DevOps: CSC 591/791-004


Modern software development organizations require entire teams of DevOps to automate and maintain software engineering processes and infrastructure vital to the organization. In this course, you will gain practical exposure to the skills, tools, and knowledge needed in automating software engineering processes and infrastructure. Students will have the chance to build new or extend existing software engineering tools and design a DevOps pipeline.

Course Overview

In the course, a mixture of traditional lectures with activities and in-class workshops will be used. During lectures, we will cover core concepts related to a topic. During the in-class workshops, we will perform sample exercises with relevant tools that reinforce lecture material. Evaluation will be based on tech talks, homework assignments, workshop attendance, and final project.

Tech Talks

Students in CSC 591 will organize in groups and present one tech talk during lecture. For a tech talk, students are expected to cover one tool or technology revelant to DevOps in a 15-20 minute presentation. Students should perform a small demo to help illustrate the tool. Three days during the semester will be reserved for these presentations.

Homeworks

Homework assignments will be regularly released throughout the semester and reinforce class material. Homeworks will typically mirror a scenario or common task that a DevOps engineer may face.

Project

The primary objective of the course will be to allow students to gain experience in incrementally building a continous delivery pipeline from scratch. Throughout the semester, students are expected to complete a component of the pipeline by each milestone deadline. Students in CSC 791 are expected to implement a research component to their pipline.

Students are able to choose their own app and technology choices for building a deployment pipeline. Otherwise, a default app and technology stack will be provided.

Milestones

Details on requirements for milestones will be released throughout the course. A student's pipeline should demonstrate the following components by the milestone deadline:

  • BUILD
  • TEST+ANALYSIS
  • DEPLOY
  • SPECIAL

Schedule and Topics - Spring 2015

The following schedule is subject to change.

Class Topics Resources Deadlines
Jan 8th Hello    
Jan 13th Core Concepts + Skills Slides  
Jan 15th Workshop: Git, Branches, Servers Site  
Jan 20th Configuration Management Slides  
Jan 22nd Workshop: Managed Environments Docker, Chef, Vagrant, Ansible HW #1 - Provisioning Servers
Jan 27th Build Management Slides  
Jan 29th Workshop: Build Servers Jenkins, CruiseControl, GoCd  
Feb 3rd Test Management Slides MILESTONE: BUILD
Feb 5th Workshop: Test Generation    
Feb 10th Static + Dynamic Analysis Slides  
Feb 12th Workshop: Fuzzing+Minification   HW #2 - Test Suite Generation
Feb 17th Project Planning (no class)    
Feb 19th Tech Talks #1    
Feb 24th SNOW DAY    
Feb 26th SNOW DAY  
March 3rd Infrastructure Management OpenStack, AWS  
March 5th Tech Talks #2 MILESTONE: TEST+ANALYSIS
March 7th-13th ~~~ Spring Break ~~~    
March 17th Redis   HW #3 - Infrastructure Fluency
March 19th Workshop: Queues, Caches, Proxies    
March 24th Staging + Deployment Slides  
March 26th Workshop: Deployment   HW #4 - Data Migration
March 31st Tech Talks #3   MILESTONE: DEPLOY
April 2nd ~~~ Spring Holiday ~~~    
April 7th Analysis + Monitoring Flame Graphs, Splunk, NewRelic, A/B @ Bing  
April 9th Workshop: Monitoring + Resilience Testing Chaos Monkey  
April 14th Tech Talk #4 / Auditing    
April 16th Nick Craver, Operations @ Stack Overflow How We Upgrade a Live Data Center MILESTONE: SPECIAL
April 21st Demos    
April 23rd Demos   HW #5 - Server Inventory

Resources

Piazza Class Forum

Books
Glossary of Tools