#1 DevOps Bootcamp

Yes! The bootcamp is created with working participants in mind, because our participants are often already working as a SysAdmin or Developer transitioning to DevOps or expanding their skills.

That being said, you can work with the provided materials whenever you want. Be it before going to work, on the weekends or late at night. That is up to you.

Yes! The whole DevOps bootcamp was created with this focus of making you a job-ready DevOps engineer.

1) Many of our students manage to successfully get jobs after the training.

Here are some of the things that are helpful for that:

Throughout the bootcamp, you are building actual real-life DevOps processes start to end, so you are actually implementing things, writing pipelines, automation scripts etc. And you create all these as git projects in your repository. And you can then use your git repositories with all our projects in your resume and LinkedIn profile to show your employers what you know and what you are able to do at work.

It makes sense, because employers want to see that you can actually implement DevOps tasks and use the DevOps technologies. So in the Bootcamp we focus on giving you not just theoretic knowledge or irrelevant information for a certificate, but rather practical hands-on skills that you can use immediately at your job.

So again the whole bootcamp was created with the focus of providing real-life demos, making you job-ready for DevOps role as a whole.

But of course for that you need to actively follow along the demos and do the exercises afterwards.

2) Nearly half of our enrollments are from companies, who purchase the bootcamp for their employees to upskill them in DevOps. This also proves that we are teaching the relevant skills, which are actually needed by companies.

The bootcamp is a structured course of videos, handouts, Git projects etc. It's structured in a way, that you can easily follow them module by module, lecture by lecture, and work through it in a specific order. This guarantees a smooth flow of the learning process for all our students. It's self paced, so you can schedule your learning sessions, watch the videos and work through the hands-on projects at your own pace.

Compared to the traditional way of live classes, this has actually many advantages over live classes, which are often overlooked. So I want to highlight those here:

HANDS-ON WORK

✅ You can rewatch lectures if you haven’t understood something, stop and practically work along the demos

❌ You can't rewatch. In live classes there is no time for doing deep hands-on work. If they do, either instructor is not able to wait for all students to finish certain tasks or you need to wait e.g. 30mins for other students to get the task done and so valuable learning time is lost very easily. Ultimately, you learn much less in this format.

ACCESS OF MATERIALS

✅ You also have access to the materials for 2 years, which is great because you may want to revisit some lectures, when you actually have found a job or when you work on such tasks. In that case you can refresh some of the knowledge or use the videos as reference.

❌ You can’t revisit lectures and demos later at work. So when you finally need to implement stuff, you may have forgotten many things. Also in other self-paced bootcamps you only get access to the materials for as long as the bootcamp takes. So e.g. when they take 4 or 6 months, you will have access for 4 or 6 months, but not for 2 whole years!

VIDEO over FACE

✅ Video format allows us to add engaging and helpful animations that further help to understand complex concepts as well as showcase the demos

❌ You get a presentation by lecturer, either seeing the face (which doesn't add value to your understanding) or they have static slides, which are boring and your mind gets distracted

SUPPORT

✅ Ensuring that students get the support they need, is actually a high priority for us. We have several experienced engineers, who support our students throughout the program through their learning journey. They are from different time zones to make sure students get quick replies. You will be part of a Discord group, where you can ask questions around the clock. You can also see past questions to review and exchange with other students of course.

❌ In live classes you can only ask questions during the live class. And mostly the questions don’t pop up immediately when you hear them, but e.g. only when you actually work in practice with it. So the advantages of being able to ask "live" is not existent.

PRICE

✅ Another big advantage is of course the difference in price. With our education you save $5,000-10,000 and still get a full education that prepares you for a highly-demanded job, which is quite unique and we are proud to be able to provide that! :)

❌ Bootcamp fee is 5-10x higher than ours

INSTRUCTOR

✅ You can check out Nana’s teaching style on Youtube and verify if it is understandable for you. And from feedback from 1000s of students and comments on Youtube, we know that Nana has a unique teaching style that fills knowledge gaps. She explains every detail and concept behind the tools . Understanding the why’s and the concepts behind the tools is what makes you feel confident of your newly acquired skills.

❌ On the other hand, you don’t know what instructor you will get, whether they can teach the complex topics to the students in an easy and understandable way. Whether they teach in a boring way, whether they use complex terms that you don't understand.

The bootcamp is a self-paced program, meaning it consists of online videos (and other materials like PDF files), which you can watch whenever you want.

So the program has no start and end date or duration you need to finish.

Duration depends on several factors

How long it takes for you to finish depends on several factors, like your background/experience, do you work full-time or part-time on the bootcamp, how intensely you work along and through the exercises.

Our estimation for someone, who works part-time on it and has a background either in software development or system administration, is 6 months.

So after 6 months you should be ready for your first DevOps job and be done with the bootcamp :)

For a successful completion of the program, it's important to watch ALL the supplied resources each week and do ALL the demos that I show you in the videos. Work at your own pace and take time to really understand and practice one module before moving to the next.

In the later modules you will not only learn the technology, but also the combination with the other tools you already learnt in the previous modules. E.g. in the Terraform module you will learn not only Terraform, but also how to integrate Terraform in the CI/CD pipeline.

The most important thing is to practice, practice and practice. It will help you learn faster and give you confidence at work, when applying the technologies in practice.

Regarding exercises:

The way it is structured and meant is, you work through a module, like Jenkins CI/CD module, during the module you work through the demos that I show you. Once you are done with that module, you go to the exercises for that module. The exercises are based on the things you learnt in the module, so it's a way for you to check that you can now independently do tasks with that technology, as well as validate and test your knowledge and how much you learnt. So it's a practice plus self-check.

Exercises have solutions so you can validate your own solutions!

