Foundations of DevOps Practice

This unit introduces core DevOps principles, cultural practices, and foundational technical workflows that reduce waste and accelerate reliable software delivery. Students will assess organizational health, learn basic CI/CD/testing and release practices, design collaboration and team structures, and evaluate automation strategies to prepare for implementation and scaling in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze an organization’s DevOps culture and workflows by conducting a health assessment, identifying at least three sources of the seven types of waste, and documenting prioritized improvement opportunities.
• Apply core DevOps lifecycle practices by designing a basic CI/CD pipeline that includes automated testing, version-control communication artifacts (e.g., pull request templates), and a release checklist, and demonstrate the pipeline with a sample code change and test run.
• Demonstrate design of effective DevOps teams and processes by producing a staffing and role-responsibility plan, a customer feedback loop, and a prioritization strategy that addresses working with monoliths and microservices.
• Evaluate automation and resilience strategies by comparing at least two cloud-based or open-source automation approaches (e.g., IaC, pipelines, orchestration), proposing automation to reduce human error, and estimating expected improvements in cycle time or failure rate.