I am a front end developer but I have to learn some DevOps'y things like Docker, Ansible, AWS, deployments, etc... Any good starting points and resources to get this ship moving?
Here is the complete course on Devops from Edureka.
It has over 50 videos covering everything from Docker, Jenkins, Testing , Anisole etc.
Its a paid certification course from Edureka and certification cost is nearly 17000 INR (265$) , they have released the videos for everyone.
I'd say look at this list for a DevOps video course. They are very detailed and updated so you get a nice walkthrough the whole process.
Start with them one at a time. Jumping into everything at once is very overwhelming. I would start with AWS (plenty of resources out there) then Ansible (their docs are pretty good) and finally Docker. Deployments can very simple or very complex. The easier you make your build the easier the deployment will be.
Disclaimer: Docker is a way to build applications, it's not necessarily a DevOps thing.
Let me answer this by trying to say what DevOps is all about and how we do it at Hashnode. I'll go into how you can get started with it in the second part of my answer.
All we're trying to do is make sure how fast a change made in your development repository gets shipped to production. Besides the deployment side of things, a DevOps engineer's role is to set up load balancers, make sure the machines are up and if they are down, have a swift backup plan. These things are usually a one time set up thing. Deployments can also be a one time set up thing and we've achieved exactly that at Hashnode.
We have two types of deployment at Hashnode:
How to get started
You can use any tool that suits you best (please stay away from Jenkins though) to get started with. Build a test project, say a simple NodeJS hello world server. Try to bring it out on a cloud machine and access it over the internet (AWS can be intimidating for beginners, so I would recommend using a simple digital ocean machine). Now, try to check in to code to your repo. Your end goal should be to see it live on your digital ocean machine. The story I had linked earlier in the answer should be a good starting point for you to achieve this.