Real Projects from Real Learners
Every semester, our students tackle hands-on DevOps challenges that mirror what they'll face in actual work environments. These aren't textbook exercises—they're infrastructure solutions built from scratch.
Learning Through Building
We stopped using simulated environments back in early 2024. Students now work with live cloud platforms, real monitoring tools, and actual deployment pipelines. The mistakes they make here won't cost them a job later.
Each project runs for six to eight weeks. Teams of three work together, managing their own Git workflows and handling merge conflicts just like they would in any tech company. Some groups struggle at first—that's part of it.
By the time students finish their capstone work in late 2025, they've usually deployed at least four complete systems. Not demos. Working applications with proper CI/CD, monitoring, and documentation.
Recent Student Work
Projects completed during Spring 2025 cohort—all deployed to production environments
Automated Deployment Pipeline
Three-person team built a complete GitLab CI/CD system that handles testing, building, and deployment across staging and production. Includes rollback capabilities and Slack notifications.
Monitoring Stack Setup
Student configured Prometheus and Grafana to track server metrics, application performance, and user behavior. Created custom dashboards that actually make sense to non-technical stakeholders.
Infrastructure as Code
Team used Terraform to provision an entire multi-tier application environment. Took them three attempts to get the networking right, but the final version deploys in under ten minutes.
Container Orchestration
Deployed a microservices application using Kubernetes. Students handled scaling, load balancing, and service discovery. The documentation they wrote is good enough to onboard new developers.
Security Automation
Built automated security scanning into the deployment process. Catches vulnerabilities before code reaches production. Includes dependency checking and container image scanning.
High Availability Setup
Configured redundant servers with automatic failover. Simulated various failure scenarios to test recovery. System stayed online through everything they threw at it.
Kasper Thornquist
Lead DevOps Instructor
I've been doing infrastructure work since 2011. Started with bare metal servers in a data center basement, moved through the cloud migration wave, and now I spend most days helping students avoid the mistakes I made early on.
The best part of teaching is watching someone finally understand why their container keeps crashing—and then fix it themselves. We don't give answers here. Students get stuck, they troubleshoot, they read documentation, and eventually they figure it out. That's how the learning sticks.
Our autumn 2025 cohort starts in September. If you're curious about what infrastructure work actually involves, come sit in on a project review session. You'll see students presenting their work, defending their architectural choices, and sometimes admitting they should have read the error logs more carefully.
How Project Work Unfolds
Each cohort follows this progression—though timing shifts based on how quickly groups grasp concepts
Foundation Building
Students set up their development environments and get comfortable with Linux command line. We cover Git workflows, SSH keys, and basic scripting. Everyone deploys a simple web application manually before we introduce automation.
Weeks 1-3
First Automation Project
Teams create their initial CI/CD pipeline. Lots of broken builds at this stage. Students learn to read logs, debug YAML syntax, and handle Docker networking issues. This is usually where the learning curve hits hardest.
Weeks 4-7
Infrastructure as Code
Groups move from manual cloud console work to Terraform. They provision entire environments from code, which means they also destroy entire environments by accident. Good learning experience. Backups become very important to them around week six.
Weeks 8-11
Monitoring and Observability
Students add proper monitoring to their systems. They configure alerts, build dashboards, and learn what metrics actually matter. Some groups get carried away with graphs—we've seen 40-panel dashboards that nobody would actually use.
Weeks 12-14
Capstone Integration
Final project brings everything together. Teams build a production-ready system with automated deployment, monitoring, security scanning, and documentation. We evaluate based on how well it works and whether another team could maintain it.
Weeks 15-18