Cloud DevOps and Container Orchestration

About this course

Deliver a containerised application through Kubernetes and GitOps, provision its cloud infrastructure as code, and operate it with metrics, alerts and traces.

This is an 8-week specialist track - our most in-depth program, taking you to a professional, hireable standard. Learn online at your own pace. Practice the concepts with the listed assessments.

What's included

• Self-paced lessons and practice (40 estimated hours).
• Hands-on coding quests you solve inside the EchoLens browser compiler - nothing to install.
• Gems, stages and a leaderboard that keep you moving instead of grade anxiety.
• A verified certificate with a scannable QR code, ready to share on LinkedIn, when you satisfy the course requirements.
• Completely free - no fee, just create an account and start.

What you will learn

Course outline - level by level

12 leveles, each with hands-on quests you clear in the portal.

• Level 1. Container Internals and Image Optimisation - Analogy: Packing everything a machine needs into one sealed crate that behaves identically in every warehouse it lands in. Covered: Namespaces and control groups, the layered filesystem and cache invalidation order, multi stage builds, distroless and Alpine base images, running as a non root user, and the dockerignore file.
• Level 2. Networking and Persistent Storage - Analogy: Running private cabling between offices and putting the filing cabinet in the building rather than inside a desk that gets replaced. Covered: Bridge, host and user defined networks, container name resolution, published ports, named volumes against bind mounts, and where database data actually lives.
• Level 3. Multi Service Stacks with Compose - Analogy: One master switch that brings up the lights, the fridge and the stove in the right order, rather than three separate trips to the fuse box. Covered: Compose file structure, service dependencies with condition on health, environment files, health checks, named networks, and profiles for optional services.
• Level 4. Pods, Deployments and Self Healing - Analogy: A control tower that dispatches a replacement aircraft the moment one is taken out of service, without waiting to be told. Covered: Control plane components, the reconciliation loop, Deployments and ReplicaSets, liveness, readiness and startup probes, resource requests and limits, and rolling update strategy.
• Level 5. Services, Ingress and Traffic Routing - Analogy: An airport terminal that sends arriving passengers to the correct gate rather than leaving them to wander the concourse. Covered: ClusterIP, NodePort and LoadBalancer, service discovery through DNS, endpoints and selectors, Ingress controllers, path and host routing, and TLS termination.
• Level 6. ConfigMaps, Secrets and Autoscaling - Analogy: Keeping the combination out of the safe door and adding motorway lanes automatically when traffic builds. Covered: ConfigMaps and Secrets as environment variables and mounted files, why Secrets are only base64 encoded at rest by default, sealed secrets and external secret stores, the metrics server, and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler behaviour.
• Level 7. Pipelines with GitHub Actions - Analogy: An inspection line that tests and seals every unit coming off the belt, so nothing untested reaches the loading bay. Covered: Workflow and job syntax, triggers, matrix builds, caching dependencies, repository and environment secrets, artefacts, and required status checks on protected branches.
• Level 8. Registry Publishing and Image Scanning - Analogy: Inspectors opening every crate for contraband before the export seal goes on. Covered: Registry authentication, tagging strategy and why latest is not a version, image signing, software bills of materials, and vulnerability scanning with Trivy.
• Level 9. GitOps Delivery with Argo CD - Analogy: An autopilot that keeps comparing the aircraft's actual attitude with the filed flight plan and corrects the difference itself. Covered: Declarative delivery, Git as the single source of truth, the Argo CD Application resource, sync policies and self healing, drift detection, and rollback by reverting a commit.
• Level 10. Terraform and Cloud Provisioning - Analogy: A blueprint that orders the servers, the cabling and the locks, and can also un order all of them in one instruction. Covered: HCL syntax, providers and version pinning, variables and outputs, remote state and state locking, plan against apply, modules, and why manual console changes cause drift.
• Level 11. Prometheus Metrics and Alerting - Analogy: A ward monitor that beeps when the reading crosses a threshold, not one that simply records numbers nobody reads. Covered: The pull model and scrape configuration, counters, gauges, histograms and summaries, PromQL including rate and histogram quantile, recording rules, and alert routing with Alertmanager.
• Level 12. Grafana Dashboards and Distributed Tracing - Analogy: A cockpit display showing altitude, fuel and engine health together, plus a flight recorder that can replay any single journey. Covered: Connecting Grafana to Prometheus, dashboard and panel design, variables, alert visualisation, distributed tracing concepts, and instrumenting a service with OpenTelemetry.

Who it's for

Cloud DevOps and Container Orchestration suits learners at a intermediate to advanced level who want a practical, project-based route into Cloud DevOps and Container Orchestration. You need only a browser and an internet connection - all coding runs inside the EchoLens compiler, so there is nothing to set up.

Certificate

Pass every required assessment at its stated threshold to earn your verified certificate. Optional practice and watching videos do not determine eligibility. Anyone can scan its QR code to verify it on our site. You can add it to your CV or share it to LinkedIn in one click.