(curious why you want to leave genetics because I'm an engineer and would like to go into computational genetics)

I'll just list a few tools I use on a daily basis

Kubernetes - Great platform for orchestrating containers, made my life a ton easier (Learn Docker and containers first)

Jenkins - Very powerful automation platform, great for setting up CI/CD pipelines

AWS - Good to get your feet wet in the public cloud space

Chef - Configuration management and infrastructure automation tool, you define how you want your workloads to look and it delivers

Terraform - Infrastructure as code, where Chef defines the configuration of an existing machine, terraform defines how that machine should be provisioned

In terms of core concepts, read up on CI/CD, Agile, and SDDC architecture.

Thanks! I am comfortable using Docker so I'll try to come up with a Kubernetes + AWS project.

AWS has an offering coming soon called EKS[0] however if you want to deploy a Kubernetes cluster to AWS sooner I would use kops[1]. however to under Kubernetes and to develop/deploy locally I would first try minikube[2] and get comfortable there before deploying into a cloud.

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/eks/ [1]: https://github.com/kubernetes/kops [2]: https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube

Dockers are probably my fav. Containers make it really easy to share projects