Summary

What happens once your software is actually running in production? Ensuring that it stays up-and-running is important. And depending on what the system does, and how much traffic it needs to handle, that may not be particularly easy.

There are systems that will allow developers to run their code and not need to think about it. Platforms as a service option like Google’s App Engine go a long way to reducing and, in some companies, removing operations. However, not every system can or will run on such platforms. Which means that having qualified operations engineers is an important thing.

The role of an operations engineer is continually evolving; which isn’t a surprise since changes in technology never slows down.

So, if the job falls on you to keep a system up-and-running, where do you start? What needs to happen? These are the questions this Lesson aims to answer.

In this Lesson, we take a look at some of tasks that operations engineers need to address. I use the term operations engineer as an umbrella, to cover a wide variety of job titles. Titles such as ops engineer, operations engineer, site reliability engineer, devops engineer, among others, all fall under this umbrella.

Regardless of the name of the title, the responsibilities involve keeping a system up-and-running, with little or no downtime. And that’s a tough thing to do because there are a lot of moving parts.

If you’re just starting out, and are interested in one of those roles, then the fundamentals in this Lesson may be just what you need. These fundamentals will prepare you for more advanced Lessons on specific cloud providers and their certifications.

Topics such as high availability are often covered in advanced Lessons, however they tend to be specific to a cloud provider. So this Lesson will help you to learn the basics without needing to know a specific cloud provider.

If this all sounds interesting, check it out! :)

Lesson Objectives

By the end of this Lesson, you'll be able to:

• Identify some of the aspects of being an ops engineer
• Define why availability is important to ops
• Define why scalability is important to ops
• Identify some of the security concerns
• Define why monitoring is important
• Define why practicing failure is important

Intended Audience

This is a beginner level Lesson for anyone that wants to learn. Though probably easier if you have either:

• Development experience
• Operations experience

Optional Pre-Requisites

• Introduction to Devops
• Introduction to Continuous Integration
• Introduction to Continuous Delivery

What You'll Learn

Lecture	What you'll learn
Intro	What will be covered in this Lesson
Intro to Operational Concerns	What sort of things to operations engineers need to focus on?
Availability	What does availability mean in the context of a web application?
High Availability	How do we make systems more available than the underlying platform?
Scalability	What is scalability and why is it important?
Security	What security issues to ops engineers need to address?
Infrastructure as code	What is IaC and why is it important?
Monitoring	What things need to be monitored?
System Performance	Where are the bottlnecks?
Planning and Practicing Failure	How can you practice failure?
Summary	A review of the Lesson