare
CDN, DDoS protection, and edge networking.
HAProxyContourFastlyAkamai
HashiCorp Vault
Dynamic secrets, encryption as a service, and PKI.
1Password
Team secrets and credential vaulting with a developer CLI.
AWS Secrets ManagerAzure Key VaultGCP Secret ManagerDopplerInfisicalExternal Secrets Operator
SonarQube
Static analysis (SAST) and code-quality gating.
Checkmarx
Enterprise-grade SAST and SCA platform.
SemgrepCodeQLFortify
OWASP ZAPBurp Suite
Snyk
Developer-first dependency (SCA) and container scanning.
DependabotMend / WhiteSourceBlack Duck
Trivy
Open-source scanner for containers, IaC, and SBOMs.
GrypeClairAnchoreCheckovtfsecTerrascanKICS
GitLeaksTruffleHogdetect-secrets
Open Policy Agent (OPA)ConftestKyvernoOPA Gatekeeper
Falco
CNCF runtime security — detects anomalous container behavior live.
Aqua SecuritySysdigPrisma Cloud
Sigstore / CosignSLSAin-totoSyft (SBOM)
OktaKeycloakAWS IAMMicrosoft Entra ID
Palo Alto Networks
Enterprise firewalls and cloud security.
Fortinet
Widely deployed enterprise firewall and security fabric.
Check PointWeb Application Firewalls
OWASP
The standards body behind the OWASP Top 10 and ZAP.
SOC 2ISO 27001PCI-DSSHIPAACIS Benchmarks

Not a tool — a body of practice every SRE track is built on.

SLIs & SLOsError BudgetsGolden SignalsToil ReductionBlameless PostmortemsCapacity Planning
PagerDuty
The industry standard for on-call scheduling and escalation.
Opsgenie
Alerting tightly integrated with Jira and Atlassian tools.
Statuspage
Public-facing incident and uptime communication.
VictorOpsincident.ioFireHydrant

Injecting failure on purpose, before production does it for you.

GremlinLitmusChaosChaos MeshChaos MonkeyAWS Fault Injection SimulatorSteadybit
k6JMeterGatlingLocustArtillery
RundeckStackStorm
Backstage
Spotify's open-source developer portal — the dominant IDP framework.
PortCortexOpsLevelAtlassian Compass
CrossplaneKubernetes CRDs & OperatorsTerraform Cloud
Argo CD
The GitOps engine most internal developer platforms are built around.
Policy as CodeSoftware Templates / ScaffoldingGolden PathsSelf-Service APIs
PostgreSQL
The default open-source relational database.
MySQL
Still the most widely deployed relational database in the world.
Oracle DBMS SQL ServerAmazon Aurora
MongoDB
The default document database.
CassandraDynamoDBCouchDB
Redis
In-memory cache and data-structure store.
Memcached
Elasticsearch
The most common self-hosted search engine.
OpenSearchSolr
Apache Kafka
The standard for event streaming at scale.
RabbitMQ
The traditional message queue and broker.
ActiveMQNATSAmazon SQS / SNSGoogle Pub/SubAzure Service BusApache Pulsar
Apache AirflowdbtApache Spark
KubecostInfracostCloudHealth (Broadcom)CloudabilityVantageHarness CCM
AWS Cost ExplorerAzure Cost ManagementGCP Cost Management
Showback / ChargebackRightsizingReserved Instances / Savings PlansSpot Instances
Certifications
FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP)→FinOps Certified Engineer
MLflow
Experiment tracking and model registry.
Ray
Distributed compute for both training and serving.
KubeflowAmazon SageMakerVertex AIAzure MLMetaflow
PyTorch
The dominant deep-learning framework.
TensorFlow
Google's production-grade ML framework.
Hugging Face
Model hub and tooling for open LLMs.
JAX
vLLMTensorRT-LLMTriton Inference ServerOllamaLocalAI
LangChain
Framework for building LLM-powered applications.
LlamaIndexLangSmithLangfuseWeights & BiasesArize Phoenix
NVIDIA
GPU hardware and the CUDA / inference software stack.
GPU OperatorKubernetes device pluginsVolcano / Kueue
PineconeWeaviateMilvusQdrantpgvector
CNCF
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation — steward of this entire ecosystem.
12-Factor App MethodologyMicroservices Architecture
Kubernetes
Cloud native computing's literal foundation.
k3s
Lightweight Kubernetes distribution built for edge and resource-constrained clusters.
Istio
The richest-featured mesh, born cloud native.
Cilium
eBPF-based networking, observability, and security.
CalicoFlannel
Argo CD
The GitOps engine most cloud native platforms are built around.
Flux
CNCF's other major GitOps operator.
Rook
Cloud native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes.
Ceph
The distributed storage system Rook most commonly orchestrates.
Longhorn
Lightweight, Kubernetes-native distributed block storage.
Knative
Kubernetes-based platform for serverless workloads.
OpenFaaS
Functions-as-a-service, deployable on any Kubernetes cluster.
AWS LambdaAzure FunctionsGoogle Cloud Functions
etcd
The distributed key-value store every Kubernetes cluster's state lives in.