As someone still in school, this type of article -- though inspiring-- kind of scares me, to be honest. I don't think I could do any one of the things mentioned in this article.
(I'm the author of this blog post)
I couldn't do all these things when I was in school :) I worked in companies for a few years and learned some engineering practices. Then I had basic skills to prototype my own side projects. Then after working on many silly side projects, I started Listen Notes.
And initially, Listen Notes was running on 3 tiny DigitalOcean servers ($5/month each?). I logged in each server to git pull to "deploy to production". Then I added things little by little, day by day. It's a process. The key is to get started. People say that showing up is 80% (or whatever percentage) of success. I think this is very true. Just get started and you'll figure out things along the way.
The first version of a web service can be as simple as flask app which you run in a screen session somewhere. Better to start somewhere than get overwhelmed and never do the thing at all.
Do you understand what the web, api, and DB servers are doing?
If your interested in Python and want to start small I can recommend Flask. Flask is smaller and could be more user friendly than Django.
Here’s a great tutorial. You’ll build a blog with Bootstrap, Python, Flask and SQLAlchemy.[1]
[1]https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTs4UjLw5MM6...
https://wakatime.com/blog/14-pirates-use-flask-the-navy-uses...
You take a project like this one step at a time. Some bits of it are relatively easy - setting up a few postgres servers doesn't take much knowledge. ElasticSearch is a little more obscure, but for the most part, things like this are running a few commands, and setting up a few config files with the help of docs and google. Same for Redis, nginx... etc. Which isn't to diminish devops - you can dive deep into each of these configurations and develop pretty complex setups, but by the time you actually need to you hope to be making enough money to pay someone else to do it.
You won't get everything perfect all the time. You'll have to revisit parts of the stack and tweak them. But you can take it a day at a time and do what you need to do.