Operational Practices and Team Dynamics

This unit integrates core DevOps operations—deployments, incident management, performance tuning, containers, and cloud services—with the people-side of engineering: hiring, incentives, culture, and customer-focused design. Students will learn to operationalize resilient systems and align team processes and measurement strategies to business goals in preparation for advanced practice and capstone work.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze deployment and release strategies (including containerization and cloud service models) and compare major cloud providers to recommend a cost-effective, scalable deployment plan for a given application
• Apply performance monitoring, logging, and feedback-collection techniques to identify system bottlenecks and produce an empirical improvement plan with measurable KPIs
• Demonstrate incident management and post-incident review processes by leading a simulated incident, documenting root causes, mitigation steps, and design decisions to prevent recurrence
• Evaluate hiring, incentive, and cultural practices by designing a recruiting plan, incentive model, and customer persona that align team behavior with product goals and measurable progress metrics