DevOps Engineer

The journey

1. Practised under observation

   1. 01The machine, the shell and the networkThe ground everything stands on: the operating system as home territory, the terminal as an instrument, scripting as the first automation, and the protocol literacy the whole field assumes.Practised under observation

      MilestoneAt home on the machine

      A broken connection is taken apart layer by layer rather than guessed at, a script can be run twice without harm, and the machine answers the questions you ask it instead of the ones you remember.

2. From here, milestones are verified rather than practised.

   Verified against a real task

   1. 02Infrastructure as codeThe end of the snowflake, with infrastructure declared in a repository, provisioned reproducibly, and changed only through code.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneRebuilt from the repository

      Everything here can be built again from the repository alone, and a change somebody made by hand is treated as an incident rather than as a shortcut.

   2. 03Containers, images and the supply chainThe unit of deployment: applications packaged reproducibly, images built lean and trustworthy, and the software supply chain treated as an attack surface.Verified against a real task

      MilestonePackaged, promoted, and clean

      The artifact that reaches production is the one that was built rather than one rebuilt for the occasion, and no credential ever travels inside it.

   3. 04Continuous integration and deliveryThe path itself, with gates that actually gate, deployments that are reversible, and a release process boring by design.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneFrom commit to production, safely

      A failing gate is the end of that change, the way back is rehearsed before it is needed, and a change to stored data can be undone as readily as the code that used it.

   4. 05Observability and operationsRunning what you shipped: metrics, logs and traces engineered as one system, alerts humans respect, and incidents handled as engineering rather than heroics.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneVisible, and handled

      You hear about the failure from your own system before anybody else tells you, and a backup nobody has restored is not a backup.

   5. 06Orchestration and scaled workloadsMany machines, one system, with workloads that heal and scale by declaration and an honest threshold for taking on the complexity.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneScaled, healing, and justified

      Complexity is taken on only where you can say what it buys, and the limits a workload runs under come from what you measured rather than from what looked reasonable.

   6. 07Cloud platforms, security and costRunning on somebody else's computers responsibly: the provider-neutral primitive set, a security posture that holds, and a bill the business can defend.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneSecure, portable in the head, and affordable

      Nothing long-lived holds access to this estate, every grant answers what it would reach if it were stolen, and the monthly bill has two named drivers rather than a shrug.

   7. 08The DevOps Engineer in the organizationThe seat's real job: making other engineers faster and safer without becoming the ticket queue.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneFaster and safer, without the bottleneck

      Somebody else ships to production without you touching it, and nothing about the path lives only in your head.

3. 1. Capstone

      A delivery path an organization runs on

      A complete production delivery platform for a real application, proposed by you and approved by an instructor, built under observation, from infrastructure as code across environments through packaging, a gated pipeline, observability and orchestration to the cloud, cost and organisational layers of the seat.

      Defence

      You walk an instructor through your own platform: what in this system cannot be rebuilt from the repository and why that is acceptable, where the time between a commit and production actually goes, what happens when somebody changes production by hand, and what only you know about this system. The credential is not awarded if you cannot account for your own work.

   2. Credential

      High-assurance credential

      Evidence that you can make shipping safe, repeatable and boring for a whole organisation. It does not claim seniority, and it does not oblige any employer to accept it.

      See how proof works