A New Way To Learn DevOps!

James Wickett and Ernest Mueller on the set for DevOps Fundamentals

We’re really excited to announce that James Wickett and I (Ernest Mueller) from The Agile Admin have put together a comprehensive DevOps Fundamentals course for lynda.com – a 3 hour long course covering everything from DevOps’ Agile and Lean roots, to DevOps culture to book recommendations and we even cover future .

As you know we here at The Agile Admin have spent a lot of time trying to help people learn DevOps – for a variety of reasons, many of the original DevOps practitioners were reluctant to even define the term, and were against a lot of the “DevOps” training/certification programs that sprung up because they weren’t really a good reflection of the real scope of the movement. While we understand those factors and agree with some of the specific critiques, we think it’s frankly been criminally difficult to learn DevOps with the available resources to date (best answer: go to a variety of events, crawl some random blogs and twitters, try to piece it together yourself over time, read some kinda-related books…).  The unicorns don’t need any more than that, but all four of the Agile Admins have worked in corporate IT before and have a lot of sympathy for all the folks out there that *don’t* work for Etsy or Netflix and are trying to figure out how this new world can make their work and life better.

In the course, we go into what we consider to be the three primary practice areas of DevOps – continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and reliability engineering. lynda has a free trial period so feel free and go give it a look to see if it could help you!

To give you an idea of what is included in the course, here’s the course outline. Even in a three hour class there’s no way to comprehensively cover these topics, so we tried to extensively point you out at other resources as we go and have a whole section on great DevOps learning resources.

• Introduction
  • Welcome
• DevOps Basics
  • What Is DevOps?
  • DevOps Core Values: CAMS
  • DevOps Principles: The Three Ways
  • Your DevOps Playbook
  • 10 Practices For DevOps Success (Part 1)
  • 10 Practices for DevOps Success (Part 2)
  • DevOps Tools: The Cart Or The Horse?
• DevOps: A Culture Problem
  • The IT Crowd and the Coming Storm
  • Use Your Words
  • Do Unto Others
  • Throwing Things Over Walls
  • Kaizen: Continuous Improvement
• The Building Blocks of DevOps
  • DevOps Building Block: Agile
  • DevOps Building Block: Lean
  • ITIL, ITSM, and the SDLC
• Infrastructure Automation
  • Infrastructure As Code
  • Golden Image to Foil Ball
  • Immutable Deployment
  • Your Infrastructure Toolchain
• Continuous Deployment
  • Small + Fast = Better
  • Continuous Integration Practices
  • The Continuous Delivery Pipeline
  • The Role of QA
  • Your CI Toolchain
• Reliability Engineering
  • Engineering Doesn’t End With Deployment
  • Design for Operation: Theory
  • Design for Operation: Practice
  • Operate for Design: Metrics and Monitoring
  • Operate for Design: Logging
  • Your SRE Toolchain
• Additional DevOps Resources
  • Unicorns, Horses, and Donkeys, Oh My
  • The 10 Best DevOps Books You Need To Read
  • Navigating the Series of Tubes
• The Future of DevOps
  • Cloud to Containers to Serverless
  • The Rugged Frontier of DevOps: Security
• Conclusion
  • Next Steps: Am I a DevOp Now?

We worked long and hard on the course and we think it represents all the must-know aspects of DevOps and can get you started down the path of implementation with a good foundation.  Check it out and let us know what you think!