Course: Network Admin to Site Reliability Engineer – Part 2: DevOps Engineer

It's important to know why the roles, philosophy, and principles behind release engineering - a relatively new discipline of software engineering - are used for building and delivering software. In this course, you'll learn about the automated release system called Rapid, and how it can be used to provide a framework for delivering reliable software builds and releases. You'll also learn about configuration management and the importance of collaboration between release engineers and site reliability engineers.

Release management can guide your software development efforts from planning to deployment, resulting in better customer satisfaction with the end product. In this course, you'll learn about the benefits of using a release management process to manage and improve the development of a software build. You'll then move on to explore key concepts and principles that apply to release management, as well as common considerations and potential challenges to be aware of. Lastly, you'll learn about common toolsets used by release engineers and best practices related to continuous integration and release deployment.

It has been proven that the automation of processes and systems commonly results in higher production rates and increased productivity. In this course, you'll learn the basics of automation, including benefits such as consistency, efficiency, problem-solving, and cost-savings. You'll examine the potential challenges of automation, including integration, complexity, and security. Lastly, you'll learn the value of automation for a Site Reliability Engineer and how SREs are using automation to improve daily operations and overcome obstacles.

Site Reliability Engineers often use automation and orchestration capabilities to scale security and performance, ensuring sites are reliable and efficient. In this course, you'll learn about common use cases for automating systems and processes. You'll examine PowerShell capabilities that can be used to automate a variety of Windows administrative tasks including user creation, patching and updating, bulk enrollment, and software installations. Lastly, you'll learn about cluster turnup automation, reliability, and enabling failure at scale.

Simple systems and software are proven to be easier to develop, understand, maintain, and test. For site reliability engineers, simplicity should be an end-to-end goal and cover all aspects of the software life cycle. In this course, you'll explore the importance of simple systems and software code. You'll identify the different types of software complexity, such as structural complexity, organizational complexity, complexity of use, and theoretical complexity, and learn how to differentiate between complex and complicated code. You'll move on to recognize how to measure complexity using various metrics, such as cyclomatic complexity, the Halstead metric, and the maintainability index. Lastly, you'll examine class coupling, using NPATH to measure the complexity of a piece of code, and prioritizing the simplification of projects and resources.

When creating a simple software system, it is essential to identify and remove any unwanted complexity, whether accidental or essential. By eliminating complexity, site reliability engineers can ensure the final software product is more stable and reliable. In this course, you'll learn to differentiate between agility and stability and explore the importance of stability testing. You'll learn about key metrics and methods, such as production analysis and agile process metrics, which can be used by software development teams to ensure business goals are met. Lastly, you'll learn how to avoid introducing potential defects and bugs by limiting the number of negative lines of code in a project.

There are various, frequently-used premortem and postmortem techniques adopted by site reliability engineers (SRE) to diagnose issues and come up with problem resolution ideas and alternative approaches. To do this effectively, SREs need to account for several factors at play, including the workplace culture and work collaboration. In this course, you'll learn how to promote a blameless culture - one without finger-pointing and animated language. You'll explore the key characteristics of good and bad postmortems, and discover the benefits of reviewing postmortems, sharing knowledge, giving feedback, and rewarding positive behavior. You'll then learn how to respond to postmortem culture implementation failure. Lastly, you'll discover how using the right postmortem templates and postmortem management tools can improve how you write postmortems and manage their associated data.

When deploying a medium to a large-sized cloud solution, there are many factors to consider, such as the numerous cloud environments to choose from and the different levels of management and security they each require. In this course, you'll explore these environments in detail, with a specific focus on their application in SRE. You'll examine the features, purpose, benefits, and potential drawbacks of services such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Anything as a Service (XaaS). You'll then investigate private, public, hybrid, and community clouds and on and off-premises software. Moving on, you'll delve into cloud architecture-related topics, such as orchestration, automation, elasticity, and cloud bursting. Lastly, you'll study cloud payment models, resource allocation, and on-demand self-service.

Containers in cloud computing are a form of operating system virtualization that allows users or administrators to deploy and run applications without the need for virtual machines. Containers can be deployed and run virtually anywhere, and support Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems. In this course, you'll explore the various types of container solutions, including Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS. You'll outline how containers enable a more efficient continuous integration and delivery system and why they're needed for SRE. You'll also examine container storage, security, and migration. You'll list the high-availability solutions available for containers and investigate the Containers as a Service concept. Lastly, you'll recognize how the container ecosystem is revolutionizing software delivery, and identify the role of Docker and Kubernetes in container orchestration.

Although containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes can function independently, they can also benefit significantly from one another. Furthermore, open source automation tools such as Jenkins can be used to increase resource utilization and efficiency through pipelines. In this course, you'll explore the many benefits of pipelines, and learn how to use them to build code. You'll outline the benefits of Git and GitHub for revision control and identify the distributed version control tools that can be used to manage source code history. You'll then work with Jenkinsfiles to write pipeline-as-a-code and code to use at the build stage, after the build and test stages, and for recording failures. Next, you'll use the Jenkins Pipeline to set the environment variables and outline the key steps and factors needed in your code review. Lastly, you'll learn how to use Kubernetes to deploy applications with high availability, scalability, and resilience.

Final Exam: DevOps Engineer will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the DevOps Engineer track of the Skillsoft Aspire Network Admin to Site Reliability Engineer Journey.