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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. The lessons teach the concepts and the real usage — the commands, the configuration, the console steps and the trade-offs — so you understand how production AWS is run and can apply it in your own account when you are ready. You do not need an AWS account to learn from this course; you practise, at your own pace, in your own free-tier account.

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
  • Optional: your own AWS free-tier account to try things in — the lessons do not require one to follow
  • 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 environments30 min
    2. IAM: users, roles and least privilege in practice45 min
    3. Human and machine access without long-lived keys35 min
    4. Billing alarms and tagging, set up on day one25 min
  2. 2

    Networking

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

    1. VPC design: CIDR planning and subnet layout40 min
    2. Route tables, internet and NAT gateways35 min
    3. Security groups and NACLs30 min
    4. VPC endpoints and private connectivity35 min
    5. Site-to-site VPN and hybrid connectivity patterns35 min
  3. 3

    Choosing Compute

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

    1. EC2, ECS, EKS and Lambda compared honestly35 min
    2. When Kubernetes is not worth it25 min
    3. Running a service on ECS Fargate40 min
    4. Graviton, Spot and right-sizing35 min
  4. 4

    Kubernetes on EKS

    Running real workloads on a managed cluster.

    1. EKS: control plane, node groups and add-ons40 min
    2. Deployments, services and config40 min
    3. Ingress, load balancers and TLS40 min
    4. Horizontal pod autoscaling and cluster autoscaling35 min
    5. Requests, limits and why pods get evicted35 min
    6. Debugging a broken deployment40 min
  5. 5

    Terraform at Scale

    Structure that survives multiple environments and multiple engineers.

    1. Remote state, locking and why it matters35 min
    2. Structuring a Terraform repository40 min
    3. Writing reusable modules40 min
    4. Managing dev, staging and production35 min
    5. Drift, imports and adopting existing resources35 min
  6. 6

    Deployment Pipelines

    Shipping safely, and getting back when it goes wrong.

    1. Designing a deployment pipeline30 min
    2. Building and storing images in ECR35 min
    3. Deploying to EKS from CI40 min
    4. Rollback strategies that actually work30 min
    5. Secrets: Parameter Store and Secrets Manager35 min
  7. 7

    Observability

    Dashboards and alerts that tell you something useful.

    1. Metrics with Prometheus and CloudWatch40 min
    2. Centralised logging and finding things in it35 min
    3. Grafana dashboards people actually read35 min
    4. Alerts worth waking up for30 min
    5. Running an incident, and the report afterwards35 min
  8. 8

    Cost Optimisation

    Where AWS bills leak, and how to stop them.

    1. Reading an AWS bill properly30 min
    2. Where the money usually goes35 min
    3. Right-sizing and scale-to-zero for non-production35 min
    4. Savings Plans and Reserved Instances25 min
    5. Running a monthly cost review25 min
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