Verify Certificate A Cloud Guru’s Beginners Guide to Containers and Orchestration provides an overview of the key concepts in containers and how they lead to the need for an orchestrator such as Docker or Kubernetes. The course also covers common use-cases for container orchestration technologies including microservice architectures, automated scaling, and CI/CD pipelines. I appreciated this course’s coverage of how different technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes relate to one another.

This past week, I reconfigured my home server to address some issues with the partition scheme. I also used this process as an opportunity to convert most of my bespoke configurations to IaC using Ansible . This was also the first time I took on a large DevOps project with the assistance of ChatGPT. The Ansible project has some great documentation complete with multiple examples of how to use each module, but because the options, and sometimes the syntax, of each modules differs, the process of automating the configuration of a complex server can be a time intensive process of hunting through many pages of documentation looking for the exact syntax of an ansible task so you can move on to automating the next task.

I recently finished revamping my homelab, and I’m very excited about it. For the past 6+ months my “homelab” consisted of an old laptop running Linux and a bunch of docker containers. This worked surprisingly well, but increasingly I found myself wanted to spin up test envrionments of multiple machines. That old laptop didn’t have the power to support those kinds of labs, and I didn’t have a good set of tooling for creating, configuring, and backing up these VM or container stacks.

Verify Certificate William Boyd’s DevOps Essentials course provides an introduction to the DevOps approach to writing and deploying software. Boyd begins with the historical and conceptual background for the DevOps movement. DevOps is best understood as a cultural movement towards stronger collaboration and shared responsibilty between engineers who write code (Dev) and engineers who deploy code (Ops.) This cultural movement gave rise to a set of practices that enable the two groups of engineers to work together more effecively and an ecosystem of tools to support this goal.

Verify Certificate A Cloud Guru’s Introduction to Cloud Computing course provides a concise overview of the basics concepts and vocabulary involved in cloud computing. The course describes IaaS, PaaS, and serverless technologies gives examples of where each might be best choice for a project or business need. This course was helpful in providing a broad view of the cloud technology landscape to put future studies into context. Check out my continued studies in cloud technologies and DevOps .