DevChamps "Extreme Automation" training

2021-05-17 06:56:00

After completing PDSO's CDP (Certified DevSecOps Professional) two months ago, I was left wanting more. More CI/CD, more pipelines, more automation. That's when, via-via, I met Andrey Adamovich via LinkedIn. Andrey works with a collective of DevOps trainers, to teach his XA: Extreme Automation training.

To sum it up: I was looking for a little extra fun, to expand upon what I'd learned in the past two years and the price was right at €700 for a three-day training with all the labs neatly arranged for students. 

To summarize my impressions:

• Andrey's course content is solid: there's a decent flow to the information and there's logical progression to the content. It's also still highly relevant to today's world of IT.
• Time management is difficult, especially with a highly varied group of students who can range from "what is git-pull?" to "I've built multi-stage Docker containers". We covered the most important, bit topics but the final two hours of day three were a rush and a crunch to get in a few extra topics. 
• The labs were excellent. Not one hitch was experienced and everybody could get started immediately. 

Would I recommend Andreys class? Yes, especially to folks in my shoes (security engineer) who need a quick introduction to modern-day IT infrastructure.

As to what I've learned during class? Well, Ansible and Docker weren't new to me, but that's perfectly okay. Terraform was very nice to get to know better, while Packer and Kubernetes were eye-opening. 

My biggest take-away is that I'm behind the times on modern-day infrastructure. This class has helped me recognize some of my bigger knowledge-gaps, which means I can now address them. 

My first order of business in my homelab should be to attempt a complete rebuild, using Packer to create golden images and using Terraform to drive VMWare ESXi, instead of using Vagrant. From there on out, I should try to use my Gitlab instance together with K8s and Docker to run many of my services. Luckily I have two Dell servers for my lab, so I can repurpose an old laptop as Terraform+Packer box while using the smaller Dell to first test-run my configs. 

The sad part is, as Andrey mentioned halfway through day 3: he expects that within a few years many apps and services will move to a server-less model, like Lambda or Azure Functions. That means that >60% of what we learned in XA will become much less useful. 

kilala.nl tags: studies, work,

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