Do you have a website / blog or any other hobby project? You can learn basics by automating its deployment. Let's say you will go with public cloud: Amazon or

Do you have a website / blog or any other hobby project? You can learn basics by automating its deployment. Let's say you will go with public cloud: Amazon or Google. Create a small basic infrastructure with some automation tool such as terraform. For example a VPC with private subnets and two small instances in different availability zones. Another instance for NAT and a load balancer. Then use Ansible / Puppet / Chef to automate deployment of your application, make sure you can deploy without any outage to the service (set up some health check to verify your app is always up). Perhaps deploy the app in a container. Automate security settings to lock down ports. Automate SSL certificate renewal with let's encrypt. You can even take it a step further and automate deployment of a PaaS like Kubernetes or CloudFoundry and deploy your blog / website there. Next task would be setting up CI pipeline and continuous deployments. Integrate it with PaaS. Where do you store all secrets and credentials? Look at solutions such as Vault from hachicorp or Ansible Vault. There's a lot to learn by just automating everything about a simple hobby project or blog. Of course after you're done with this scale down all this crazy infrastructure so you don't pay $200 for a blog.