Knowledge Framework

A mental model I use to organise — and communicate — the skills that underpin a career in Cloud & DevOps engineering. The pyramid has five layers: each one builds on the tier below it.

Knowledge pyramid for cloud and DevOps engineering, version 2 Five horizontal tiers from general foundations at the bottom to architect at the top. Layer 2 has four sub-tiles, with the engineering tile dashed to mark it as an optional alternate entry path for telecom or electronics backgrounds. All other layers have three sub-tiles. L5 Architect / lead Senior+ System design Multi-cluster, HA Leadership Mentoring, hiring Strategy Roadmap, vendors L4 Cloud & DevOps Mid–senior Kubernetes Docker, OpenShift Cloud platforms AWS, Azure, GCP SRE & ops IaC, CI/CD, obs. L3 Practitioner Junior–mid Linux & shell Bash, sysadmin Code & Git Python, Go, Git Networking TCP/IP, TLS, DNS L2 CS / EE core University Programming Logic, types Systems OS, memory Net & data TCP/IP, SQL Engineering Signals, EE L1 Foundations School + uni Mathematics Algebra, calculus Languages Italian, English Method Critical thinking

L1 — Foundations

Mathematics, language, and scientific method. These are school- and university-level building blocks: algebra, calculus, logic, fluency in Italian and English, and the habit of forming hypotheses then testing them. Everything above rests on this layer.

L2 — CS / EE Core

University-level computer science and, in my case, electrical engineering. Programming fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, type systems), operating systems and memory management, networking theory (OSI model, TCP/IP), and databases. The dashed Engineering tile marks the alternate entry path I took through telecommunications and signal processing — it’s not required, but it gives useful intuition about protocols, latency, and reliability.

L3 — Practitioner Toolkit

The hands-on skills a junior-to-mid engineer uses daily: Linux system administration and shell scripting; writing production code in Python or Go and managing it with Git; practical networking — configuring DNS, debugging TLS handshakes, reading packet captures. This is where academic knowledge turns into operational muscle.

L4 — Cloud & DevOps Specialty

The domain layer. Kubernetes and container orchestration (Docker, OpenShift, Helm); cloud platform fluency across AWS, Azure, and GCP; and SRE & operations practices — Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible), CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD), and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK). Mid-to-senior territory.

L5 — Architect / Lead

System design at scale (multi-cluster, high-availability, disaster recovery), leadership (mentoring juniors, conducting hiring loops, running incident reviews), and strategy (technology roadmaps, vendor evaluation, budget planning). This is where technical depth meets organisational impact.

Version 2 — April 2026