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RizTech Academy

AWS DevOps in Practice

How production AWS is actually run — networking, EKS, Terraform, pipelines, observability and cost control.

Most AWS material teaches you to pass an exam. This course teaches you to run a system that real people depend on, which is a different skill.

It covers the decisions that matter in production: how to lay out a VPC you will not regret, when Kubernetes is worth its complexity and when it is not, how to structure Terraform so two engineers can work without fighting, what to monitor, and how to keep the bill from quietly tripling.

These are generalised patterns drawn from running production workloads — deliberately written without any employer-specific detail. You will build your own environment from scratch rather than copying somebody else’s.

Cost is treated as a first-class concern throughout, because in practice it always is.

Who this is for

  • Engineers who have completed the DevOps Foundation course
  • Developers becoming responsible for their own infrastructure
  • Anyone preparing for a DevOps or SRE role and tired of exam-focused material

What you need first

  • DevOps Complete Foundation, or equivalent Linux, Git, Docker and Terraform experience
  • An AWS account (the free tier covers most of the course)
  • Comfort reading documentation

Tools you will use

AWSTerraformKubernetes / EKSGitHub ActionsPrometheus & GrafanaCloudWatch

By the end you can

  • Design a VPC with sensible subnet, routing and gateway choices
  • Apply IAM least privilege without blocking your own team
  • Decide honestly between ECS, EKS and serverless for a given workload
  • Run workloads on EKS: deployments, services, ingress, autoscaling
  • Structure Terraform for multiple environments and multiple engineers
  • Build deployment pipelines with rollback that works
  • Set up metrics, logs, dashboards and alerts that people act on
  • Find and remove the cost that accumulates in every AWS account
Syllabus

8 modules, 39 lessons

Work through these in order. Each lesson is short enough to finish in one sitting and ends with something to build, not a quiz.

  1. 1

    Account Foundations

    The decisions that are painful to change later.

    1. Account structure and separating environmentsComing soon
    2. IAM: users, roles and least privilege in practiceComing soon
    3. Human and machine access without long-lived keysComing soon
    4. Billing alarms and tagging, set up on day oneComing soon
  2. 2

    Networking

    VPC design you will not have to unpick in a year.

    1. VPC design: CIDR planning and subnet layoutComing soon
    2. Route tables, internet and NAT gatewaysComing soon
    3. Security groups and NACLsComing soon
    4. VPC endpoints and private connectivityComing soon
    5. Site-to-site VPN and hybrid connectivity patternsComing soon
  3. 3

    Choosing Compute

    An honest comparison, including when Kubernetes is the wrong answer.

    1. EC2, ECS, EKS and Lambda compared honestlyComing soon
    2. When Kubernetes is not worth itComing soon
    3. Running a service on ECS FargateComing soon
    4. Graviton, Spot and right-sizingComing soon
  4. 4

    Kubernetes on EKS

    Running real workloads on a managed cluster.

    1. EKS: control plane, node groups and add-onsComing soon
    2. Deployments, services and configComing soon
    3. Ingress, load balancers and TLSComing soon
    4. Horizontal pod autoscaling and cluster autoscalingComing soon
    5. Requests, limits and why pods get evictedComing soon
    6. Debugging a broken deploymentComing soon
  5. 5

    Terraform at Scale

    Structure that survives multiple environments and multiple engineers.

    1. Remote state, locking and why it mattersComing soon
    2. Structuring a Terraform repositoryComing soon
    3. Writing reusable modulesComing soon
    4. Managing dev, staging and productionComing soon
    5. Drift, imports and adopting existing resourcesComing soon
  6. 6

    Deployment Pipelines

    Shipping safely, and getting back when it goes wrong.

    1. Designing a deployment pipelineComing soon
    2. Building and storing images in ECRComing soon
    3. Deploying to EKS from CIComing soon
    4. Rollback strategies that actually workComing soon
    5. Secrets: Parameter Store and Secrets ManagerComing soon
  7. 7

    Observability

    Dashboards and alerts that tell you something useful.

    1. Metrics with Prometheus and CloudWatchComing soon
    2. Centralised logging and finding things in itComing soon
    3. Grafana dashboards people actually readComing soon
    4. Alerts worth waking up forComing soon
    5. Running an incident, and the report afterwardsComing soon
  8. 8

    Cost Optimisation

    Where AWS bills leak, and how to stop them.

    1. Reading an AWS bill properlyComing soon
    2. Where the money usually goesComing soon
    3. Right-sizing and scale-to-zero for non-productionComing soon
    4. Savings Plans and Reserved InstancesComing soon
    5. Running a monthly cost reviewComing soon
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