Overview

This course is a practical introduction to modern system administration and DevOps fundamentals. Students learn to build, configure, and operate computing infrastructure: from physical hardware to cloud-hosted virtual machines to container clusters running on Kubernetes.

The course is organized in layers, each building on the previous one. The first weeks establish the foundation: how physical hardware is assembled and what its components do, how Linux servers are installed and configured, and how networks connect systems together. Students deploy real workloads to AWS from the very first lab, so cloud operations become concrete early rather than hypothetical.

The middle weeks introduce the tools that modern operations teams use to manage infrastructure at scale: Docker for packaging applications into portable, reproducible containers; Terraform for declaring infrastructure as code so environments can be created and destroyed reliably; Ansible for automating configuration across fleets of servers; and GitHub Actions for building continuous integration and delivery pipelines that automatically build, test, and deploy software. Students also learn deployment strategies, including rolling updates, blue-green deployments, and canary releases, which are the techniques real teams use to ship new versions without taking services offline.

The final weeks focus on operating infrastructure once it is running: collecting metrics and building dashboards with Prometheus and Grafana, analyzing logs, responding to incidents, and writing the postmortems that turn failures into organizational learning. Students also survey Windows Server and Active Directory administration, rounding out the picture for mixed-environment organizations.

Every topic is motivated by the problem it solves. Automation is not introduced as an abstract best practice; it is introduced after students have experienced the friction of configuring the same service by hand on multiple servers. Security is woven into every layer rather than isolated in a single module. Documentation and written communication are assessed as first-class skills alongside technical execution.

By the end of the course, students will have deployed the same service, a Minecraft game server, five times over, each iteration more automated and more resilient than the last: bare metal, manually on a cloud VM, containerized, infrastructure-automated with Terraform and Ansible, and finally on a Kubernetes cluster with full observability.