AWS Zero to Hero: 30-Day DevOps Roadmap (Day 0)

This course is a comprehensive, project-driven roadmap designed to transition aspiring and practicing DevOps engineers from foundational cloud concepts to production-grade AWS architecture. Rather than focusing strictly on theoretical certification paths, this curriculum prioritizes real-world scenarios, hands-on projects, and the exact toolsets utilized by DevOps professionals in their day-to-day operations.

1. Course Philosophy: Job Readiness vs. Certification

Many cloud courses focus primarily on helping students pass multiple-choice certification exams. While certifications have value, they often fail to prepare engineers for the actual tasks they will face on the job. This course is designed with a job-first philosophy.

Core Pillars of the Curriculum

• Zero Prerequisites: No prior cloud or DevOps knowledge is required. The course starts from absolute basics and builds up progressively.
• DevOps-Centric Scope: The curriculum deliberately bypasses niche AWS services (such as machine learning or AI Ops) to focus deeply on the core compute, networking, security, storage, CI/CD, and container orchestration services that DevOps engineers manage daily.
• Hands-On Projects: Theoretical concepts are immediately reinforced with practical deployments, culminating in real-world architectural projects.
• Interview Preparation: Key architectural decisions, debugging workflows, and cloud migration strategies are framed around common interview questions to help students secure cloud engineering roles.

2. Core Learning Resources & GitHub Repository

All code, templates, architecture diagrams, and notes are centralized in a single, open-access repository. Students are expected to fork, star, and watch this repository to receive updates as the course progresses.

• Repository Name: AWS devops Zero to Hero
• Creator/Maintainer: Abhishek Veeramalla
• Contents:
  • Step-by-step project instructions.
  • CloudFormation templates and CLI scripts.
  • Python-based AWS Lambda functions.
  • Reference architectures and troubleshooting guides.

3. Phase 1: Core Infrastructure, Networking, and Security (Days 1–7)

The first week establishes the foundational pillars of AWS: compute, identity management, networking, DNS, and security.

Day 1: Introduction to AWS & Cloud Computing

• Concepts: Private vs. Public Cloud architectures; business drivers for cloud migration.
• Practical: Setting up an AWS Free Tier account, navigating the AWS Management Console, and understanding billing alarms.

Day 2: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

• Concepts: Principle of Least Privilege (Zero-Access/Zero-Privilege security model).
• Practical: Creating IAM users, groups, custom JSON policies, and roles. Restricting access programmatically.

Day 3: AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

• Concepts: EC2 instance types, pricing models, and virtualization basics.
• Practical: Launching an EC2 instance, configuring security groups, and deploying a live Java-based web application (e.g., Jenkins). Configuring local laptop access to the hosted application.

Day 4: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) & Networking

• Concepts: Subnets (public vs. private), route tables, internet gateways, and CIDR blocks.
• Practical: Designing and building a custom VPC networking infrastructure from scratch.

Day 5: AWS Security & Traffic Control

• Concepts: Defense-in-depth using Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) and Security Groups.
• Practical: Implementing strict traffic rules to isolate application layers and prevent unauthorized external access.

Day 6: AWS Route 53 (Domain Name System)

• Concepts: DNS record types (A, CNAME, TXT), routing policies (latency, failover, weighted), and health checks.
• Practical: Registering a domain, managing DNS records, and configuring health checks for high availability.

Day 7: Milestone Project 1 — Secure Web Infrastructure

• Objective: Synthesize Days 2–6 by deploying a secure, production-ready web application.
• Architecture: An EC2 instance hosted inside a custom VPC, secured via custom NACLs/Security Groups, mapped to a custom domain via Route 53, and managed using restricted IAM roles.

4. Phase 2: Storage, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and CLI (Days 8–10)

This phase transitions students from manual console configurations to automated, programmatic resource provisioning.

