02. Course Overview

Course Overview Skills Check

This course is taught with the assumption that you have completed courses 1 and 2 of the Cloud DevOps Nanodegree. We will move very quickly over sections which cover the same material addressed in those previous courses, and reinforce your understanding of them.

The fundamentals of AWS are addressed in previous courses. You are assumed to have had some experience using the command line in a Linux or UNIX environment. New subject matters such as Jenkins, Pipelines, Prometheus, and Ansible are taught with the expectation that you have no experience with them. We will attempt to review material very frequently in the form of short quizzes and practice exercises to ensure you are mastering the skills and concepts. You will learn by doing, in the Udacity way!

Course Overview

I am excited that we will be able to address a wide variety of subject matter throughout this course! Our main focus will be on CI/CD and pipelines in the first two lessons of this course. Next we will move to configuration management using Ansible, and we will conclude with monitoring and log aggregation.

The idea for you as a student is to be able to develop the skills needed to: a) create an environment from code (infrastructure as code) with Ansible; b) create a development pipeline on this infrastructure with Jenkins; and c) monitor and maintain this infrastructure through the use of monitoring, metrics, and log analytics using Prometheus and ELK stack.

One of the beautiful things about the field of DevOps is the flexibility and interoperability of the different components, which can be compared to Lego pieces. In these lessons we will start to understand how the building blocks of development, monitoring, and deployment fit together and complement each other.

It should also be noted that we are endeavoring to use some of the most common representations of these technologies. There are many very similar, but different, pieces of software which perform the same or similar tasks. When will discuss some but not all of these alternatives.

Project Overview

The most important way to learn something is by doing it. This is why the end of this course will lead into a project where you can show that you have acquired all of the skills taught in this course. In our project, you will deploy and run an instance on AWS, configure Jenkins, and create a pipeline to deploy a static website on S3.