Cloud & DevOps

Understand the building blocks of a cloud application and how to choose services for a workload.

• IaaS, PaaS and SaaS; public, private and hybrid cloud models.
• Regions, availability zones, compute, object storage and managed databases.
• Virtual networks, subnets, routing, DNS and load-balancing concepts.
• Shared responsibility, identity permissions, availability and cost awareness.

Practical exerciseDraw a cloud architecture for a small web application and explain its security, availability and cost choices.

Build practical foundations for managing systems and collaborating on application changes.

• Files, permissions, users, processes, services and package management.
• Networking checks, logs and troubleshooting from the command line.
• Shell variables, conditions, loops and reusable administration scripts.
• Git commits, branches, pull requests, merge conflicts and repository hygiene.

Practical exerciseWrite a service health-check script and submit it through a documented Git workflow.

Trace a change from source control through automated checks to a release.

• Build, test, package and deployment stages in a CI/CD pipeline.
• Pipeline triggers, jobs, dependencies and build artefacts.
• Environment configuration, secrets, approvals and release controls.
• GitHub Actions and Jenkins concepts; diagnosing failed pipeline stages.

Practical exerciseCreate a pipeline for a sample application with automated checks, an artefact and a controlled deployment step.

Package an application with its dependencies and run it consistently across environments.

• Images, containers, registries, Dockerfiles and image layers.
• Ports, container networks, volumes and environment variables.
• Multi-stage builds, smaller images and non-root execution.
• Container logs, health checks and local multi-service applications.

Practical exerciseContainerise a sample application and database, then document configuration, startup and troubleshooting.

Explore how container workloads are scheduled, exposed and maintained.

• Clusters, nodes, pods, deployments and replica sets.
• Services, ingress concepts, namespaces and configuration.
• Readiness and liveness checks, resource requests and limits.
• Rolling updates, rollback, scaling, logs and workload troubleshooting.

Practical exerciseDeploy a sample workload in a training cluster and investigate a failed rollout using events and logs.

Manage infrastructure through repeatable definitions instead of untracked manual steps.

• Terraform providers, resources, variables, outputs and modules.
• Plan and apply workflows, state management and change review.
• Configuration management and Ansible inventory/playbook concepts.
• Environment separation, secret handling, drift and safe resource cleanup.

Practical exerciseDefine a small infrastructure environment as code and document how to provision, change and remove it safely.

Understand how teams detect problems and improve the safety of software delivery.

• Metrics, logs and traces; dashboards and actionable alerts.
• Availability targets, incident response, backups and recovery plans.
• Dependency and image scanning, least privilege and pipeline secret protection.
• Performance checks, resource utilisation and cloud cost reviews.

Practical exerciseCreate a monitoring and incident checklist for a deployed application, including rollback and recovery steps.

Bring source control, containers, automation and operations together in one delivery workflow.

• Repository structure and a documented application architecture.
• Automated tests, image builds and environment-specific deployment.
• Infrastructure definitions, monitoring and a release runbook.
• Cloud and DevOps interview scenarios: failed deployments, permissions and service outages.

Practical exercisePresent an application delivery project with a pipeline diagram, operational evidence and a troubleshooting walkthrough.