Class Tuesday / Thursday 7:00-8:20pm via Zoom (link on Canvas/Piazza)
Summer 2026
12 units
Jonathan Aldrich
aldrich at cs dot cmu dot edu
TCS 422
Office hour: TBA
For appointments outside of office hours, email the instructor.
Course Description
DevOps - Development Operations - is a set of practices that shortens the system development lifecycle and continuously delivers software with high quality. The course starts with a review of the necessary background concerning virtualization, containers, networking, and the structure of the cloud, as well as basic principles for measurement and infrastructure security. We then cover fundamental DevOps concepts: continuous integration, continuous deployment, infrastructure as code, configuration management, secret management, and observability. DevSecOps carries the ideas forward to consider security as an integral part of the DevOps lifecycle. We finish by covering DevOps for Agentic AI-based development, looking at how to set up agents to perform development tasks. The class will include case studies of DevOps in action, and assignments will cover common tools used in modern DevOps settings.
Prerequisite Knowledge. Programming maturity in several programming languages, familiarity with basic operating system tasks and tool installation.
Course Syllabus and Policies
The syllabus covers course learning objectives, textbooks, assessments, late work, and other policies.Schedule
| Date | Topic and Slides | Additional Reading or Code | Assignments Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 12 | Introduction: What is DevOps? | Textbook chapter 9 | |
| May 14 | Platform and DevOps Preliminaries (video ch. 1, ch. 8) | Textbook chapter 1, 8 | |
| May 19 | Virtualization (video) | Textbook chapter 2 | May 18: Assignment 0 |
| May 21 | Networking (video) | Textbook chapter 3 | |
| May 26 | The Cloud (video) | Textbook chapter 4 | |
| May 28 | Container Orchestration (video) | Textbook chapter 5 | Assignment 1 |
| June 2 | Measurement (video) | Textbook chapter 6 | |
| June 4 | Infrastructure Security (video) | Textbook chapter 7 | |
| June 9 | No class, but watch or read Basic DevOps Tools. (video) | Textbook chapter 10 | Assignment 2 |
| June 11 | The Deployment Pipeline Part 1. Class discussion on Version Control (video) | Textbook chapter 11.0-11.3 | |
| June 16 | Continuous Integration (video) | Textbook chapter 11.4-11.6 | Assignment 3 |
| June 18 | Continuous Deployment (video) | Textbook chapter 11.7-11.10 | |
| June 23 | Infrastructure as Code, Configuration Management | (no new readings, was chapter 10) | |
| June 25 | Architectural Choices (video) | Textbook chapter 12 | |
| June 30 | Post Production (video) | Textbook chapter 13 | |
| July 2 | No Class: Community Appreciation Day | ||
| July 7 | DevSecOps and Secret Management (video) | Textbook chapter 14 | |
| July 9 | Fundamentals of Agentic Loop Engineering | Watch this video and read this blog post | Mini Project |
| July 14 | Loop Engineering in Practice | Read Rewriting Bun in Rust | |
| July 16 | Model Context Protocol, Agent Skills and Systems | ||
| July 21 | Agentic Tool Ecosystems | Assignment 4 | |
| July 23 | ML Ops (video) | ||
| July 28 | Disaster Recovery (video) | Textbook chapter 15 | |
| July 30 | The Future of DevOps and Meerkat (video) | Textbook chapter 16 | Assignment 5 |