Day 8: Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

• Concepts: Object storage vs. block storage, bucket policies, versioning, and lifecycle rules.
• Practical: Hosting a static website on S3 integrated with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for global low-latency delivery.

Day 9: AWS CloudFormation (Infrastructure as Code)

• Concepts: Declarative infrastructure management, drift detection, and stack updates.
• Practical: Writing CloudFormation templates (YAML/JSON) to automate the deployment of EC2 instances, security groups, and VPCs.

Day 10: AWS CLI & Elastic Beanstalk

• Concepts: Programmatic control of AWS resources; Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) deployment models.
• Practical: Configuring the AWS CLI on a local machine, executing resource management scripts, and deploying an application using AWS Elastic Beanstalk for automated scaling and provisioning.

5. Phase 3: AWS Native CI/CD Pipelines (Days 11–14)

DevOps engineers must know how to build, test, and deploy code automatically. This block is dedicated to mastering AWS-native continuous integration and continuous delivery tools.

Day 11: AWS CodeCommit

• Concepts: Managed Git repositories in the cloud, secure access control via IAM.
• Practical: Setting up a secure repository, managing SSH/HTTPS credentials, and establishing branching strategies.

Day 12: AWS CodePipeline

• Concepts: Continuous delivery orchestration, stage transitions, and manual approval gates.
• Practical: Creating an automated pipeline that triggers on code commits.

Day 13: AWS CodeBuild

• Concepts: Serverless build environments, configuring buildspec.yml files, and managing build artifacts.
• Practical: Compiling application code, running unit tests, and packaging artifacts.

Day 14: AWS CodeDeploy

• Concepts: Deployment strategies (In-place, Blue/Green), rolling updates, and appspec.yml configurations.
• Practical: Deploying application packages automatically to EC2 instances.

6. Phase 4: Monitoring, Serverless, and Event-Driven Architectures (Days 15–18)

Modern cloud systems rely on automated monitoring, logging, and serverless execution to maintain system health and respond to real-time events.

Day 15: AWS CloudWatch

• Concepts: Metrics collection, custom namespaces, log groups, and alarm thresholds.
• Practical: Setting up CloudWatch alarms to monitor CPU utilization and sending automated notifications when thresholds are breached.

Day 16: AWS Lambda (Serverless Computing)

• Concepts: Serverless execution models, event sources, and execution roles.
• Practical: Writing serverless functions in Python to perform automated administrative tasks.

Day 17: Milestone Project 2 — Serverless Event-Driven Workflow

• Objective: Build an automated, self-healing infrastructure workflow.
• Practical: Integrating CloudWatch Events/EventBridge with AWS Lambda to detect resource state changes (e.g., an EC2 instance stopping) and trigger an automated remediation function.

Day 18: AWS CloudTrail & AWS Config

• Concepts: API auditing, user activity tracking, and compliance monitoring.
• Practical: Configuring CloudTrail to log API calls and setting up AWS Config rules to enforce organizational compliance (e.g., alerting if an S3 bucket is made public).

7. Phase 5: Databases, Containers, and Kubernetes (Days 19–22)

Containerization is a core requirement for modern DevOps. This phase covers data persistence and container orchestration.

Note on Prerequisites: For students unfamiliar with Docker or container basics, the instructor provides supplementary resources from the DevOps Zero to Hero series covering container history, image creation, and basic runtimes before diving into AWS-specific container services.

Day 19: Amazon DynamoDB

• Concepts: NoSQL database design, partition keys, and performance scaling.
• Practical: Managing DynamoDB tables and using DynamoDB for state locking in Terraform configurations.

Day 20: AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service)

• Concepts: Task definitions, services, clusters, and Fargate (serverless container execution) vs. EC2 launch types.
• Practical: Deploying a containerized application using ECS.

Day 21 & 22: AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) & ECR (Elastic Container Registry)

• Concepts: Managed Kubernetes control planes, worker node groups, and container registries.
• Practical:
  • Pushing Docker images to Amazon ECR.
  • Provisioning an EKS cluster.
  • Deploying, scaling, and managing production-grade Kubernetes workloads on AWS.

