🔹 LEVEL 5: CI/CD + Monitoring

❌ REMOVED: ArgoCD

Why removed: Too heavy for entry-level roles. ArgoCD is great, but you'll learn it on the job if needed.

❌ REMOVED: Prometheus/Grafana Deep Dive

Why removed: Overkill early. CloudWatch is what you'll use at most companies initially.

✅ GitHub Actions Tutorial Free & Comprehensive

Why GitHub Actions: Most companies use GitHub. Actions is simpler than Jenkins, more widely adopted than GitLab CI for smaller teams.

What you'll learn:

• Workflow syntax and triggers
• Building and testing code automatically
• Deploying to AWS/cloud providers
• Matrix builds for multiple environments
• Secrets management
• Marketplace actions and reusability

📊 AWS CloudWatch - Logs, Metrics, Alarms Keep

Why CloudWatch: It's AWS-native, most cloud engineers use it daily, and it's simpler than Prometheus for getting started.

What you'll learn:

• Collecting application logs
• Creating custom metrics
• Setting up alarms
• Creating dashboards
• CloudWatch Insights for log analysis
• Integration with SNS for notifications

📖 Site Reliability Engineering by Google Industry Bible

Why this book: FREE book written by Google's SRE team. The definitive guide to modern operations and DevOps principles.

What you'll understand:

• Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets
• Monitoring distributed systems
• Incident management and postmortems
• Eliminating toil through automation
• Building reliable, scalable systems
• On-call best practices

Format: Free online version or purchase physical copy

📗 The DevOps Handbook (Free Preview) Free Chapters

Why this resource: Explains The Three Ways of DevOps. Free sample chapters available.

What's covered: Flow, feedback, continuous learning, cultural principles

Project 1: Complete CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions

• Create a web application (Node.js, Python, or Go)
• Write unit tests
• Set up GitHub Actions workflow:
  • Run tests on every pull request
  • Build Docker image
  • Push to Docker Hub or ECR
  • Deploy to AWS EC2 or ECS
• Add status badges to README

Deliverable: Working CI/CD pipeline that deploys on merge to main

Project 2: Infrastructure CI/CD with Terraform

• Take your LEVEL 4 Terraform project
• Create GitHub Actions workflow for Terraform:
  • terraform fmt check
  • terraform validate
  • terraform plan on pull requests
  • terraform apply on merge to main
• Store state in S3 with locking (DynamoDB)
• Use GitHub secrets for AWS credentials

Project 3: Monitoring & Alerting

• Deploy application to AWS EC2
• Send application logs to CloudWatch Logs
• Create custom CloudWatch metrics
• Set up CloudWatch alarms:
  • High CPU usage
  • Application errors
  • Increased latency
• Configure SNS to send email/SMS alerts
• Create CloudWatch Dashboard

Project 4: Full-Stack Deployment (Capstone)

Combine everything you've learned:

• Terraform provisions infrastructure (VPC, EC2, RDS, ALB)
• Application runs in Docker containers
• GitHub Actions deploys automatically
• CloudWatch monitors logs and metrics
• Alarms trigger if something breaks

This is your interview showcase project.

Week 1: GitHub Actions Fundamentals

• Read GitHub Actions tutorials
• Build simple workflows (linting, testing)
• Practice: triggers, jobs, steps, actions
• Start Project 1

Week 2: CI/CD for Applications

• Complete Project 1 (App CI/CD)
• Complete Project 2 (Terraform CI/CD)
• Document your pipelines

Week 3: Monitoring & Observability

• Learn CloudWatch Logs and Metrics
• Set up CloudWatch agent on EC2
• Complete Project 3 (Monitoring)
• Practice: logs, alarms, dashboards

Week 4: Integration + The Phoenix Project

• Read The Phoenix Project
• Complete Project 4 (Capstone)
• Polish your GitHub portfolio
• Prepare for job search