Professional Certificate in DevOps Engineering, Kubernetes, IaC & Site Reliability

DevOps Engineering

Professional Certificate in DevOps Engineering, Kubernetes, IaC & Site Reliability

Move from developer or IT background into DevOps — fast and structured

Get program updates

Be the first to hear about the next cohort.

5 Months
Duration
Hybrid
Format
Lagos, Nigeria
Location
Rolling 2025
Intake
CAREER SWITCH
Level
Yes
Certificate

What's included

Weekend Mentorship

Live cohort sessions with senior practitioners, every weekend.

Real-World Projects

Build a portfolio with hands-on industry case studies.

Community Access

Join a cohort of peers and the wider Firstlincoln alumni network.

Internship Pathway

Transition from learning into real industry experience through our internship program.

Weekend Mentorship Sessions

More than recorded videos — this is a live cohort.

Our Weekend Mentorship Sessions are live, instructor-led cohorts that run every weekend. Instead of watching pre-recorded lessons in isolation, you join a small group, work through real-world case studies, ask questions in real time, and get direct feedback from senior practitioners actively working in industry.

  • Live Q&A with senior practitioners every weekend
  • Real case-study breakdowns, not just slides
  • Cohort accountability and peer feedback
  • Career guidance, mock interviews and portfolio reviews
Sessions run Virtual or Physical — pick your format when you enrol.

What you'll learn

  • Manage cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP, or Azure with IAM and security policies
  • Orchestrate containerised workloads with Kubernetes, Helm, and service meshes
  • Provision and manage infrastructure as code using Terraform and Ansible
  • Implement GitOps workflows using ArgoCD or Flux for declarative deployments
  • Build sophisticated CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or GitLab CI
  • Instrument systems with Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry for observability
  • Apply SRE principles: SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and blameless post-mortems

Prerequisites

  • Bachelor's degree, HND, or equivalent (Computer Science, IT, or Engineering preferred)
  • Working knowledge of at least one programming or scripting language (Python, Bash, or similar)
  • Familiarity with Linux command line (basic navigation and file operations)
  • Laptop: 8GB RAM minimum, 256GB SSD recommended
  • Reliable internet — cloud lab access is included in programme fees
  • 12–15 hours per week study commitment

Who is this programme for?

  • Software developers wanting to transition into infrastructure and platform roles
  • System administrators and network engineers moving into cloud-native operations
  • IT managers and technical leads adding DevOps to their skill portfolio
  • Backend engineers wanting to own the full deployment and reliability stack
  • Recent CS graduates targeting DevOps and SRE job titles specifically

Curriculum

5 modules • 25 lessons • 5 Months
  1. PHASE 1 DevOps Foundations

    Weeks 1–3 · 5 lessons
    • DevOps culture, practices & CALMS model
    • Advanced Linux administration
    • Networking for DevOps engineers
    • Cloud platforms: AWS / GCP / Azure
    • IAM, security groups & policies
    • Docker advanced: multi-stage builds
    • Kubernetes: pods, services, deployments
    • Helm charts & package management
    • Service mesh (Istio basics)
    • Project: Kubernetes-managed microservices
    • Terraform: modules, state, workspaces
    • Ansible for configuration management
    • Infrastructure testing with Terratest
    • GitOps principles (ArgoCD / Flux)
    • Build: Full IaC environment on cloud
    • GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI
    • Pipeline design patterns
    • Artifact management & registries
    • Blue-green & canary deployments
    • Security scanning in CI (SAST/DAST)
    • Prometheus & Grafana stack
    • Distributed tracing (Jaeger / OpenTelemetry)
    • SLIs, SLOs & error budgets
    • Incident response & blameless post-mortems
    • Capstone: Production-grade platform build

Personalized Roadmap

Start your journey with a learning path customised to your motivation and experience

DevOps Foundations
1
Containers & Orchestration
2
Infrastructure as Code
3
CI/CD & Automation
4
Observability & SRE
5

Assessment & Certification

Assessment
Lab submissions (40%), Infrastructure project (25%), Capstone platform (35%)
Certification
Firstlincoln Professional Certificate in DevOps & Site Reliability Engineering
Delivery format
Hybrid (Online sessions 3x/week + fortnightly in-person labs)

Career outcomes

DevOps Engineer
Site Reliability Engineer
Cloud Engineer
Platform Engineer
Infrastructure Engineer
Internship Pathway

From classroom to a real industry role.

Top performers progress into our Internship Pathway — a structured placement programme of 3, 6 or 12 months. Internships are either sponsorship-backed or guardian-supported, depending on the arrangement that suits the learner.

3 months 6 months 12 months
Learn how the internship pathway works →

Get Expert Guidance

Need support? We've got your back — talk to a Firstlincoln advisor today.