DevOps Course

Lesson 1 • Measuring DevOps Success

Introduces DORA metrics and other KPIs for tracking DevOps maturity. Connects measurement to continuous improvement cycles.

Lesson 2 • History and Evolution of DevOps

Traces DevOps from Agile and Lean roots to modern practice. Provides context for why DevOps emerged and what problems it solves.

Lesson 3 • Core DevOps Principles

Covers CALMS framework: Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing. Connects principles to measurable delivery improvements.

Lesson 1 • Pull Requests and Code Review

Establishes peer review practices that catch defects early and share knowledge. Directly supports quality gates in CI pipelines.

Lesson 2 • Git Fundamentals

Covers core Git commands, repository structure, and commit history. Forms the technical baseline for all subsequent pipeline work.

Lesson 3 • Branching Strategies

Compares GitFlow, trunk-based development, and feature branching. Students select strategies aligned with team size and release cadence.

Lesson 1 • Optimizing Pipeline Performance

Reduces pipeline duration through caching, parallelism, and selective execution. Faster pipelines increase developer productivity and adoption.

Lesson 2 • Pipeline as Code

Teaches declarative pipeline definitions stored in version control. Connects pipeline-as-code to reproducibility and auditability.

Lesson 3 • Automated Testing in CI

Integrates unit, integration, and static analysis tests into pipeline stages. Ensures code quality gates block broken builds automatically.

Lesson 4 • CI Security and Compliance Gates

Embeds security scanning and policy checks into CI to enforce standards early. Prepares students for shift-left security practices.

Lesson 1 • Building Docker Images

Covers Dockerfile syntax, layer caching, and multi-stage builds. Students produce lean, reproducible images ready for production.

Lesson 2 • Container Concepts and Architecture

Explains containers vs. virtual machines (VMs), namespaces, and cgroups. Provides the conceptual foundation for all Docker and orchestration work.

Lesson 3 • Container Image Security

Identifies and mitigates image vulnerabilities through scanning and hardening. Supports secure supply chain practices introduced in CI.

Lesson 4 • Container Registries and Distribution

Manages image storage, tagging conventions, and registry access controls. Prepares students for artifact promotion in continuous delivery (CD) pipelines.

Lesson 1 • Configuration and Secret Management

Uses ConfigMaps and Secrets to decouple configuration from container images. Reinforces twelve-factor app principles introduced in earlier chapters.

Lesson 2 • Kubernetes Architecture and Components

Maps control plane and worker node components and their interactions. Provides the mental model needed to troubleshoot cluster behavior.

Lesson 3 • Scaling and Resource Management

Configures resource requests, limits, and autoscaling policies for workloads. Ensures clusters use capacity efficiently under variable load.

Lesson 4 • Networking and Service Discovery

Explains Services, Ingress, and DNS-based discovery within a cluster. Connects networking to multi-tier application communication patterns.

Lesson 1 • Provisioning with Terraform

Covers Terraform syntax, providers, state backends, and module design. Students provision multi-resource environments from reusable modules.

Lesson 2 • IaC in CI/CD Pipelines

Automates plan, validate, and apply stages within existing CI pipelines. Connects IaC automation to the delivery workflows built in earlier chapters.

Lesson 3 • IaC Principles and Tooling Landscape

Contrasts declarative vs. imperative IaC and surveys leading tools. Sets the selection criteria students apply throughout the chapter.

Lesson 4 • Testing and Validating IaC

Integrates linting, policy checks, and integration tests into IaC workflows. Prevents misconfigurations from reaching production environments.

Lesson 1 • GitOps Principles and Workflows

Uses Git as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and app state. Connects GitOps to Kubernetes and IaC skills from prior chapters.

Lesson 2 • CD Security and Compliance

Enforces security controls and audit trails throughout the delivery pipeline. Ensures deployments meet organizational and regulatory requirements.

Lesson 3 • CD Concepts and Release Strategies

Distinguishes continuous delivery (CD) from continuous deployment and maps release patterns. Provides the decision framework for choosing deployment strategies.

Lesson 4 • Deployment Pipeline Design

Structures multi-stage pipelines with environment promotion and approval gates. Builds on CI pipeline skills to create end-to-end delivery workflows.

Lesson 1 • SLOs, SLAs, and Error Budgets

Defines service level objectives and uses error budgets to balance reliability and velocity. Provides the SRE framework for prioritizing reliability work.

Lesson 2 • Metrics Collection and Alerting

Configures metrics pipelines and threshold-based and anomaly alerts. Connects alerting to on-call workflows and incident response.

Lesson 3 • Observability Pillars: Logs, Metrics, Traces

Defines the three observability pillars and their complementary roles. Establishes the instrumentation strategy for all monitoring work in the chapter.

Lesson 4 • Log Management and Analysis

Centralizes logs from distributed systems and builds search and analysis workflows. Enables rapid root-cause identification during incidents.