Cloud & DevOps

This is not an entry-level course and it is not a route into IT from nothing. It assumes you can already write code and use a Linux command line — the Python or Full-Stack course first, or equivalent. Cloud vendors also charge for what you run: the labs are built to sit inside the AWS and Azure free tiers, but you will need a card to open an account and you are responsible for what you leave running. We show you how to set a budget alarm in week one for exactly this reason. Vendor certification (AWS Solutions Architect Associate, AZ-104) is booked and paid separately with the vendor; this course prepares you for the work, not for a specific exam, and no certification result is promised.

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Everything after this assumes you can move around a Linux box without hesitating. Most people who struggle with cloud are actually struggling here.

• The filesystem, permissions and who you are hands on
  Users, groups, chmod and why 'permission denied' is usually correct and you are wrong.
• Processes, logs and finding out what broke hands on
  ps, systemctl, journalctl, tail. Reading a log is the single most useful debugging skill in this field.
• SSH, keys and never using a password again hands on
  Key pairs, ssh-agent, config files, and why a private key never leaves your machine.
• Networking as a cloud engineer meets it hands on
  IP, subnets, ports, DNS and TLS — enough to reason about why a service is unreachable.

Git is already in the Programming course. Here it becomes branching strategy, review and the thing CI hangs off.

• Branches, merges and the conflicts you will cause hands on
  Feature branches, rebase vs merge, and resolving a conflict without losing somebody's work.
• Pull requests and reviewing somebody else's code hands on
  How a change gets discussed and approved. You will review a classmate's work and have yours reviewed.
• What must never be committed hands on
  Secrets, credentials, .env files, large binaries. How to fix it when it happens, because it will.

The unit everything else in this course moves around.

• Images, containers and layers hands on
  What an image actually is, why layer order changes build time, and why your image is 1.2GB.
• Writing a Dockerfile for a real application hands on
  Multi-stage builds, non-root users, .dockerignore. You containerise an app you wrote in an earlier course.
• docker compose for more than one service hands on
  An app plus its database plus a cache, brought up with one command.
• Volumes, networks and where the data actually lives hands on
  Why your database was empty after a restart.
• Registries and shipping an image hands on
  Tagging, pushing, pulling. What a tag guarantees and what it does not.

Both, deliberately. Pakistani employers ask for either and the concepts transfer; the console does not.

• The account, the bill and the budget alarm hands on
  FIRST LESSON, not last. Regions, IAM users, MFA, and a budget alarm before you launch anything. People get large bills by leaving things running.
• Compute: EC2 and Azure VMs hands on
  Launching, sizing, security groups, and shutting it down again.
• Storage: S3 and Blob Storage hands on
  Buckets, objects, lifecycle rules, and the public-bucket mistake that has leaked more data than any exploit.
• Networking: VPC, subnets and security groups hands on
  Public and private subnets, and why your database should not have a public IP.
• Managed databases: RDS and Azure SQL hands on
  When to let the vendor run your database, and what you give up.
• Identity and least privilege hands on
  IAM roles and policies. Why an application gets a role, never a user's keys.

A pipeline that builds, tests and deploys without anybody logging into a server.

• What a pipeline is, and why manual deploys fail hands on
  Build, test, deploy stages. The failure this prevents: 'it works on my machine' and the deploy nobody can repeat.
• GitHub Actions end to end hands on
  Workflow files, triggers, secrets, matrix builds. Your containerised app builds and tests on every push.
• Automated tests as the gate hands on
  A pipeline that does not run tests is a delivery mechanism for bugs.
• Deploying from the pipeline hands on
  Pushing an image to a registry and rolling it out. Environments, and why staging exists.
• Rollback hands on
  How to get back to the previous version quickly. Practised, because you will need it under pressure.

Kubernetes and Terraform at working level — enough to be useful on a team, not enough to claim you administer a cluster.

• Why orchestration exists
  What breaks when you run containers by hand across several machines.
• Kubernetes objects you will actually touch hands on
  Pods, Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps and Secrets. Deploying and scaling a real app on a managed cluster.
• kubectl and reading a broken cluster hands on
  describe, logs, events. Diagnosing a pod that will not start.
• Terraform: infrastructure you can review hands on
  Providers, resources, state, plan and apply. Building the same VPC twice from one file.
• Why clicking in the console does not scale
  The console is for learning and for looking. Anything that must exist twice goes in code.

A real application, containerised and shipped by a pipeline

Take an application you built in an earlier course. Containerise it, write a compose file for it and its database, put it behind a GitHub Actions pipeline that builds and tests on every push, deploy it to a cloud VM or managed service, and demonstrate a rollback. Delivered with a README somebody else could follow, a budget alarm in place, and the infrastructure defined in Terraform. Marked on whether a stranger can deploy it from your repository without asking you a question.

A final assessment marked out of 100; the pass mark is 60, with 120 minutes to complete it.

• Linux, shell and networking (20 marks)
• Containers and Docker (25 marks)
• Cloud services and IAM (25 marks)
• CI/CD pipelines (20 marks)
• Orchestration and infrastructure as code (10 marks)

Students who pass the final assessment and have project work verified by their trainer receive a completion letter. It states attendance, the assessment result and the projects verified, and carries a code any employer can check at the verification page.

No verified NAVTTC alignment. Cloud lesson plans exist but none has been checked against this syllabus module by module, as the CEH mapping was. Map it before quoting it in a bid. This course is taught to BvLogic's own syllabus, published in full above.

Interested in this programme?

Apply now, or try the subject free first: there is no reason to pay before you know you like it.