Cloud resources for developers

A short, nine-stage path for picking the right database for each job in an app: describe your data first, then relational, document, key-value and cache, search, vector, columnar and warehouse, graph, time-series and object storage, each with a hands-on task, and finally managed versus self-hosted, cloud equivalents, free tiers and cost. It suits students and developers starting a project. By the end you can write a database decision for your own app and defend every choice in it.

• Web
• Databases
• Backend
• Cloud

A nine-stage path from how cloud billing works through tagging, allocation and unit costs, commitments and spot, rightsizing and waste, forecasts and anomaly alerts, AI and GPU spend, the FinOps Framework and FOCUS, to working with finance, on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. It suits cloud and DevOps engineers, analysts and students who want to explain and reduce a cloud bill. By the end you can read a bill line by line, allocate it to teams, buy commitments safely, cut waste and run a monthly cost review.

• Cloud
• DevOps
• Career

Nana Janashia, a Docker Captain and AWS Container Hero, teaches DevOps and cloud with clear diagrams and long, structured tutorials on Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform, Prometheus and more. Short "explained in 5 minutes" videos sit alongside full beginner courses. It suits developers and students moving into DevOps, cloud or platform roles.

• DevOps
• Cloud

A seven-stage path for developers and sysadmins who want to own how software is built, shipped and kept running: Linux and Bash, networking, Docker, AWS service by service, Terraform and GitHub Actions, Kubernetes with Helm and Argo CD, and observability with incident response. One application grows through the stages. By the end you can take it from a Git repository to a monitored, automatically deployed service on AWS and Kubernetes, and run the incident when it breaks.

• DevOps
• Cloud

A quick-revision companion to the DevOps and cloud roadmap in ten chapters: Linux and Bash, Git workflows, networking, Docker, the core AWS services, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes and GitOps, observability and incident response, and security basics. It has 79 concepts, command and config snippets where they help, nine rules of thumb and a 142-term glossary. Use it to refresh a command or concept before you touch a server, a pipeline or a cluster.

• DevOps
• Cloud

Real broken Linux servers in your browser: a process is filling the disk, Nginx will not start, a Kubernetes pod keeps crashing, and you have a few minutes to fix it. The closest thing to on-call practice you can get without a pager, with a free tier and a paid plan for the full set.

• DevOps
• Cloud

A free, open curriculum for becoming a cloud engineer, founded by Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza with Rishab Kumar. It runs from Linux, networking and Python through cloud platform fundamentals, DevOps and security, with a hands-on project in each phase and a choice of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.

• Career
• Cloud
• DevOps

A free, project-based course that takes you through a whole modern data stack: Docker, Terraform, orchestration, BigQuery, dbt, Spark and Kafka, ending in a pipeline you design yourself. The best free end-to-end introduction to the job, as long as you do the homework and the final project rather than only watching.

• Programming
• Databases
• DevOps
• Cloud

The Linux Foundation's platform for paid, structured mentorships on open source projects, including the cloud native projects run by CNCF. You apply to a specific project, complete any tasks the mentors set, and if selected you work on real issues with an experienced maintainer for a fixed term. It suits students and early career developers who want open source experience with guidance instead of guessing alone.

• Career
• Job search
• Cloud

Kelsey Hightower's free tutorial for building a Kubernetes cluster by hand, with no installer: certificates, kubeconfigs, etcd, the control plane, worker nodes and pod network routes, each set up step by step. It is for developers and ops learners who can already use kubectl and want to understand what a managed cluster is actually doing, not for anyone looking for a production setup.

• DevOps
• Cloud

The book that defined site reliability engineering, written by Google engineers and published by O'Reilly in 2016, and free to read online. It covers service level objectives and error budgets, eliminating toil, monitoring, release engineering, on-call, incident response, blameless postmortems, load balancing and cascading failures. It suits backend, DevOps and platform engineers who want to understand what running large production systems really involves.

