Laptop to Production

Learn DevOps by shipping one app

Follow QuickCart, a food-ordering app, from a laptop to millions of customers. Every idea arrives at the moment QuickCart needs it — and every lesson ends with you building it yourself, in your own AWS account.

Written for engineers who have never worked on backend infrastructure. If you build mobile or web apps, you already know more of this than you think.

Start at the beginningFind the lesson for your question

The route

Twelve stations, then five projects. Each station is a problem QuickCart runs into, and the tools that solve it. Stops you mark as done fill in here.

  1. Module 00: Start here

    3 of 3 ready

    What DevOps is for, how this course works, and setting up your computer.

    Meet QuickCart: a food-ordering app with a small team and big plans.

  2. Module 01: How software ships

    5 of 5 ready

    The DevOps lifecycle, and how good teams measure delivery.

    QuickCart releases once a month and it hurts. Why, and what better looks like.

  3. Module 02: The cloud, simply

    3 of 3 ready

    What AWS actually is, who can do what, and where it all physically lives.

    QuickCart moves off a laptop and onto AWS.

  4. Module 03: Networking

    5 of 5 ready

    Your private network on AWS, and deciding exactly what the internet can reach.

    The app must reach the API. Nobody should ever reach the database.

  5. Module 04: Running code

    3 of 3 ready

    Servers, load balancers, and adding capacity automatically.

    Launch day. The one server falls over at 7pm.

  6. Module 05: Data

    4 of 4 ready

    Databases, files and secrets — the parts you cannot afford to lose.

    Orders must never be lost, and the database password must never leak.

  7. Module 06: Watching it run

    3 of 3 ready

    Knowing something is wrong before your customers tell you.

    Checkout has been failing for an hour. Nobody noticed.

  8. Module 07: Containers

    4 of 4 ready

    Packaging the app once so it runs the same everywhere.

    'It worked on my laptop' breaks a release.

  9. Module 08: Running containers

    4 of 4 ready

    ECS and Kubernetes: keeping containers alive and releasing without downtime.

    Friday releases stop causing errors.

  10. Module 09: Infrastructure as code

    8 of 8 ready

    Terraform from your first resource to a whole platform in two regions.

    Opening in a second country took a week of clicking. Next time: one command.

  11. Module 10: Automation

    5 of 5 ready

    Jenkins and the pipeline that takes a commit all the way to production.

    Releases stop needing someone awake at 2am.

  12. Module 11: When things break

    3 of 3 ready

    Where to look first, runbooks, and learning from real failures.

    3am. Checkout is down. What do you open first?

  13. Projects

    5 of 5 ready

    Five builds that put each part together, with step-by-step guides.

    Everything above, built for real.