8. Phase 6: Enterprise Management, Scaling, and High Availability (Days 23–28)

This phase focuses on designing systems that can scale dynamically to meet demand while maintaining high availability and security.

Day 23: CloudWatch Logs & Log Insights

• Concepts: Centralized logging, log aggregation, and real-time log analysis.
• Practical: Querying application logs using CloudWatch Log Insights to troubleshoot runtime errors.

Day 24: AWS Systems Manager (SSM) & Parameter Store

• Concepts: Secure configuration management, parameter hierarchical paths, and secret rotation.
• Practical: Storing and retrieving sensitive API keys, database credentials, and configuration parameters securely.

Day 25: AWS Auto Scaling

• Concepts: Scaling policies (target tracking, step scaling, scheduled scaling), cooldown periods, and launch templates.
• Practical: Configuring an Auto Scaling Group (ASG) to dynamically scale EC2 instances based on traffic spikes (e.g., holiday shopping events).

Day 26: AWS RDS (Relational Database Service)

• Concepts: Managed relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), Multi-AZ deployments for high availability, and read replicas for read scaling.
• Practical: Provisioning a secure, highly available RDS database instance.

Day 27: AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

• Concepts: Application Load Balancers (ALB - Layer 7), Network Load Balancers (NLB - Layer 4), target groups, and path-based routing.
• Practical: Deploying an ALB to distribute traffic across multiple EC2 instances in different Availability Zones.

Day 28: Milestone Project 3 — High-Availability Enterprise Architecture

• Objective: Build a highly available, fault-tolerant, secure application stack.
• Practical: Deploying an auto-scaling group of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer, connected to a Multi-AZ RDS database, with all secrets managed by AWS Systems Manager.

9. Phase 7: Cloud Migration Strategies & Career Preparation (Days 29–30)

The final phase prepares students to apply their knowledge in real-world business environments and clear technical interviews.

Day 29: AWS Cloud Migration Strategies

• Concepts: The "6 Rs" of migration (Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Retain, Retire, Re-purchase).
• Practical: Step-by-step breakdown of how to plan, execute, and validate a migration from an on-premises data center to AWS.
• Interview Prep: How to structure answers to the common interview question: "Can you describe a cloud migration you performed?"

Day 30: Best Practices, Resume Building, and Next Steps

• Concepts: Cost optimization, performance efficiency, and operational excellence.
• Practical:
  • Structuring an AWS-focused DevOps resume.
  • Highlighting course projects effectively.
  • Navigating technical interviews and identifying resources for continued learning.

10. Complete 30-Day Syllabus Matrix

11. Typical DevOps Deployment Workflow

The diagram below outlines the standard deployment pipeline and runtime environment that students will build and manage by the end of this course:

Summary and Key Takeaways

• Job-First Focus: The course is designed to build practical, job-ready skills for DevOps roles rather than focusing solely on passing certification exams.
• Zero Prerequisites: The curriculum starts with foundational cloud concepts and builds up to advanced container orchestration and automation.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Students transition from manual console configurations to automated deployments using AWS CloudFormation and the AWS CLI.
• Production-Grade CI/CD: The course covers building fully automated, native pipelines using CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy.
• Serverless & Event-Driven: Students learn to build self-healing, event-driven architectures using AWS Lambda, CloudWatch, and EventBridge.
• Enterprise Kubernetes: The curriculum places a heavy emphasis on Amazon EKS and ECR, reflecting the high industry demand for Kubernetes skills.
• High Availability & Scaling: Students learn to design fault-tolerant systems using Application Load Balancers, Auto Scaling Groups, and Multi-AZ RDS databases.
• Real-World Interview Prep: The course includes dedicated sessions on cloud migration strategies and resume building to help students successfully transition into DevOps roles.