Description

This curriculum spans the technical and operational rigor of a multi-workshop cloud migration program, addressing the same automation, governance, and cross-team coordination challenges encountered in large-scale organizational transformations.

Module 1: Assessing Application Readiness for Cloud-Native Automation

Evaluate monolithic application dependencies to determine refactoring requirements before pipeline integration.
Classify workloads by statefulness, latency sensitivity, and compliance constraints to prioritize migration sequencing.
Inventory third-party integrations and assess compatibility with cloud provider service APIs and automation tooling.
Conduct technical debt analysis to identify legacy components that block CI/CD adoption.
Determine ownership boundaries across teams to assign automation responsibilities and prevent pipeline bottlenecks.
Define application health indicators that will serve as automated promotion gates in deployment workflows.

Module 2: Designing Secure, Scalable CI/CD Infrastructure

Select between self-hosted and managed pipeline agents based on security policies and network egress requirements.
Implement role-based access control (RBAC) for pipeline configuration and secret management across environments.
Architect pipeline high availability using regional redundancy and failover strategies for critical workloads.
Integrate artifact repositories with vulnerability scanning and retention policies to enforce compliance.
Configure network peering or private endpoints to allow secure communication between CI/CD systems and cloud resources.
Size and optimize build agents to balance cost, performance, and concurrency demands during peak deployment cycles.

Module 3: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Governance and Lifecycle Management

Standardize IaC templates using organizational modules with enforced tagging and naming conventions.
Implement pre-commit and pre-merge validation pipelines for IaC syntax, security, and policy compliance.
Establish drift detection mechanisms and define remediation procedures for configuration divergence.
Coordinate state file management across teams using locking, versioning, and backup strategies.
Define ownership and approval workflows for production environment changes in version-controlled infrastructure.
Integrate cost estimation tools into IaC pipelines to flag resource overprovisioning before deployment.

Module 4: Automated Testing and Quality Enforcement in Migration Pipelines

Embed contract testing in pipelines to validate API compatibility between legacy and cloud-deployed services.
Configure performance test gates that block promotion if response times exceed baseline thresholds.
Integrate static application security testing (SAST) tools with feedback loops to developer workflows.
Manage test data provisioning for integration environments while complying with data privacy regulations.
Orchestrate end-to-end tests across hybrid environments during phased cutover scenarios.
Balance test coverage and pipeline duration by prioritizing critical user journeys in staging promotions.

Module 5: Zero-Downtime Deployment Patterns and Traffic Management

Implement blue-green deployment workflows with automated DNS or load balancer switching in cloud networks.
Configure canary analysis using real-time metrics to trigger automated rollback on error rate thresholds.
Coordinate database schema changes with deployment strategies to maintain backward compatibility.
Manage feature flag lifecycle in production to decouple deployment from release.
Test failover procedures for stateful services during rolling updates in containerized environments.
Align deployment windows with business SLAs and customer usage patterns to minimize impact.

Module 6: Observability and Feedback Loop Integration

Instrument applications with structured logging and distributed tracing before cloud deployment.
Correlate deployment events with monitoring alerts to accelerate root cause analysis.
Configure synthetic transaction monitoring to validate external accessibility post-deployment.
Aggregate metrics from cloud-native services and on-prem systems for unified dashboards.
Define SLOs and error budgets to guide automated deployment throttling decisions.
Integrate user feedback channels with incident management systems to close operational loops.

Module 7: Managing Technical and Organizational Change at Scale

Coordinate pipeline adoption across business units with staggered rollout and change freeze windows.
Document and version operational runbooks to align with automated recovery procedures.
Negotiate shared responsibility models for cloud resources between platform and application teams.
Track automation adoption metrics to identify teams requiring targeted enablement support.
Establish a change advisory board (CAB) process that accommodates automated deployment velocity.
Update disaster recovery plans to reflect new dependencies on cloud provider services and automation tooling.

Module 8: Cost Optimization and Resource Automation

Implement auto-scaling policies tied to usage patterns while accounting for cold start penalties.
Automate deprovisioning of non-production environments during off-hours using scheduling tools.
Enforce instance type optimization through policy-as-code in deployment pipelines.
Monitor and alert on orphaned resources such as unattached disks or idle load balancers.
Negotiate reserved instance commitments based on forecasted workload stability post-migration.
Integrate FinOps practices into CI/CD pipelines by exposing cost impact in pull request reviews.