• System design
• DevOps
• Cloud

A practical guide to Terraform best practices for people who manage cloud infrastructure as code. It covers structuring and formatting configuration, pinning Terraform, providers and modules, storing state remotely with locking, keeping secrets out of state, writing modules and refactoring them safely, and a review workflow with plans, tests and policy.

• DevOps
• Cloud

A production readiness review you can run before launch, or on a service you just inherited. Each check has a severity and a concrete way to verify it, covering ownership, reliability and capacity, observability and alerting, deployment and rollback, data and recovery, security and incident response.

• DevOps
• Backend
• Cloud

A checklist for cutting what you spend on LLM APIs without cutting quality. It covers measuring cost per request and per feature, routing work to smaller models, prompt caching, batch APIs, trimming context, limiting output, caching whole responses, retries and rate limits, and budgets with alerts, each with a severity and a concrete way to verify it.

• AI
• Cloud

A Linux server hardening checklist for a VPS or cloud VM that runs your app. It covers user accounts and sudo, SSH, security updates, open ports and the firewall, system settings and permissions, logging, and checking the result against a CIS benchmark, with a command to verify every check.

• Security
• DevOps
• Cloud

A pre-launch verification list for a workload going to production on Kubernetes, and for the cluster it lands on. Each check has a severity and a command or test that proves it, covering cluster version and access, resources, probes, availability, Pod security, RBAC and network policy, secrets and images, autoscaling, and backups of cluster state.

• DevOps
• Cloud
• Security

A practical guide to Kubernetes best practices for people who deploy and run applications on a cluster. It covers writing manifests that stay manageable, setting resource requests and limits, health probes and graceful shutdown, staying available through node drains, Pod Security and secrets, and RBAC and network policies.

• DevOps
• Cloud

An incident response checklist for software teams, covering both outages and security incidents. It walks through preparation, detecting and declaring an incident, roles and coordination, mitigation, security containment and evidence, communication, and closing with a blameless postmortem, with a way to check each item before you need it.

• DevOps
• Security
• Cloud

A backup and disaster recovery checklist for teams running production systems in the cloud or on their own hardware. It covers recovery objectives per system, backup coverage, isolated and immutable copies, restore testing, zone and region strategy, runbooks, drills, dependencies and communication, each with a severity and a concrete way to verify it.

• DevOps
• Cloud
• Security

A cloud cost checklist written for the engineers who create the spend, not only for finance. It covers seeing and allocating cost, budgets and anomaly alerts, rightsizing, autoscaling and scheduling, commitment discounts, storage lifecycle, data transfer, idle resources and unit cost metrics, each with a severity and a concrete way to verify it on AWS, Google Cloud or Azure.

• Cloud
• DevOps

An AWS account security checklist for teams that run real workloads on AWS without a dedicated security team. It covers the root user, human and workload access, multi-account guardrails, CloudTrail and threat detection, S3 and data protection, EC2 and network exposure, and readiness for a leaked key, with an AWS CLI command or console check for each item.

• Cloud
• Security
• DevOps

A reference in 10 chapters and 78 concepts for picking the right database for each job: a decision chart from data and access patterns to a database type, then relational, document, key-value and cache, search, vector, columnar and warehouse, graph, time series and object storage, with one at-a-glance card per type and tables of matching managed services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. It follows the Sefism Choosing the right database roadmap. Use it whenever you start a project or someone suggests adding a database.

• Web
• Databases
• Backend
• Cloud

The FinOps Foundation's free, self-paced beginner course: what FinOps is, why cloud spend needs engineering and finance working together, and how to join the FinOps community. The natural first hour before the framework pages or the practitioner certification.

• Cloud

A revision reference for understanding and reducing a cloud bill, in 9 chapters and about 80 concepts per edition: billing basics and cost types, the detailed export and tagging, allocation and unit costs, commitments and spot, rightsizing and waste, forecasts and anomaly alerts, AI and GPU spend, the FinOps Framework and FOCUS, and working with finance. It comes in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud editions with cross-provider tool maps and follows the Sefism Cloud cost and FinOps roadmap chapter by chapter.

• Cloud
• DevOps