Search Results

What you'll learn What Terraform is for: provisioning infrastructure (creating VMs, networks, DNS, etc.). The core building blocks: providers, resources, and HCL syntax. What the state file is and why it's central to how Terraform works. The everyday workflow...

Lesson: Configuration Management with Ansible

What you'll learn What configuration management is and how Ansible does it. Why Ansible is agentless and works over plain SSH. The core pieces: inventory, playbooks, tasks, and modules. Why Ansible runs are idempotent, and what that looks like in practice. Wh...

Lesson: First-Boot Bootstrap and Code-Native IaC

What you'll learn What cloud-init is and how it configures a fresh VM on its first boot. The shape of a cloud-init user-data file (packages, users, files, commands). How the lab itself uses cloud-init to turn the golden template into a working VM. What Pulumi...

Lesson: When to Use Which

What you'll learn A simple decision rule for picking Terraform, Ansible, cloud-init, or Pulumi. The boundary between provisioning, configuration management, and bootstrap. How these tools combine in one workflow rather than competing. A worked example: Terraf...

Assignment 1: Write a cloud-init config for a new VM

Goal: Write a valid #cloud-config user-data file that would bootstrap a fresh Linux VM into a usable, reachable machine — the same kind of first-boot IaC the lab uses on every VM. Where: Do this on your own machine (or the Jumpbox). You'll write a file and val...

Assignment 2: A small Ansible playbook (or Terraform plan) walkthrough

Goal: Read, explain, and (for the Ansible path) dry-run a small piece of IaC so you can describe exactly what it does before it touches anything. This builds the habit of "preview, then apply." Where: On your own machine or the Jumpbox. Neither Ansible nor Ter...

Module 11 — Observability & Monitoring

See inside your systems: the three pillars (logs/metrics/traces), Grafana dashboards & alerts, the Alloy collector, the Loki/Mimir/Tempo backends — and the end-to-end capstone.

Lesson: Logs, Metrics & Traces

What you'll learn Why observability matters when systems break at 3 a.m. The three pillars — logs, metrics, and traces — and what each one is good at. The difference between monitoring (watching known things) and observability (asking new questions). What MTT...

Lesson: Dashboards, Exploring & Alerts

What you'll learn What a Grafana data source is and why Grafana stores no data itself. How to build a dashboard out of panels that query a data source. How to use Explore to ask ad-hoc questions without building anything. How basic alerting works: rules, cond...

Lesson: The Collector

What you'll learn What a collector / agent does and why you need one between your systems and the backends. How an agent scrapes metrics and tails/ships logs. The building blocks of a Grafana Alloy pipeline: components and references. How to read and write a ...

Lesson: Loki, Mimir & Tempo

What you'll learn What Loki does for logs, and how to query it with LogQL. What Mimir does for metrics, and the idea of querying with PromQL. What Tempo does for traces, and how spans form a trace. How Grafana ties all three together so you can pivot logs ↔ m...

Assignment 1: CAPSTONE — Ship a full stack end to end

Goal: Prove you can take a real application all the way through the platform you've built across the whole internship — containerize it (Module 6), push it through a CI/CD pipeline (Module 8), deploy it to the live Kubernetes cluster (Module 7), and observe it...

Assignment 2: Build a dashboard and a working alert

Goal: Get hands-on with Grafana on its own: connect to existing lab data, build a focused dashboard, and create an alert that you can actually make fire and recover. This sharpens the skills the capstone assumes. Where: The lab Grafana at 10.100.100.4 (reached...

Module 10 — Helm Charts

Package, install and manage Kubernetes apps with Helm: charts, releases and repositories; chart anatomy; the install/upgrade/rollback lifecycle; and authoring your own chart.

Lesson: What Helm Is and Why

What you'll learn The problem Helm solves on top of Kubernetes. What a chart, a release, and a repository are. How Helm relates to the raw kubectl apply you learned in Module 7. When Helm is the right tool — and when it's overkill. By the end you'll be able ...

Lesson: Anatomy of a Chart

What you'll learn The standard files and folders inside a Helm chart. What Chart.yaml, values.yaml, and templates/ each do. How Helm's templating turns templates + values into real Kubernetes YAML. What _helpers.tpl and NOTES.txt are for. By the end you'll b...

Lesson: Installing & Managing Releases

What you'll learn How to add a repository and install a public chart. The release lifecycle: install, upgrade, rollback, uninstall. How to override values safely and preview changes before applying them. How to inspect what's installed and what changed. By t...

Lesson: Writing Your First Chart