Intermediate to Advanced|10 hours|23 lessons

Production Systems Engineering

The production half of system design. Deployment strategies, release patterns, observability, and security, taught as general production engineering principles. Built for senior engineers who need to design systems that can be deployed safely, observed clearly, and secured properly, in interviews and in real production.

Text-based, no videos

4 modules, 23 lessons

Lifetime access

What you'll learn

Choose between recreate, rolling, blue-green, and canary based on the stakes of the change

Design a CI/CD pipeline from commit to production and decide where to gate

Decouple deployment from release with feature flags, and run experiments safely

Change a live database schema with zero downtime using expand-contract

Decide between rolling back and rolling forward, and make recovery reliable

Instrument metrics, logs, and traces, and know which question each one answers

Design alerts that are actionable, and dashboards and runbooks that hold up in an incident

Apply general production security: TLS, encryption at rest, secrets, passwords, RBAC, and SAML

Curriculum

4 modules · 23 lessons

Deployment Strategies

Getting new code in front of users without downtime and with a way back: the strategy spectrum, the pipeline that delivers it, and rolling, blue-green, and canary in depth.

5 lessons

Deployment Strategies Overview20 minFREE CI/CD Pipelines25 minFREE Rolling Deployments25 minFREE Blue-Green Deployments25 minFREE Canary Releases30 minFREE

Release Patterns

Separating deploy from release: feature flags, experiment infrastructure, zero-downtime schema change, and getting back to a known-good state.

4 lessons

Feature Flags25 min A/B Testing Infrastructure25 min Schema Migrations30 min Rollbacks & Immutable Infrastructure25 min

Observability

Seeing what production is doing: the three pillars, logging and aggregation, correlation, metrics, alerting, dashboards and runbooks, and distributed tracing.

8 lessons

Three Pillars of Observability20 min Logging Best Practices20 min Log Aggregation25 min Correlation IDs20 min Metrics & Instrumentation25 min Alert & Monitoring25 min Dashboards & Runbooks20 min Distributed Tracing30 min

Advanced Security

Production security as general principle: TLS in transit, encryption at rest, secrets, passwords, access control, and enterprise SSO. Platform-specific depth lives in the Kubernetes Security and Identity and Trust courses.

6 lessons

SSL/TLS25 min Encryption at Rest25 min Secrets Management25 min Password Management20 min RBAC25 min SAML20 min

About the Author

Sharon Sahadevan

AI Infrastructure Engineer

Building production GPU clusters on Kubernetes. H100s, large-scale model serving, and end-to-end ML infrastructure across Azure and AWS.

10+ years designing cloud-native platforms with deep expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, GitOps (Argo CD), Terraform, and MLOps pipelines for LLM deployment.

Author of KubeNatives, a weekly newsletter read by 3,000+ DevOps and ML engineers for production insights on K8s internals, GPU scheduling, and model-serving patterns.

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