Continuous Delivery & DevOps

Continuous Delivery & DevOps

Instructor: Alex Cowan

What you'll learn

How to diagnose a team’s delivery pipeline and bring forward prioritized recommendations to improve it
The skill sets and roles involved in DevOps and how they contribute toward a continuous delivery capability
How to review and deliver automation tests across the development stack
How to facilitate prioritized, iterative team progress on improving a delivery pipeline

Skills you'll gain

Details to know

Shareable certificate

Add to your LinkedIn profile

Assessments

4 assignments

Taught in English

See how employees at top companies are mastering in-demand skills

Learn more about Coursera for Business

Earn a career certificate

Add this credential to your LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV

Share it on social media and in your performance review

There are 4 modules in this course

Amazon famously delivers new code every 11.6 seconds. Just a few years ago, this was unthinkable: many ‘cutting edge’ firms would release software quarterly. When it comes to digital innovation, velocity is critical and many would say it’s the most reliable determinant of success.

Bringing an organization to the state of the art (or even functional capability) in this area requires strong work in a combination of disciplines and a combination of both technical and managerial skills. There is no single cookie-cutter approach for achieving this capability. Much like agile, the right focus and formulation depends a lot on the facts and circumstances of the team. This course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and taught by top-ranked faculty, will provide you with the interdisciplinary skill set to cultivate a continuous deployment capability in your organization. After completing this course, you will be able to: 1. Diagnose a team’s delivery pipeline and bring forward prioritized recommendations to improve it 2. Explain the skill sets and roles involved in DevOps and how they contribute toward a continuous delivery capability 3. Review and deliver automation tests across the development stack 4. Explain the key jobs of system operations and how today’s leading techniques and tools apply to them 5. Explain how high-functioning teams use DevOps and related methods to reach a continuous delivery capability 6. Facilitate prioritized, iterative team progress on improving a delivery pipeline

If your job is to make software, you’re probably busy. Everyone needs new features yesterday. Stuff breaks. How do you make time to work smarter? How do you know where you should focus the time you do have for process improvement? In this week, we’ll cover the fundamentals of DevOps and continuous delivery with an emphasis on the relationship between required investment and benefits.

What's included

9 videos1 assignment2 discussion prompts

9 videosTotal 62 minutes

Why Is Velocity Important?4 minutesPreview module
What Is a Delivery Pipeline?4 minutes
What Is a Test Stack?7 minutes
What Is DevOps?6 minutes
The Job of Development and DevOps6 minutes
The Job of Test and DevOps5 minutes
The Job of Ops and DevOps5 minutes
Interview with Jez Humble16 minutes
Your Delivery Pipeline- Getting Started6 minutes

1 assignmentTotal 30 minutes

Week 1- The Importance of Velocity & The Jobs of Delivery30 minutes

2 discussion promptsTotal 25 minutes

Ideas for Helping Move Towards a More DevOps Environment15 minutes
Ideas for helping the developer, tester, and ops roles work together10 minutes

Focusing and automating your software testing is one of the most critical foundation elements to a continuous delivery capability. Thinking like a developer and looking at how to automate repetitive tasks is a lot of what DevOps collaboration is about. In this week, we’ll explore the test stack with a focus on the when and how’s of automated testing.

What's included

14 videos1 assignment3 discussion prompts

14 videosTotal 75 minutes

The Science and Economics of Testing5 minutesPreview module
How Many Tests?6 minutes
Demo: Introduction to Our Sample Application5 minutes
Demo: Introduction to Our Sample Code3 minutes
Demo: Sample Code7 minutes
The Small/Unit Test3 minutes
Unit Test Example7 minutes
Unit Test Practice Example2 minutes
The Medium/Integration Test6 minutes
The Medium/Integration Test Example3 minutes
The Large/System Test6 minutes
Introduction to System Testing4 minutes
System Test Example10 minutes
Creating a Culture of Experimentation2 minutes

