Cloud & DevOps Engineer Capstone: Ready for the Sale

Programme overview

The capstone of the Cloud & DevOps Engineer track. Kasuwa, the online shop from the Data Scientist Capstone, lost checkout for 94 minutes at the peak of last year's sale, and nobody wrote the postmortem. With eight weeks to go, you'll take stock of a cloud account where half the spend was built by hand, reconstruct the outage from per-minute metrics and logs (autoscaling made it worse), and review the readiness pull request, where your policy checks catch a rename that would have deleted the orders database. Then you'll measure delivery with the DORA measures, size capacity from a load test and Little's law, replay burn-rate alerts against last year to see when they'd have fired, cut the cloud bill while the platform gets stronger, and turn a game day's failures into an honest go/no-go with conditions. Every number comes from running the code.

Curriculum

1. 01The Brief and the Inventory25 min

   • The brief and the inventoryMeet Kasuwa's platform eight weeks before its biggest sale, take stock of everything running in the cloud account, and find what isn't managed, isn't owned or isn't safe.
2. 02Last Year's Outage30 min

   • Last year's outageReconstruct the 2025 sale-day outage from per-minute metrics and error logs, measure its impact, find the real cause, and see why autoscaling made it worse.
3. 03Reviewing the Readiness Plan25 min

   • Reviewing the readiness planRead the Terraform plan for the sale-readiness changes, write policy checks in Python, and catch the change that would have deleted the orders database, plus two security holes, before anyone applies it.
4. 04Delivery and the Change Freeze25 min

   • Delivery and the change freezeMeasure Kasuwa's delivery with the four DORA measures, find which deploys fail most often, and set evidence-based rules for deploying before and during the sale.
5. 05Capacity for This Year's Peak25 min

   • Capacity for this year's peakTurn last year's peak and this year's forecast into a capacity target, read a load test to find what limits each configuration, and use Little's law to see why a connection pooler fixes last year's problem.
6. 06SLOs and Alerts That Matter30 min

   • SLOs and alerts that matterSet a checkout SLO, measure how much error budget last year's outage burned, replay burn-rate alerts against sale day to see when each would have fired, and clear out the alerts nobody acts on.
7. 07Cost Before and During the Sale25 min

   • Cost before and during the saleFind the spend that buys nothing (idle machines and an always-on staging copy of production), price the readiness changes and the sale's extra capacity, and keep the savings away from resilience.
8. 08Game Day and the Go/No-Go25 min

   • Game day and the go/no-goTest the platform by breaking it on purpose, read the game-day results against their targets, turn the whole review into a readiness checklist, and give leadership an honest go/no-go for the sale.

Assessment and certificate

You are assessed with a final assessment (pass mark 60%) and a final project. Your certificate is awarded when you meet those requirements. Paying for the programme does not award it on its own.