I took DevOps Engineering on AWS for the last three days. The course is part of the learning process for the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Overall the course is excellent it covers substantial material, and the labs are ok. To become proficient, one should do the labs from scratch and build the CloudFormation templates. It reviews 45-50% of the material for the on the DevOps Exam, so each topic requires a deeper dive before sitting the exam.

Here is my summary by day of the course.

Day One

The class started with an introduction to DevOps and the AWS tools which support Devops:

• CodeCommit
• CodeBuild
• CodeDeploy
• CodePipeline
• CodeStar

It’s interesting as CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline are required to replace Jenkins. Their advantage is that it directly integrate with AWS. One question I have is why isn’t there a service like Jfrog Artifactory

One of my favorite topics was DevSecOps which talks about adding security into the DevOps process. There should be a separate certification and course for DevSecOps or SecDevOps.

There was a minimum discussion on Elastic Beanstalk, which was a big part of the old acloud.guru course and had several questions on the old exam.

Lastly, the day focused on various methods for updating applications. In-place updates Rolling updates Blue/Green Deployments Red/Black Deployments

Day Two

The class started with a lab on CloudFormation. The lab was flawed as it had a code deployment via the cfn-init and cfn-hup. The rest of the morning was a deeper dive on the tools discussed throughout Day 1.

Afternoon lab focused on a pipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy. After the lab, we spent time discussing various testing, CloudWatch Logs, and Opsworks. Most of the discussion was theoretical.

Day Three

The first part of the morning was a 2-hour lab on AWS Opsworks setting up a Chef recipe and scaling out the environment. The rest of the class was devoted to containers, primary ECS, with a lab that deployed an application on containers.

It’s an interesting course and worth taking if you’re doing AWS DevOps or planning to take the certifications.