DevOps Fundamentals Ideas for the new Domain 5 in the Version 004.

Great topic Michael!

A resource that I found very useful was this from Altassian. Agile development and Devops methods are compatible but not the same thing.

This article walks through both agile development (the agile manifesto) and introduces a couple of the sources of Devops methodology (the Devops three ways).

The meaning of DevOps has changed dramatically since Werner Vogels originally started the idea back in 2006 with "You build it, you ship it."

It originally meant putting more and more shipping responsibility in the hands of developers - this came in the form of a few frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Heroku, but was really popularized by the Docker container model, which led to the split from the original term.

As container development practices matured, DevOps became more associated with development types that placed "most" deployment in the hands of developers (this later became known as GitOps), and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) became the role that handled the stuff that developers really couldn't do in larger projects, such as fancy orchestration (e.g., Jenkins and large scale Kubernetes) as well as monitoring (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana), security (e.g., Stackhawk, IAM), and end-to-end solutions (e.g., OpenShift).

Today, DevOps is less understood as a term than it original was - but in general, it's used to denote developers who have some experience with some forms of deployment-related activity.

For Cloud+, I'd personally recommend focusing only on SRE-style topics and from that viewpoint, given the audience for the certification.
My two cents

As someone who has spent the last decade working as a developer, devops engineer, SRE, and cloud architect for a local university incubator, I can tell you that there are no shortcuts when it comes to building skills in the area of devops and SRE.

What I can tell you is what I designed for my cloud program at triOS College, which prepares students for what they'll need to know about devops and SRE today, and in a way that received extreme praise all around from our industry PAC members who employ our grads.

After getting enough practice in Linux administration (Linux+ topics), Network administration (more=better), and security (CySA+ topics), we get our students comfortable with Proxmox VE in depth - they install it on their own system on Hyper-V with nested virtualization and use it to run both Linux and Windows Server VMs and LXC containers. They practice all Proxmox VE admin concepts (SDN configuration, 2FA for all accounts in the pve Kerberos realm, storage types, backups, monitoring, etc.).

Then we have them configure their Proxmox VE host OS into an Ansible control node and teach them YAML and Ansible CM (in depth!) to automate the configuration of all of the VMs and containers in their Proxmox infrastructure. They end by assembling their Ansible playbooks and supporting files into Ansible Roles that are pushed to their own GitHub repos.

Then we install Kubernetes (K3s from Rancher) on one of the VMs and teach Kubernetes in depth for building, deploying, and managing containerized microservices (this is easy after Ansible because it's all YAML). This includes connecting storage to microservices, running supporting sidecar containers, the networking types, configuration of services and load balancers, etc.

Then we finish by covering Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (their generous free tier) using their OCI-I and II curriculum. By this time, copying SSH keys for administration and setting up the Ansible CM, services (e.g., load balancers), storage, etc. is easy for students to grasp - and more importantly - allows us to finally talk about the different situations where they'd need to do these things.

Hope this helps!

Michael Schmitz said:

jason: But you have much more time then 5 Days to go through all this.. i have max 5 days in my Courses..... So less time for the Pratical World.

Click to expand...

Correct, I have a minimum of 160 days to build up prerequisite skills to the material I described, and 40 days to cover the actual material I described. From a learning perspective, I wouldn't recommend doing it in less than that time.