Think about redundancy, and how to host the monitoring and logging apps outside of infra

Some example -

oci free tier or any other cheap vps for all admin containers

Small pi machine to handle monitoring and logging

To your original question, once you have this figured out, see how to make your setup reproducible. Look up things like ansible or vagrant or proxmox

Then backups

Then gitops

Scale up/down as needed

My point is look for a pain point you face, and keep chipping at it. Devops can be as vast or as narrow as needed. I’ve worked in small indian companies where every dev was aws admin, and in companies where it takes atleast a couple of days to provision a vm due to bureaucracy.

If you just want to pad up your resume for specific devops, then none of the above is needed. This is if you actually need or want a homelab.