A couple years ago I was working at a start-up on a team of about 3 developers. I was 20 years old and knew nothing about configuration management, but we neede

A couple years ago I was working at a start-up on a team of about 3 developers. I was 20 years old and knew nothing about configuration management, but we needed it, so I bought a book ("x for devops" - trying not to advertise), and got an automation pipeline in place that got the job done. Cannot stress enough to new developers how you should have one of Ansible, Puppet, etc., framework under your belt to improve your ability to build software products. I'd recommend picking one that works equally good with old legacy systems, rather then just whatever is new like Kubernetes, because it will seriously broaden your career options and make you an asset to almost every software company. EDIT: to clarify, k8s can obviously be used with legacy software applications. But the idea was that if you get hired by $some_old_PHP_shop throwing Ansible into the mix may have significantly less friction then convincing whoever is in charge to start maintaining k8s clusters.