[joshavant]

Here's my strategy:

- Setup VMs locally, on your development machine. (This eliminates the cost of hosting but gives you all the technical learning opportunities). My development machine is macOS and UTM has been an excellent app to manage these VMs. You can eventually model your VM's configuration around what resources your VPS will have on AWS/DO (e.g. 1GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, etc).

- Learn the basics of Ansible, in order to provision a server (local or remote). I did the course on KodeKloud.com and found it great to getting me going quickly.

- Write Ansible playbooks to provision your local VM as you would want your VPS on AWS/DO/etc to work. Ansible Galaxy is a repository of many community-supplied roles for common tasks/services. You could consult these for best practices on building your own playbooks or totally offload provisioning onto those roles.

- Once you're comfortable getting your local VM setup, point your Ansible playbook at an AWS/DO VM and put it online!

My high-level roadmap has been to build my own Ansible playbook to provision a Ubuntu server to CIS Level 2.

CIS benchmarks define security controls for a few of the more common aspects of DevOps work (e.g. Ubuntu OS hardening, AWS account security, Docker host, etc). They're freely available and there's many well-maintained scripts that can both audit and provision your host to the standard. I've been using the benchmarks as an easy to way to self-teach security aspects (and validate I've done it correctly). Level 2 is the standard used to handle financial information and medical records, so it's probably the most secure you'll ever need to go.

Once I have a provisioning playbook to stand up a secure host with some services (Nginx, Redis, etc), the next goal on my roadmap is learn Terraform to configure + deploy a personal cloud of services to AWS/DO/etc.

[ctxc]

This is pretty comprehensive. Thanks! KodeKloud looks interesting.