The Linux Foundation and edX announce free DevOps course

Friday, October 28, 2016

The Linux Foundation has announced its newest Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is available for registration. The course, LFS161x - Introduction to DevOps: Transforming and Improving Operations, is offered through edX, the nonprofit online learning platform launched in 2012 by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The course is free and will begin November 16.

This is the fourth edX MOOC offered by The Linux Foundation. Its first course, Intro to Linux, has reached more than 600,000 students globally and continues to grow in registrations. The others are Intro to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies and Introduction to OpenStack.

DevOps started as a cultural movement, designed to remove silos between developers and operations personnel. It originated with operations personnel who felt they would be more effective managing IT infrastructure if they better understood how and why it was built. Organizations that implement DevOps best practices have been demonstrated to be more agile, flexible and effective in designing and implementing IT practices and tools, resulting in higher revenue generation at a lower cost. The Linux Foundation is already helping develop technology for DevOps professionals through its open source projects, and now through the launch of this course, to provide the training opportunities to educate a talent pool to support those projects.

LFS161x is organized around the three basic principles of DevOps, otherwise known as the “Three Ways”, which outline the values and philosophies that guide DevOps processes and practices.

Students will learn how to:

- Explain the need to do DevOps.

- Understand the DevOps foundations, principles, and practices.

- Understand, analyze, and map value streams.

- Explain and implement the deployment pipeline.

- Illustrate the concept of Continuous Delivery.

- Create a problem solving culture.

- Explain the concepts of blameless postmortems.

- Monitor meaningful infrastructure and business metrics.

- Converge change management and DevOps.

- Understand how resilience engineering and safety culture are critical to DevOps success.

- Create a learning organization.

The course instructor, John Willis, has over 35 years of experience, focusing on IT infrastructure and operations. He has helped early startups such as Chef, Enstratius (now Dell) and Docker navigate the DevOps movement, and is one of the original core organizers of this movement. Willis has been a prominent keynote speaker at various DevOps events throughout the years, and is a co-author of the "DevOps Handbook".

“DevOps is a new and rapidly growing field that shows immense promise,” said edX CEO and MIT Professor Anant Agarwal. “This course furthers the professionalization of the industry, and we are proud to continue our work with The Linux Foundation to expand edX’s technical and open source educational offerings.”

The course includes six chapters, each with a short graded quiz at the end. A final exam is also required in order to complete the course. Students may take the complete course at no cost, or add a verified certificate of completion for $99.