Tag Archives: linkedin

Hey all! James and I are preparing to revise our LinkedIn Learning course, DevOps Foundations, a three hour set of videos designed to orient beginners in the whole scope of DevOps. 

We created the course in 2016 primarily because at the time there were no good introductions to DevOps. You needed to know what blogs to follow and what events to go to and that was it. Even the DevOps Handbook hadn’t come out yet. And this provided a very high barrier to entry to the field. And we believe in learning and collaboration so we knew what we had to do!

Since then, it’s been one of the top tech courses on LinkedIn Learning with over 400,000 learners so far and has generated a dozen other courses drilling down into detail in specific areas. The things that make it worth it to me is the people we run across who say “this helped me improve my career.” My favorite was one gentleman who pulled me aside at the Aqua Security booth at RSA back before the pandemic and said “Hey, I had just gotten out of the Army and was trying to get a good job, and so was looking at tech. Your course oriented me enough that I got a sales job here!” Being able to help people like that is a rare privilege and we really value it.

Please fill out our survey to let us know what you think are the key things someone needs to learn about DevOps – whether they have some existing dev or ops knowledge or are just getting into it!

Here’s the old table of contents for reference… A lot of this hasn’t changed, the basics are still the basics, but it has been 7 years and a lot has changed, some things to add, some things to change, some things to cut. Let us know your opinion!

• DevOps Basics
  • What Is DevOps? – Understand the meaning of DevOps and why you might care about it.
  • DevOps Core Values: CAMS – Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing are the core values of DevOps.
  • DevOps Principles: The Three Ways – The Three Ways can guide your strategic approach to DevOps.
  • Your DevOps Playbook – There’s a developing list of patterns and methodologies that can help you transition to DevOps.
  • Ten Practices for DevOps Success: 10 through 6 – Tactical, pragmatic tips for DevOps success in your organization
  • Ten Practices for DevOps Success: 5 through 1 – Tactical, pragmatic tips for DevOps success in your organization
  • DevOps Tools – the Cart Or The Horse? – The role of tools in DevOps and tips for selecting and using tooling to achieve your end goal.
• DevOps: A Culture Problem
  • The IT Crowd and the Coming Storm – Existing IT culture has both internal and external problems. Meanwhile, new challenges of scale and business cadence are pressing technology departments to change.
  • Use Your Words – Communication is the key to collaboration and solving problems when the stakes are high.
  • Do Unto Others – Build trust and respect and eliminate blame and hostility in your teams.
  • Throwing Things Over Walls – Break down the silos and establish a culture of responsibility and ownership, and align your teams to support the flow of concept to cash.
  • Kaizen: Continuous Improvement – Everything can be iterated upon to make it better – even yourself!
• The Building Blocks of DevOps
  • DevOps Building Block: Agile – DevOps extends Agile principles to include deployment and operations.
  • DevOps Building Block: Lean – Understanding Lean can be the difference between a DevOps implementation that helps you achieve your company’s goals and one that’s just “the same but different.”
  • ITIL, ITSM, and the SDLC – Where does the “old school” fit in to a DevOps world?
• Infrastructure Automation
  • Infrastructure As Code – Take a fundamentally different approach to building distributed systems whether in the datacenter or in the cloud.
  • Golden Image to Foil Ball – Learn about configuration mangement, automated provisioning, deployment and orchestration.
  • Immutable Deployment – With the rise of containers, different CM patterns are gaining currency.
  • Your Infrastructure Toolchain – Common tools in this space include Chef, Puppet, and Ansible but new container-based approaches like docker are on the rise. [Yes, this was before terraform and kubernetes, definitely places to update]
• Continuous Delivery
  • Small + Fast = Better – Delivering small batches of change quickly reduces risk, improves quality, and restricts technical debt.
  • Continuous Integration Practices – Learn about Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment, which you need and how to get there.
  • The Continuous Delivery Pipeline
  • The Role Of QA – Move from manual testing to automated with Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD).
  • Your CI Toolchain – From Github to Jenkins, your code pipeline consists of many different parts with specific functions.
• Reliability Engineering
  • Engineering Doesn’t End With Deployment – If you build it, you run it and other patterns for reliability engineering.
  • Design For Operation – Theory – Building a system to be resilient is the highest leverage step in ensuring high uptime and low MTTR.
  • Design For Operation – Practice – Ops has learned hard lessons about resiliency over the years – take it into account when building your applications.
  • Operate For Design: Metrics and Monitoring – Operational support isn’t just keeping the systems up, it provides crucial feedback back into the development cycle. {Yes, the kids call this observability now]
  • Operate for Design: Logging
  • Your SRE Toolchain – Monitoring, troubleshooting, and metrics are a vital space in your tooling strategy.
• Additional DevOps Resources
  • Unicorns, Horses, and Donkeys, Oh My – In an emerging discipline, going to events to learn from other expert practitioners is your fastest route to success.
  • Ten Best DevOps Books You Need to Read – There’s a growing number of books on DevOps, here’s our top 10 reading list.
  • Navigating The Series of Tubes – DevOps information on the Web is fragmented and hard to find sometimes; here’s some of the best places to watch.
• The Future of DevOps
  • Cloud to Containers to Serverless – Profound changes to our computing model have arrived to challenge many of our established practices.
  • The Rugged Frontier of DevOps: Security – Security is changing and is rapidly uptaking the DevOps movement, we cover the major implications here. {Yes. the kids call this DevSecOps now]
• Conclusion
  • Next Steps: Am I a DevOp now? – Learn what next steps you should pursue for growing in DevOps understanding and practice.