DevOps
Undergraduate · CS / Programming
Syllabus focus
Topics typically covered
Standard syllabus
CI/CD foundations
- Version control workflows for teams
- Automated builds and artifact repositories
- Unit/integration tests in pipelines
- Continuous deployment vs continuous delivery
- Feature flags and release strategies
Infrastructure
- Configuration management: Ansible/Chef/Puppet (survey)
- Containers: Docker images, registries, compose
- Orchestration with Kubernetes basics
- Monitoring, alerting, and SLOs (intro)
- Log aggregation and structured logging
Culture and reliability
- DevOps vs SRE responsibilities (survey)
- Blameless postmortems and error budgets
- Change management and deployment frequency metrics
- Immutable infrastructure mindset
- Secrets sprawl and supply-chain risk awareness
- Documentation as a reliability control
STEM / applied
Production operations
- Infrastructure as code pipelines
- Secrets, environment promotion, and rollback
- Incident response runbooks and on-call practices
- Performance testing in CI (load tests intro)
- Database migrations in automated deploys
Culture and security
- DevOps principles: blameless postmortems
- Supply chain security for dependencies
- Policy as code and compliance checks
- Cost-aware architecture reviews
- Capstone: deploy a multi-service app end-to-end
Toolchain fluency
- GitHub Actions/GitLab CI pipeline authoring
- Artifact signing and dependency pinning
- Environment parity: dev, staging, production
- Chaos experiments at introductory scale
- Policy-as-code and admission controls (survey)
- Capstone: greenfield CI/CD with monitoring hooks
Notes
Toolchain varies (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins). Often paired with cloud computing content.