1 assignmentTotal 30 minutes

Week 2- Your Testing Stack30 minutes

3 discussion promptsTotal 45 minutes

Share Your Team's Plan for Investing in Testing15 minutes
Debate on Using Unit Tests15 minutes
Share and Discuss How Your Team Can Help Create a Culture of Experimentation15 minutes

Something like 99% of the code that delivers your functionality to the user is code you don’t write- it’s an operating system and supporting packages from third parties. The quality and availability of standard components has driven down the cost of software development exponentially. It’s also increased the importance of managing this supporting code and the environments where it runs to support your application. In this week, we’ll look at the techniques and tools teams are using to manage their environments and operations for continuous delivery.

What's included

12 videos1 assignment1 discussion prompt

12 videosTotal 54 minutes

The 99% of Your Code You Don't Write3 minutesPreview module
Who Is this Ops Person?6 minutes
The Job of Ops Sys Admin6 minutes
The Job of Designing5 minutes
The Job of Deploying2 minutes
The Job of Maintaining3 minutes
The Job of Monitoring3 minutes
Version Control 1016 minutes
The Role of Version Control5 minutes
What's Under the Hood?6 minutes
Kubernetes and Container Orchestration4 minutes
Week Close0 minutes

1 assignmentTotal 30 minutes

Week 3- Infrastructure and The Jobs of Ops30 minutes

1 discussion promptTotal 15 minutes

What does the Job of Ops look like in Your Company?15 minutes

You now have an understanding of the key components of a continuous delivery capability. The key to success is focusing on the right things at the right time and creating momentum with your initial investments on the capability. In this final week, we’ll look at how teams get their continuous capability online and keep their pipeline healthy.

What's included

11 videos1 assignment2 discussion prompts

11 videosTotal 77 minutes

Towards CI, CD2 minutesPreview module
The CI/CD Process7 minutes
Feature Flags and the Blue/Green Pattern6 minutes
Interview with Adam Zimman at LaunchDarkly6 minutes
Microservices vs. Monoliths3 minutes
Interview with Jim Rose4 minutes
Interview with Ricardo at CircleCI14 minutes
Interview with Emma Bukacek at CircleCI4 minutes
Interview with Sam Aronoff at Honey11 minutes
Interview with David at Intuit11 minutes
Course Wrap-up2 minutes

1 assignmentTotal 30 minutes

Week 4- Delivering Continuously30 minutes

2 discussion promptsTotal 20 minutes

Share Your Use/Interest of Any Systems (Jenkins, etc.) for the CI/CD Process10 minutes
Share Your Key Takeaways from the Interviews10 minutes

Instructor

Instructor ratings

4.7 (411 ratings)

Alex Cowan

University of Virginia

25 Courses492,495 learners

Offered by

University of Virginia

Why people choose Coursera for their career

Felipe M.

Learner since 2018

"To be able to take courses at my own pace and rhythm has been an amazing experience. I can learn whenever it fits my schedule and mood."

Jennifer J.

Learner since 2020

"I directly applied the concepts and skills I learned from my courses to an exciting new project at work."

Larry W.

Learner since 2021

"When I need courses on topics that my university doesn't offer, Coursera is one of the best places to go."

Chaitanya A.

"Learning isn't just about being better at your job: it's so much more than that. Coursera allows me to learn without limits."

Learner reviews

4.6

1,615 reviews

5 stars
69.30%
4 stars
23.82%
3 stars
4.70%
2 stars
1.48%
1 star
0.68%

Showing 3 of 1615

Reviewed on Jul 4, 2021

It makes you reflect on the aspects regarding your current team, giving high-level insights into what CICD is. But also explaining by practical, yet simple, examples.

Reviewed on Oct 19, 2020

The course gave a really good overview of basic concepts and terms. It's helped me articulate devops concepts in the office and communicate effectively with the development and operations team.

Reviewed on Jan 3, 2020

Very beginner-friendly. I think the pace and content of this course would help relatively new software developers a lot in understanding what practices are being used in top notch companies

View more reviews