Welcome¶

You're reading the ITOps Level 2 course.

This course is aimed at people who are looking to develop a career in Information Technology (IT), or who already have a career in IT with one or two years of experience, and want to advance specifically towards a job in DevOps engineering. The course introduces the reader to the basic topics that you need to know to have a successful career in IT. Following on from this knowledge the course then goes into advanced topics focused on understanding and implementing DevOps practices. Finally the course then looks at career advice and attempts to help the reader get a good idea of how they can begin their career with their new found knowledge.

By the time you're done with this course you'll have a portfolio piece ready to showcase to businesses before and during the interviewing process. This portfolio piece will demonstrate a good understanding of complex technologies and how you've applied them to solve a real world problem.

Who is this course for?¶

The Learn DevOps course isn't aimed at everyone. If it was it would be never ending and would probably never be published.

Instead the course is aimed at a few groups of people:

• People who do not work in IT but want to work in IT
• People who do work in IT in a help desk or early career systems administration role (1-2 years experience)
• People who do work in IT, with years of experience, but want to move side ways perhaps from their current role and into a DevOps focused one

Of course the course can be read by anyone. I'm sure there's always something to learn from an ever growing and expanding course. Primarily, however, it's focused on people looking to get into the industry; those already on the inside looking to elevate their career; and those with plenty of experience but who might want to move sideways into DevOps.

Career Options¶

If you worked your way through "The Basics" you could step into a whole bunch of IT jobs:

• Desktop Support
• Helpdesk Technician
• Junior Systems Administrator
• Junior Network Administrator

And more. These are excellent early career jobs that will teach you a lot.

Moving through the course and completing the more advanced topics can lead to other career options:

• Systems Engineer
• Cloud Engineer
• DevOps Engineer

One thing is certain, however, and that's you're never wrong learning new skills. This course offers a lot of guidance in the field of IT and it will always have something to offer everyone.

Everything else on this page from this point onwards is background information. If you're just looking to get your teeth stuck into the core of the course's contents, then you're welcome jump straight to the next section. You won't miss out on anything too important.

Who is the author?¶

My name is Michael Crilly. I live in Brisbane, Australia. I'm originally from Liverpool, England.

I've been programming since I was eleven years old. I learned JavaScript, C and 8086 Assembly between the ages of 11 and 13. I also got into some networking via IRC, HTTP and FTP. Over time I fell into IT and started out as a network engineer and Linux systems administrator. From there I climbed the ladder, jumping to better jobs and better pay yearly. I eventually ended up working with tools focused on automating the delivery of software, Agile development practices and Cloud technologies.

I've been in the industry for many years and over that time I've reflected a lot on how I like to learn and how others like to learn too. This self reflection led to me producing video courses for others which attracted over 5,000 students. I also built a DevOps community on Discord known as The DevOps Lounge, which you're encouraged to join and participate in. After some further reflection and feedback from students, I decided to write this course.

I really love helping other people get into the IT field. I came from a working class background, so money was tight for me. It wasn't until I was nearly 28 years old that I cleared all of my debt (there was a lot) and began to really understand how money worked and how-to use it correctly. A lot of other people are in this situation too and I want to help them improve their standard of living through a career in IT as it's done for me.

That's why I wrote this course and it's why I'm building a training center in Brisbane, Australia, which will be used to offer private training for anyone looking to accelerate their career into IT.

Why did you write this?¶

Getting into the field of IT can be daunting. It's a massive field with a lot to learn. There are many possible directions to go in and many different things to study. Even with a focus on DevOps the journey ahead is unknown and complex.

The Learn DevOps course is designed to provide direction and guidance on what to study and when. Without this focused approach you'll attempt to study too much, too fast and your knowledge will be fragmented and hard to apply to the real-world. This is because IT is a massive field.

There are thousands of ways to solve problems and there are even more technologies to solve them. Due to this sheer complexity the Learn DevOps course gives the reader a hyper-focused, linear structure to follow. This structure is intended to keep the student focused on particular topics and technologies that will help them get jobs as well as teach them core, fundamental concepts they can use regardless of the technologies they need to work with.

I'm opinionated¶

This course is very opinionated.

Not everyone will agree with the technology choices, but that's OK. It's less about the technologies and more about the learning.

Giving you a direction allows you to put on hold all the other cool technologies you'll want to play with, and instead gets you focused on what you need to study today to start working in IT tomorrow. Without this focus it can be very difficult to stay on track and you'll waste time studying and playing with technologies that may not help you get employed. That's why having strong opinions is important. Without them you'll have hundreds of people on Reddit, Hacker News, LinkedIn, and more, telling you what to study and no one set of people will fully agree. There's a lot of noise out there.

This course's structure overcomes the noise of everyone else's opinion and keeps you focused on your goal: getting a job in IT or improving the one you already have.

To further the goal of keeping you focused, I also believe strongly in the 80/20 Principle (for most of life, not just IT.)

The 80/20 Principle¶

As you work your way through this course's structure you'll be introduced to new topics and technologies. There are different ways you can approach learning something new.

You can study a single topic from top to bottom, knowing everything there is to know about topic, or you can learn by solving real problems as and when you encounter them. The first approach is highly academic and the second is highly productive. Both are valid ways of approaching a new topic, but there's another way that I believe balances both the academic with the productive: the 80/20 Principle.

Also known as the Pareto Principle, this little "trick" will save you a lot of time and allow you to focus on what's important. This way of approaching a new topic combines academic study with real-world application. It's the difference between just knowing all the theory or only having practical experience.

Wikipedia has this to say about the Pareto Principle:

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few"). Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

And Investopedia has this to say:

In business, a goal of the 80-20 rule is to identify inputs that are potentially the most productive and make them the priority. For instance, once managers identify factors that are critical to their company's success, they should give those factors the most focus. - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/80-20-rule.asp

At the end of the day businesses want things done fast, cheap and accurately because that's what the end consumer (generally) expects.

Pure academic knowledge is hard to implement in the real world so it's not overly useful to businesses trying to solve software or IT problems. Real world experience lacks the academic understanding of a topic or technology required fix solutions when they stop working. Businesses want to avoid failing IT systems and broken software at all costs as any down time means a reduction in revenue and lost public opinion of their brand.

What I do in this course is use the 80/20 "rule" to teach you the core concepts around DevOps and the technologies as well as how-to make them play nice with each other, so that you can build the core academic knowledge you need to understand the topics and technologies, whilst also being able to implement and maintain what you build. This way you learn the academics of a topic AND you learn how-to implement it in the real world, in a way businesses want. This doesn't mean your knowledge is going to be "thin" or useless. In actual fact it means everything I'm teaching you is going to be precisely what you need to know to be productive sooner.

Next¶

Let's now review the course's structure from a high level.