LEADS Academy — DevOps · Cloud Engineering · SRE

A hands-on, job-ready DevOps, Cloud Engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering course, delivered as a single converged 25-week track: 50 class packages and 21 runnable lab modules you clone, complete, and validate — real files you lint, plan, build, run, and test, not fenced code blocks inside slides.

🚀 New here? Read HOW-TO-USE.md first — how to set up your machine and work the labs.

📚 Full syllabus: CURRICULUM.md — the complete week-by-week breakdown (topics, hands-on lab, and outcome for all 25 weeks).

What's inside

• 01-foundation-track/ — Weeks 1–16. The shared engineering foundation: Linux, Git, networking, AWS core, scripting, CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes, Terraform, and observability.
• 02-advanced-track/ — Weeks 17–25. Advanced specializations (landing zones & governance, FinOps, DevSecOps, platform engineering, SRE, performance), a two-week capstone, and resume / interview preparation.
• labs/ — 21 self-contained, runnable lab modules — the executable half of the course. See labs/README.md.

Every week ships as two class packages (class-01.md, class-02.md) — 25 weeks, 50 classes — each linking to its runnable lab under labs/.

How the labs work

Each module under labs/ is a self-contained project:

Path	What it is
starter/	Your working copy — complete the TODO(student) gaps here.
solution/	The reference implementation — check yourself against it.
tests/	The automated test suite for the module.
validate.sh	Runs every gate (lint, tests, build) for the module.
README.md	Brief, prerequisites, architecture, expected output, troubleshooting, cleanup, and cost notes.

Typical flow:

cd labs/<module>
cat README.md                 # read the brief and prerequisites
# ...edit files under starter/ to complete the TODO(student) gaps...
./validate.sh                 # run the checks
# compare against solution/ when you get stuck

Start here: labs/setup-validation/ — it verifies your toolchain is course-ready.

Prerequisites

• Comfort with a terminal / command line. No prior DevOps experience required.
• Git, plus the per-lab tools (each lab README lists exactly what it needs — most are free and run locally).
• For the cloud labs: an AWS account (free tier + a small budget). Cloud labs follow a build → verify → destroy flow to stay cost-safe.

Tools you'll use

Linux · Bash · Python · Git & GitHub/GitLab · AWS (VPC, EC2, S3, IAM, RDS, Organizations, CloudWatch…) · Terraform · Docker · Kubernetes · Helm · Ansible · GitHub Actions / GitLab CI · Prometheus & Grafana · OpenTelemetry · k6 · OPA/Conftest · Trivy / Grype / Syft · gitleaks · kind.

Getting started

git clone <this-repo-url>
cd devops-cloud-sre-course
cd labs/setup-validation && cat README.md   # verify your machine is course-ready

Then work week by week: read class-01.md / class-02.md for the week, then complete its lab.

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Note on the security labs: the secret-scanning exercises intentionally include the well-known AWS documentation example keys (AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE) as test fixtures. These are non-functional placeholders, not real credentials.

License

© 2026 LEADS Academy. All rights reserved. Provided for personal educational use only — see LICENSE. Not for commercial use, redistribution, or competing courses without written permission. Licensing inquiries: admissions@leadsacademy.org