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Complete package

Complete package

Architecture design through production operations — one integrated journey. Over 22 weekends you will design, build, deliver, observe, and operate a production-style platform while preparing across AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, and DevOps certification paths.

Weekends only 22 weekends · 132 hours ~5.5 months Save ~37% vs individual paths

How this program is different

Individual paths teach depth in one domain. The complete package teaches how domains connect. You work on one fictional company — "Meridian Retail" — from empty cloud account to monitored production system. Every weekend adds a layer; nothing is throwaway homework.

  • Spiral curriculum — revisit architecture decisions as new capabilities land
  • One capstone codebase and infrastructure repo from week 1 to week 22
  • Cross-functional labs: architect on Saturday morning, operator by Sunday
  • Portfolio: ADRs, diagrams, pipeline configs, runbooks, and demo video
  • Certification roadmap across AWS, GCP, CKA, and DevOps Professional

The Meridian Retail scenario

Meridian is a mid-size retailer moving from on-prem VMs to cloud-native. You are the platform team of two (you + cohort peers). Product teams demand fast deploys; security demands guardrails; finance demands cost visibility. Your job: build the platform they run on — not their shopping-cart microservice logic.

Program phases

Phase 1 · Weekends 1–4 · Discovery & landing zone

Architect the estate before you click deploy

Interview stakeholders (role-play). Document NFRs. Design OU structure, network CIDR plan, and IAM model. Then implement the landing zone on AWS or GCP — your choice, same patterns.

  • Platform requirements brief and architecture decision records
  • Multi-account setup with billing, logging, and guardrail SCPs
  • Hub-spoke VPC with segmented subnets and controlled egress
  • Centralized audit logging and break-glass access documented
MilestoneMeridian landing zone live — peer architecture review with feedback incorporated.

Phase 2 · Weekends 5–9 · Runtime platform

Clusters, workloads & day-two operations

Stand up a managed Kubernetes cluster (EKS or GKE) inside your landing zone. Deploy Meridian's first internal service — an inventory API (provided skeleton). Learn scheduling, networking, storage, and RBAC in context of a real cluster you operate.

  • Cluster provisioning with private endpoint and node groups
  • Deploy inventory API with ingress, secrets, and persistent cache
  • NetworkPolicies isolating namespaces per team
  • Helm packaging and upgrade drill
  • Node drain, pod disruption budgets, and incident debug session
MilestoneInventory API reachable internally with runbook for pod failure.

Phase 3 · Weekends 10–13 · Delivery factory

From commit to cluster — the full pipeline

Product teams will not kubectl apply by hand. Build Meridian's delivery factory: Jenkins on Kubernetes for build/test/scan, Nexus or ECR for artifacts, Argo CD for GitOps deploys to dev and staging.

  • Multibranch pipeline: Maven build, unit tests, SonarQube gate
  • Container image build, scan, and promote to ECR with immutable tags
  • GitOps repo structure — Kustomize overlays per environment
  • Argo CD sync policies: auto dev, manual promote to staging
  • DevSecOps: dependency scan and secret detection in CI
MilestoneDeveloper pushes code → staging updated without anyone SSHing to a server.

Phase 4 · Weekends 14–17 · Observability & reliability

Make the platform visible and operable

Meridian's CFO asks "is the platform healthy?" before Black Friday. Instrument services with OpenTelemetry. Stand up Prometheus/Grafana for metrics, Elastic for logs, define SLOs, and wire alerts. Introduce Zabbix for remaining VMs in hybrid cutover.

  • OTel Collector pipeline exporting traces and metrics
  • Golden-signal dashboards and SLO/error budget tracking
  • Log correlation across inventory API and pipeline jobs
  • On-call simulation: injected latency — find it without guessing
  • Bridging cloud-native telemetry with Splunk for compliance archive
MilestoneIncident timeline reconstructed from telemetry; postmortem written.

Phase 5 · Weekends 18–20 · Hardening & scale

Production readiness review

Stress the platform. DR drill. Cost review. Security assessment. Add production environment with stricter gates — approval workflow, canary deploy concept, backup verification.

  • Multi-AZ failure injection and recovery validation
  • Backup/restore test for etcd and application data
  • Cost dashboard and rightsizing recommendations
  • Production GitOps with manual sync and change window policy
  • WAF and secrets rotation drill
MilestoneProduction readiness checklist signed off in cohort review.

Phase 6 · Weekends 21–22 · Capstone defense & certification planning

Present the platform you built

45-minute presentation: architecture, live demo, failure story, cost model, and roadmap. Certification planning workshop — which exams to sit first based on your career goal.

  • Live demo: commit → pipeline → deploy → monitor → rollback
  • Portfolio package: diagrams, ADRs, repos, runbooks
  • Peer and instructor Q&A — architecture review board format
  • Personalized cert roadmap: AWS / GCP / CKA / DevOps Pro
  • Alumni community and ongoing study group formation
Final deliverableMeridian platform documented end-to-end — hire-ready portfolio piece.

What's included beyond individual paths

  • Integrated scenario — not disconnected labs per topic
  • Architecture reviews at phases 1, 3, and 6 with written feedback
  • Office hours between weekends for blocked lab questions
  • Resume and LinkedIn positioning workshop (weekend 21)
  • Priority seat in follow-on certification cram sessions

Choose your stack

Meridian runs on your preferred cloud and orchestrator. Cohort votes before week 1; minority tracks get alternate lab guides.

AWS or GCP EKS, GKE, or OpenShift Jenkins + Argo CD Prometheus + Elastic

Individual paths vs this program

Already strong in cloud but weak in GitOps? Buy CI/CD alone. Want the full practitioner-to-platform-engineer arc with one portfolio story? This program is the better investment.

Enroll in Complete package

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