Build, ship and operate real cloud infrastructure
A hands-on operations path — Linux and the shell, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, core AWS services, Terraform, and Kubernetes — then into the territory that separates "I ran a tutorial" from "I can operate this in production": service mesh, GitOps, serverless, multi-cloud, advanced Terraform, SRE practice, chaos engineering, and FinOps. It ends with a two-week capstone pipeline that builds, tests and deploys a real service to the cloud automatically.
Prerequisites & tooling
What you should already know
- Basic programming in any language — you're not learning to code here
- Comfortable opening a terminal, even if you're not fluent in it yet
- No prior Linux, cloud or DevOps experience required
- A Linux/macOS machine or WSL2 on Windows, plus a free-tier AWS account
Stack you'll work with
The same tools platform and DevOps teams use to run real production infrastructure.
Your 26-week learning path
Twenty-two modules, from your first shell script through service mesh, GitOps, multi-cloud and SRE practice, to a two-week capstone pipeline you build and deploy to Kubernetes on real cloud infrastructure.
Linux Fundamentals & the Command Line
Get fluent in the environment every other tool in this course runs on.
- The Linux filesystem, navigation & permissions
- Processes, package managers & installing your toolbox
- Bash scripting basics & SSH into a remote server
Networking Basics & Git for Ops
The networking concepts and version-control habits every later week assumes.
- IP addressing, DNS, ports & the request/response model
- TLS, firewalls & reading a
curl -vtrace - Branching workflows & Git as an ops audit trail
Docker & Containerization Fundamentals
Package an application so it runs identically everywhere.
- Images, layers & containers vs. virtual machines
- Writing a lean, multi-stage
Dockerfile - Volumes, networking & the container lifecycle
Docker Compose & Container Registries
Run multi-container applications and ship images to production.
- Multi-service apps with
docker compose - Tagging, pushing & pulling from a registry (Docker Hub / ECR)
- Image scanning & keeping image size down
CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub Actions
Automate build, test and deploy on every push.
- Workflows, jobs, runners & secrets
- Build-test-push pipelines for a containerized app
- Environments, approvals & deployment strategies
Cloud Computing Fundamentals (AWS)
The core services almost every cloud architecture is built from.
- IAM users, roles & the principle of least privilege
- EC2, S3 & a VPC's subnets, route tables and security groups
- The AWS CLI & cost-control basics
Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
Stop clicking in a console — describe infrastructure as versioned code.
- Providers, resources, state & the plan/apply loop
- Variables, outputs & reusable modules
- Remote state & safe collaboration on shared infrastructure
Kubernetes Fundamentals
The orchestrator behind most production container deployments.
- Pods, Deployments, Services & the control plane
kubectl& declarative YAML manifests- ConfigMaps, Secrets & a local cluster with kind/minikube
Kubernetes in Production
Take a cluster from "it runs" to "it scales and heals itself."
- Ingress, load balancing & horizontal pod autoscaling
- Packaging apps with Helm charts
- Rolling updates, probes & self-healing
Observability: Monitoring, Logging & Alerting
Know what your infrastructure is doing before a customer tells you.
- Metrics with Prometheus & dashboards in Grafana
- Centralized, structured logging
- Alerting rules & on-call basics
Security & DevSecOps
Bake security into the pipeline instead of bolting it on after.
- Secrets management & not committing credentials
- Dependency & image scanning in CI
- Least-privilege IAM & network policies in Kubernetes
Advanced Kubernetes: StatefulSets, Jobs & Operators
Go beyond stateless Deployments into the workload types production clusters actually run.
- StatefulSets, stable network identity & PersistentVolumeClaims
- Jobs, CronJobs & run-to-completion workloads
- The Operator pattern & Custom Resource Definitions
Service Mesh: Istio & Linkerd Fundamentals
Move traffic management, retries and mTLS out of application code and into the platform.
- The sidecar proxy pattern & the data plane / control plane split
- Automatic mTLS, retries, timeouts & circuit breaking
- Traffic shifting for canary releases with VirtualServices
GitOps: Declarative Delivery with ArgoCD
Stop deploying with kubectl apply — make Git the single source of truth for cluster state.
- Push-based CI/CD vs. pull-based GitOps reconciliation
- ArgoCD Applications, sync policies & drift detection
- Multi-environment promotion with Kustomize overlays
Serverless on AWS: Lambda, API Gateway & Fargate
Ship compute that scales to zero and runs without you managing a single server.
- Lambda functions, cold starts & event sources
- API Gateway routes & request/response mapping
- Fargate for containers without managing EC2 or Kubernetes nodes
Multi-Cloud Fundamentals: Azure & GCP Core Services
Map everything you know from AWS onto the other two major clouds.
- Azure resource groups, VMs, Blob Storage & AKS vs. their AWS equivalents
- GCP projects, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage & GKE vs. their AWS equivalents
- Why teams go multi-cloud, and the real cost of doing it
Advanced Terraform: Testing, Workspaces & Policy as Code
Take Terraform from "it applies cleanly" to "a team can trust it without reading every diff."
- Workspaces & Terragrunt for managing multiple environments from one codebase
- Automated plan testing with Terratest
- Policy as code with OPA/Conftest to block non-compliant infrastructure
Site Reliability Engineering: SLIs, SLOs & Error Budgets
Turn "the site feels slow sometimes" into numbers a team can actually act on.
- SLIs, SLOs, SLAs & the error budget that ties them together
- Burn-rate alerting instead of raw threshold alerts
- On-call rotations, runbooks & blameless postmortems
Chaos Engineering & Resilience Testing
Break things on purpose, on a schedule, before your users break them for you.
- The chaos engineering hypothesis-experiment loop
- Pod, network & latency fault injection with Chaos Mesh
- Game days & turning findings into concrete resilience fixes
Cost Optimization & FinOps
Cloud infrastructure has a bill — this week is about making it a deliberate one.
- Reading Cost Explorer & tagging resources for cost allocation
- Right-sizing, autoscaling & Spot instances
- Reserved capacity, Savings Plans & the FinOps team model
Databases & Stateful Workloads in the Cloud
Everything so far assumed a stateless app — this week is about the state it talks to.
- Managed databases (RDS, Aurora) vs. self-hosting in Kubernetes
- Backups, point-in-time recovery & tested restore procedures
- Read replicas, connection pooling & zero-downtime migrations
Capstone: Ship a Full CI/CD → Cloud Pipeline
Apply every module in one project — built, automated and running in the cloud.
- Terraform-provisioned AWS infrastructure with remote state
- A GitHub Actions pipeline deploying a containerized app to Kubernetes
- Portfolio-ready project you can show employers