What is DevOps Training?

A recent surge in understanding and adoption of DevOps culture has created a high demand for skilled DevOps practitioners. However, there is a shortage of workforce having the relevant skills of DevOps. Therefore, many organizations harness this opportunity and have prepared training courses to train freshers and experienced IT professionals in DevOps practices and tools.

Please read our post on Why DevOps to understand the causes of such a trend in IT culture, which is adopted to speed up software shipping and delivery. DevOps training providers have curriculums that have topics, similar to the ones listed in further sections of this post, to prepare learners for the certifications provided by Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Puppet, MS Azure, Google, LinkedIn, Udacity, Udemy, etc. Having a certification in DevOpsincreases one’s odds of getting hired, at an average pay of approx. 95000 USD/annum, or more, at reputed IT software and services companies.

Topics Covered in Curriculums

DevOps training providers impart knowledge in DevOps environments and cover the details that are expected from the roles of supporting software development, deployment, and maintenance. Learners also acquire knowledge of administering Operating Systems such as Linux and Windows, and prepare for DevOps and Linux certifications.

Version Control

The learners are trained on one or more centralized or distributed version control tools, such as SVN, Git, Perforce, etc. Learners also learn the use of version control systems in collaboration, release management, branching, merging, and integration strategies.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

It is of prime importance that DevOps learners understand the use of continuous integration to integrate, build, and test in the development environment. DevOps training has one or more widely used continuous tools, such as TeamCity, Jenkins, Travis CI, etc. Some of these tools are listed at https://code-maze.com/top-8-continuous-integration-tools/. Continuous delivery is a culture that builds on successful continuous integration and yields benefits such as reduced deployment risk, believable progress, and faster user feedback. Practitioners are trained on extensive automation of all parts of a delivery process, usually using a Deployment Pipeline. Various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP have provisions to setup Deployment pipelines, and trainees can take free tier subscriptions to try these out. Moreover, in DevOps training, learners get hands-on experience in writing development scripts in Cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, and GCP environments, using Python, Bash, Perl, etc., and also gain experience in developing and automating custom deployment scripts and tools.

Configuration Management

Configuration management helps in maintaining the states of the systems through human-readable formats and lays the foundation for more automation of the steps in the deployment pipeline. Students learn concepts of infrastructure as a code and configuration as a code. It makes infrastructure more flexible, automatable, and ready to scale. Learners are trained on tools such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible to learn these concepts. Prior knowledge of any scripting languages is helpful while learning these new tools; however, it would also be ok to start without any knowledge of scripting languages.

Containerization

According to some experts, DevOps is 3C - Code to Container to Cloud. A containerized application can be deployed on any platform and is widely being accepted as an alternative to virtualization. Students in DevOps courses learn about Vagrant, Docker, and Kubernetes, etc.

Use of Cloud

Cloud platforms enable organizations to provide faster provisioning of infrastructure, networks, and platforms at a low cost. Therefore, an emphasis on the implementation of best practices and cloud security principles is given in DevOps courses. DevOps training also covers Cloud load balancing and failover concepts. Expert knowledge of cloud security trends and best practices are also provided by the DevOps trainers. Having gained knowledge of cloud platforms, learners can specifically get specializations and become experts in specific areas such as development, networking, and Cloud security.

Continuous Monitoring

Continuous monitoring helps in monitoring the health, performance, and reliability of the applications and infrastructure being used in CI/CD Pipelines. Moreover, robust monitoring adds positivity to the security posture of DevOps teams and companies. Some of the DevOps courses provide training in the configuration of continuous monitoring tools like Nagios, Zabbix, etc. and impart the strong knowledge of monitoring and analyzing platform, activity, and diagnostic logs.

Certifications

After getting trained in DevOps, learners can qualify for various certifications in DevOps, such as DevOps Foundation, SRE (Site Reliability) Foundation, DevOps Leader (DOL), DevSecOps Engineering (DSOE), Continuous Delivery Architecture (CDA), DevOps Test Engineering (DTE), (DOE) Certified Agile Service Manager (CASM), and/or Certified Agile Process Owner (CAPO).

DevSecOps

There is a catalog of the courses under the category of DevSecOps. These courses prepare an individual to integrate security into their development processes and build secure applications at speed.

It is quite challenging to incorporate all of the above-mentioned skills in one training program. Moreover, it becomes difficult to impress learners in the age of an ever-decreasing attention span. Therefore, these days courses are designed as career paths and in the form of live training, short training videos, and interactive exercises and labs.