Expert DevOps: scale, reliability and security

About this track

The top of the DevOps path, for someone who can already containerise an application and deploy it through a pipeline. This track is about what happens after that: orchestrating many services, being able to answer questions about a running system instead of guessing, deciding how reliable is reliable enough and alerting on that, handling an incident calmly and learning from it properly, securing the supply chain, and understanding what your infrastructure actually costs. It is deliberately opinionated about when not to reach for the complicated answer. Work through the lessons in order, then take the exam to earn your certificate.

Every lesson is written and hosted here on Yanjye — you never leave the site. Work through them in order, then sit the exam to earn your certificate.

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Lessons

1. 1
   What Kubernetes actually does

   The problem orchestration solves, and the price of solving it that way.

   ~30 min
2. 2
   Pods, deployments, services and ingress

   The four objects that cover most of what you will actually write.

   ~35 min
3. 3
   Configuration, secrets and stateless design

   The application properties that make scaling and replacement possible.

   ~30 min
4. 4
   Scaling, requests and limits

   How capacity follows demand, and why the wrong limit causes the outage.

   ~30 min account needed
5. 5
   Observability: logs, metrics and traces

   The difference between having data and being able to answer a question.

   ~35 min account needed
6. 6
   SLOs, error budgets and alerts that mean something

   Deciding how reliable is reliable enough, and only waking people for that.

   ~30 min account needed
7. 7
   Running an incident

   Roles, communication and the discipline of restoring service before understanding it.

   ~30 min account needed
8. 8
   Postmortems that change something

   Why blame produces worse systems, and what to write instead.

   ~25 min account needed
9. 9
   Backups and disaster recovery you have tested

   The one area where being wrong is unrecoverable.

   ~30 min account needed
10. 10
    Security: supply chain and least privilege

    The attacks that actually happen, and the controls that actually stop them.

    ~35 min account needed
11. 11
    What it costs, and why

    Reading a cloud bill and finding the few lines that are most of it.

    ~25 min account needed
12. 12
    Platform engineering, and where to go from here

    Turning what you know into something a whole organisation can use.

    ~25 min account needed