DevOps Essentials

This introductory course is designed to help students explore and adopt DevOps in their organizations to improve innovation, agility and quality to support business outcomes. It addresses the benefits and challenges in evolving a DevOps approach to the application and service development lifecycle.

Audience

• Senior IT management (CIO/CTO), IT managers, IT development staff, IT operations staff, IT process owners, business managers, business process owners
• Individuals who require an understanding of DevOps and how it can contribute to the success of the business within an organization
• IT professionals and teams implementing DevOps

Prerequisites

Before attending this course, students should have the following:

• Understanding of Agile software development (beneficial, but not required)
• Understanding of ITIL 4 framework (beneficial, but not required)
• The official reference to the examination: The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis (recommended for all students)

Course objectives

During this course, students will learn:

• What is DevOps and who needs it
• Goals and business benefits of DevOps
• How DevOps fits with ITIL 4
• Changes required for DevOps
  • Changes to job roles, culture, skills, metrics
  • Changes to processes
  • Changes to tools, infrastructure and technology
• DevOps principles and techniques
  • Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment
  • The Three Ways (Flow, Feedback, Continuous Learning)
• How to begin the DevOps journey
• Where to start and how to scale
• DevOps maturity models
• Prepare for the EXIN DevOps Professional Exam

Certifications and related examinations

This course prepares students for the EXIN DevOps Professional Examination.

Detailed Course Outline

Module 1: DevOps Adoption 

• Describe the basic reasons for DevOps adoption
• DevOps myths
• History of DevOps
• Bi-model IT
• Introduction to Agile.
• Principles of the Three Ways

Module 2: Culture and People 

• Focus on business outcomes
• Explain how the several DevOps roles work together to add value to the business
• Explain the differences between I-shape, T-shape and E-shape in relationship to DevOps
• Explain how to integrate operations into the daily work of development

Module 3: DevOps Principles and Concepts

• Infrastructure as code
• Immutable vs mutable servers
• Cloud concepts
• Microservices versus monolithic services
• Configuration management practice
• Service level management practice

Module 4: The First Way: The Technical Practice of Flow

• Visualizing work
• Kanban, handoff reduction, waste reduction
• Deployment pipeline 
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
• Software development and management practice
• Automated testing
• Deployment management practice
• Release management practice

Module 5: The Second Way: Feedback 

• Feedback loops, swarming, andon
• Telemetry
• Hypothesis-driven development 
• Code review techniques
• Launch readiness
• Low-risk releases

Module 6: The Third Way: Continuous Leaning and Experimentation

• Explain how continual improvement helps an organization
• Understand and conduct a blameless post-mortem
• Differentiate between the several Simian Army Monkey types to improve learning
• Explain how injection of production failure creates resilience
• Explain when to use game days
• Explain Kaizen Blitz

Module 7: Information Security, Change Enablement, and Governance

Module 8: Where to Start 

• Assessments
• Pilots
• Agile/Scrum/Kanban

Exam preparation and review