Schedule
This schedule shows the 10-week plan for lectures, labs, and assignments. Lectures cover the concepts needed for the upcoming lab, ideally one week in advance but at minimum by the first lecture of that lab’s week.
- Lectures: Two 1-hour-20-minute sessions per week.
- Labs: Due on Fridays (multiple sections per week).
- Assignments: Due on Sundays at 11:59 PM, every two weeks starting in Week 2.
- Activities: Due at the end of the lecture week (Sunday at 11:59 PM) for the week they are assigned. They are done in class.
Week 1: Hardware and Virtualization
Section titled “Week 1: Hardware and Virtualization”| Lecture 1 | Hardware Fundamentals |
| Lecture 2 | Virtualization and Virtual Machines |
| Lab 1a | The Bare Metal |
| Lab 1b | Cloud Environment Setup (AWS Academy) |
Hardware Fundamentals supports the Bare Metal lab. Virtualization is introduced this week so you understand what a virtual machine is before spinning one up in Lab 1b: an EC2 instance is a VM running on AWS’s infrastructure.
Week 2: Linux and Networking
Section titled “Week 2: Linux and Networking”| Lecture 3 | Linux Server Planning and Configuration Essentials |
| Lecture 4 | Networking Fundamentals |
| Lab 2 | Manual Web Server Deployment (WordPress on EC2) |
| Assignment 1 | Sunday: Ops 1: Manual Minecraft Server |
Linux Server Planning prepares you for the hands-on WordPress deployment this week. Networking Fundamentals supports the VPC and security group configuration in the same lab.
Week 3: Containers and Cloud Services
Section titled “Week 3: Containers and Cloud Services”| Lecture 5 | Containerization |
| Lecture 6 | Cloud Networking, Storage, and Identity |
| Lab 3 | Containerizing a Web Application (Docker Compose) |
Docker builds directly on the VM foundation from Week 1: containers share a kernel instead of virtualizing hardware. Cloud Networking, Storage, and Identity is introduced Thursday to cover VPC design, IAM roles, S3, and ECR one full week before you use ECR and S3 in Lab 4.
Week 4: Infrastructure as Code and Scripting
Section titled “Week 4: Infrastructure as Code and Scripting”| Lecture 7 | Infrastructure as Code |
| Lecture 8 | Shell Scripting and Automation Basics |
| Lab 4 | Image Registry, Backups, and Version Switching (ECR + S3) |
| Assignment 2 | Sunday: Ops 2: Containerized Minecraft Server |
Terraform is introduced Tuesday so you have the full week to internalize IaC concepts before the Lab 5 hands-on stack. Scripting supports the backup and versioning workflows in this week’s lab and the automation-heavy weeks immediately ahead.
Week 5: Configuration Management and CI/CD
Section titled “Week 5: Configuration Management and CI/CD”| Lecture 9 | Configuration Management |
| Lecture 10 | CI/CD Pipelines |
| Lab 5 | Your First Infrastructure Stack (Terraform) |
Both lectures directly prepare you for Lab 6 the following week, giving you a full week to absorb Ansible and GitHub Actions before building the automated pipeline. The Terraform infrastructure from Lab 5 is exactly what Ansible and CI/CD will configure and deploy to in Lab 6.
Week 6: Kubernetes and Network Infrastructure
Section titled “Week 6: Kubernetes and Network Infrastructure”| Lecture 11 | Container Orchestration |
| Lecture 12 | Network Services and Application Delivery |
| Lab 6 | Automated Configuration and Deployment (Ansible + GitHub Actions) |
| Assignment 3 | Sunday: Ops 3: Infrastructure Automation |
Container Orchestration is introduced a full week and a half before Lab 7’s k3s deployment so the orchestration concepts have time to settle before you apply them. The Network Services and Application Delivery lecture follows immediately: reverse proxies, load balancers, DNS, TLS, and overlay versus underlay networking are the infrastructure layer that Kubernetes clusters sit on. Covering them together makes the connection between Ingress controllers and ordinary reverse proxies, and between CNI overlays and physical network topology, concrete rather than abstract.
Week 7: Observability and Logging
Section titled “Week 7: Observability and Logging”| Lecture 13 | Monitoring, Alerting, and Observability |
| Lecture 14 | Log Management and Incident Investigation |
| Lab 7 | First Container Orchestration Deployment (k3s) |
Monitoring, Alerting, and Observability arrives a full week before Lab 8’s failure drills so metrics, SLOs, and alert design concepts are fresh when pods crash and rollouts fail. Log Management follows immediately: the two lectures together give you the complete first-responder toolkit before you need it in Lab 8.
Week 8: Incident Response and Reliability
Section titled “Week 8: Incident Response and Reliability”| Lecture 15 | Incident Response and Postmortems |
| Lecture 16 | Reliability Engineering |
| Lab 8 | Cluster Operations: Health Probes, Rollouts, and Failure Drills (Kubernetes) |
| Assignment 4 | Sunday: Ops 4: Container Orchestration |
Incident Response covers the lifecycle and mitigation commands you need directly during Lab 8’s failure drills: rollback, cordon, drain, and port-forward are the tools you reach for when a deployment goes wrong. Site Reliability Engineering follows immediately and provides the organizational frame for why the incident program exists: error budgets, toil reduction, and on-call sustainability are the outcomes you are building toward when you invest in runbooks and postmortems.
Week 9: Physical Infrastructure and Security Retrospective
Section titled “Week 9: Physical Infrastructure and Security Retrospective”| Lecture 17 | On-Premises Infrastructure and Data Center Architecture |
| Lecture 18 | System Security and Hardening |
| Lab 9 | Observability Workshop: Metrics and Dashboards (Prometheus + Grafana) |
On-Premises Infrastructure expands the picture beyond cloud to the physical network, server hardware, and data center designs that every cloud region is built on. System Security and Hardening follows immediately as the security retrospective: it revisits Linux, networking, containers, cloud, IaC, configuration management, CI/CD, Kubernetes, observability, and incident response through a security lens, and introduces the authentication, authorization, and identity foundations (Identity Providers, SAML, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, RBAC, ABAC) that the operations practice from the rest of the course quietly depends on. Lab 9 runs alongside them as an independent Prometheus deployment that builds on the monitoring concepts from Week 7.
Week 10: Identity in Practice and Wrap-Up
Section titled “Week 10: Identity in Practice and Wrap-Up”| Lecture 19 | Windows Server Administration |
| Lecture 20 | NO LECTURE: complete wrap-up quizzes and assignments |
| Lab 10 | Make-up lab (catch up on incomplete lab work) |
| Assignment 5 | Sunday: Ops 5: Observability and Incident Response |
Windows Server Administration is the concrete case study for the identity ideas introduced in Lecture 18: Active Directory is one of the most widely deployed Identity Providers on the planet, Kerberos and LDAP are the on-premises analogues of the modern web identity protocols, and Group Policy is centralized configuration delivery for a different era. Seeing the same architectural problems solved with a different toolset closes the loop on the identity material before the course wrap-up.