Linux Academy is how I went from dude working at a call center for an insurance company to Linux SysAdmin/AWS SA interviewing for jobs at Fortune 500 companies and Amazon.

I recommend the free Linux Foundation courses on EdX:

Introduction to Linux https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-linux

Introduction to Kubernetes https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-kubernetes

Disclosure: CNCF funded the Kubernetes course development.

Guide to the Systems Administration Body of Knowledge

http://sabok.org

Training program to make a Novice System Administrator (2016)

http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/training-program-to-make-a-...

There's nothing like hands-on experience. Go set up a VM, and read the digital ocean docs. They're some of the best resources out there. Go start reading the arch linux wiki, that has some nice information on configuring services. Look into docker and investigate it. Think about how these things are put together. Understand business needs and how things fit together to make money.

Linux Academy is the best training provider for this that I've seen so far.

Seconded, LA, while not perfect, is probably your best online learning path.

Or, even better, find a server/hosting company/datacenter, and insist on interning/working for free/peanuts as a NOC Tech. You'll learn all the SA/networking/Linux/DNS etc fundamentals for sure, and it's a great foot in the door into the tech industry. If you're half way decent, you'll move up the chain quickly.

Not either/or. Both/and.

You're going to learn the best by doing it with your hands.

It'll cement what you're learning from the training.

Fully agree. I mainly learned by doing the latter route (started as a NOC Tech). If LA had existed then, it definitely would have been a nice compliment.

I like the mindset of people wanting to learn SA/fundamentals though. Far too many are skipping the needful whilst diving straight to cloud/serverless.

A few sysadmin and devops curriculum resources; though none but Beaker and Molecule are interactive with any sort of testing AFAIU:

"System Administrator" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_administrator

"Software Configuration Management" (SCM) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_configuration_managem...

"DevOps" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps

"OpsSchool Curriculum" http://www.opsschool.org

- Soft Skills 101, 201

- Labs Exercises

- Free. Contribute

awesome-sysadmin > configuration-management https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin/blob/master/README...

- This could list reusable module collections such as Puppet Forge and Ansible Galaxy;

- And module testing tools like Puppet Beaker and Ansible Molecule (that can use Vagrant or Docker to test a [set of] machines)

https://github.com/stack72/ops-books

- I'd add "Time Management for System Administrators" (2005)

https://landing.google.com/sre/books/

- There's now a "Site Reliability Workbook" to go along with the Google SRE book. Both are free online.

https://response.pagerduty.com

- The PagerDuty Incident Response Documentation is also free online.

- OpsGenie has a free plan also with incident response alerting and on-call management.

There are a number of awesome-devops lists.

Minikube and microk8s package Kubernetes into a nice bundle of distributed systems components that'll run on Lin, Mac, Win. You can convert docker-compose.yml configs to Kubernetes pods when you decide that it should've been HA with a load balancer SPOF and x.509 certs and a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) from the start!

I just found these resources from a real live company in the GitLab Handbook:

Handbook > Engineering > Infrastructure https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure...

Handbook > Engineering > Ops https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ops/

(Sysadmins are part of teams that solve business and scientific experiment problems for people that are part of organizations' teams)