Create an idealized cloud-native, K8s-based development and execution environment using modern tools
Learn Terraform for infrastructure deployment for dev, test, and prod environments. Objective is an immutable infrastructure, so avoid tools like Ansible and prefer rebuilding the infrastructure (VM images and containers) rather than updating underlying software
Learn how to create Helm charts for packaging applications to deploy software on a Kubernetes cluster (both for CI tests and production deployments)
Learn to use Packer for creating VM images from distribution install media and Vagrant for customizing them (mostly to de-mystify the idea of base images/containers that are magically supplied by others)
Learn to use Vault for secrets management (because it is important to separate management of secrets from code)
Explore various ways of managing security policy outside of code (e.g., JSON Web Tokens, Istio service mesh for hardening intra-cluster security in k8s, maybe Open Policy Agent or Keycloak for policy management and user permissions)
Microcks for helping with automated integration tests during CI, https://swagger.io/ for defining service API
Become comfortable with at least one cloud provider using their free tier (probably AWS or Google)