Free tutorial · 25 lessons
DevOps Tutorial
DevOps from the ground up: Linux and the shell, robust bash scripts, Git, CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, Docker, Compose and Kubernetes, configuration and secrets, monitoring, SLOs and incident response. Shell and Git examples were run in real bash; concept examples are Python you can run in the browser.
DevOps Basics
- DevOps Introduction — What DevOps is, the problems it solves, and the skills and tools this tutorial covers.
- DevOps Culture and DORA Metrics — The principles behind DevOps and the four DORA metrics teams use to measure delivery performance.
- DevOps History & Milestones — How DevOps grew out of agile and the "wall" between developers and operations, the tools and books that shaped it, from Git and Jenkins to Docker, Kubernetes and GitHub Actions, and what modern DevOps looks like today.
Linux and the Shell
- Linux Files and Directories — Navigate and manage the Linux file system from the shell: paths, directories, files and finding things.
- Users and Permissions — Read and change Linux file permissions, understand users and groups, and why containers shouldn't run as root.
- Processes, Services and Signals — Inspect processes, manage services with systemd, and handle signals like SIGTERM for graceful shutdowns.
- Shell Scripting Basics — Variables, conditions, loops, functions and exit codes: the bash you need for automation and CI steps.
- Writing Robust Scripts — Make bash scripts fail fast and clean up after themselves with set -euo pipefail, traps, quoting and ShellCheck.
- Text Processing: grep, sed, awk — Search and summarise logs and command output with grep, sort, uniq, cut, sed and awk.
- Working with JSON and YAML — Read and transform JSON with jq, and write YAML for CI pipelines and Kubernetes without the classic mistakes.
Git and CI/CD
- Git Basics — Track changes with Git: repositories, commits, the staging area, history and undoing mistakes.
- Branches, Pull Requests and Merging — Work in branches, review with pull requests, merge safely, and choose between trunk-based development and long-lived branches.
- Continuous Integration Pipelines — Build a CI pipeline with GitHub Actions: triggers, jobs, steps, caching, secrets and the checks that protect main.
- Versioning and Artifacts — Version releases with semantic versioning and Git tags, and store build outputs in artifact and container registries.
- Deployment Strategies — Rolling, blue-green and canary deployments, feature flags, and rolling back safely.
Containers and Kubernetes
- Containers and Docker — What containers are, how images and containers differ, and the Docker commands you'll use every day.
- Writing Good Dockerfiles — Small, fast, secure images: layer caching, multi-stage builds, non-root users, .dockerignore and pinned base images.
- Docker Compose — Run an app with its database and cache locally with one Docker Compose file: services, networks, volumes and health checks.
- Kubernetes Basics — Pods, Deployments, Services and the declarative reconciliation loop that makes Kubernetes self-healing.
- Rolling Updates, Probes and Resources — How Kubernetes rolls out new versions, why readiness probes and graceful shutdown matter, and how to set requests and limits.
- Configuration and Secrets — Keep configuration out of images and secrets out of Git: environment variables, ConfigMaps, secret managers and rotation.
Operating in Production
- Monitoring, Logging and Tracing — The three pillars of observability, the golden signals to watch, and why percentiles beat averages.
- SLOs, Error Budgets and Alerts — Define service level objectives, turn them into error budgets, and alert on burn rate instead of every blip.
- Incident Response and Postmortems — Handle production incidents calmly: roles, mitigation before root cause, communication, and blameless postmortems.
- DevOps Next Steps — Where to go next: the DevOps in Production course, Terraform, cloud networking, quizzes and interview questions.