Regarding Support:

On the one hand the dedicated support is there, when something that I show in the demo doesn't work for you, or you get stuck in the exercises, because you are getting an error in something and you need to resolve it etc.

And on the other hand, use the community to exchange information with other participants, ask questions and also help others, because one of the best ways is also by teaching and helping others. :)

A big part of DevOps is working with infrastructure, creating, configuring infrastructure on actual cloud platforms like AWS. So setting them up yourself instead of using a pre-configured lab is part of the learning. Because what is a value of DevOps learning program, if you don't learn how to setup infrastructure on cloud yourself (as you would ACTUALLY do in a real job) and instead use a lab?

So we are going to be creating and using virtual servers on cloud for various real-life projects in the bootcamp. For those remote servers, we are gonna use 3 different cloud platforms:

1. Linode - you get $100-200 credit when you create an account and it should be enough for completing the relevant demos, so you shouldn't have any additional costs for using this cloud platform in the bootcamp

2. Digital Ocean - you also get $100 credit when you create an account. Here you may go little beyond that credit, because we use a droplet to run Jenkins there and Jenkins actually runs throughout the whole bootcamp, because we are learning how to build a complete CI/CD pipeline with many tools. So we will be needing Jenkins for a big part of the bootcamp duration. But we are using Ubuntu server for it, so essentially you can use any other platform or your own server or a company ubuntu server for it. It doesn’t have to be Digital Ocean.

3. The third and mostly used one in the bootcamp is AWS. We use AWS in many modules, AWS itself, EKS, Terraform and Ansible to learn how to provision and configure servers on AWS. So even though AWS has a free tier, we will be using compute resources and AWS services that go beyond that free tier, because LEARNING these services are part of the course itself. This means you will be charged for the AWS infrastructure, like EC2 servers and EKS service. You can see their pricings on the AWS website.

Understanding pricing and Tip for saving costs

Now it's important to understand, that on cloud platforms you pay for the duration of servers used. So if your server is running for 2 weeks, you pay for that 2-week period. So some students, if they have longer periods of time between learning sessions and don't want to be charged or use the free credits for that time, they delete the servers and recreate them when they continue learning. Or in case of AWS, just stop and restart them, because you don’t get charged for the stopped or not running servers on AWS. A bit of inconvenience, but you will save lots of money this way.

KNOWLEDGE:

As DevOps overlaps with Development and IT Operations processes, you should have some kind of IT background.

The DevOps bootcamp is very beginner friendly in terms of the DevOps tools. Also it includes some pre-requisites modules like Linux basics and Programming basics. However, we don't recommend getting into DevOps without having any IT knowledge, because in DevOps you need to automate software development and deployment processes. So if you don't know about these processes, it would be difficult to get started in DevOps right away.

We don't want to exclude anyone, but without having this pre-requisite knowledge, it will be difficult to follow the bootcamp. See "I’m new to IT. I have no IT background. Can I enroll into the bootcamp?" question for more infos.

TECHNICAL:

See "System Requirements" question.

Nana uses MacOS throughout the bootcamp, so it’s desirable to have either MacOS or Linux, to follow along easily. Plus, as a DevOps engineer, you will benefit a lot from working with Unix (Linux or MacOS) on a daily basis.

However, many of our students have Windows and they are still able to work through the bootcamp.

In terms of compute resources, most of the demos are on Cloud Systems (see the "Are we using Cloud Platforms or an integrated lab environment in the bootcamp?" question on Q&A), which means we need less on local resources, since we install things like Jenkins, full K8s cluster, Nexus etc on remote cloud servers, and not on a local machine.

However you still need some amount of compute resources for several other things. For example, we install a Virtual Machine in Linux module. We also install and use some tools, like Docker, Minikube, Visual Studio Code locally.

So you need to have enough RAM (min 4GB), CPU working working properly with these tools.

On Windows you need more, because the Windows OS itself requires more resources than MacOS or Linux.

If you are completely new to IT, then it will be very difficult to work through the bootcamp. Our bootcamp is mostly beginner-friendly, but if you have zero IT background, then it will be very challenging for you.

In that case, we recommend people to join our bootcamp, once they know at least conceptually how software development works, what IT roles there are and basically have an understanding of what the manual processes are that a DevOps engineer tries to automate and make more efficient.

Usually DevOps engineer is not the first IT job people have, but rather a role they transition to, if they are already software developers, system administrators, test engineers, network engineers etc.

Having said that, we do have some students with little IT background in our bootcamp, who have started as junior DevOps engineers after completing it. So it is possible, but it will be much more challenging, and you would need to put in a lot of time and effort to learn.

IT Beginners Course - Pre-Bootcamp Course

As we noticed this huge interest for our DevOps bootcamp from non IT people , we started working on a "Pre-Bootcamp" course, which will make it easier to join and become DevOps engineers. We see this huge demand for DevOps engineers daily and it would be a pity to exclude so many motivated and talented people, who truly want to transition to IT and DevOps specifically.

So in this course, we teach you everything you need to be able to start our DevOps bootcamp.

We decided to create this course ourselves, because we couldn't find any such preparation course on the internet, which we could recommend you to take before. So this course is very special and unique, because we tackled and solved this difficult task of giving you real world insights of how software development and deployment processes work in practice.

You can find more information here: https://www.techworld-with-nana.com/it-beginners-course

Yes, half of our bootcamp and course purchases are from companies, who build out their internal DevOps know-how with our educational content.

Most of which are actually suggested by the employees themselves, as they appreciate Nana’s outstanding teaching style and hands-on demos, leaving them with no knowledge-gaps as well as knowing clearly how to apply the learnt skills right away in their work.

Companies appreciate it that employees don’t need to be sent away for several months to complete the training, but instead they can learn the skills next to their job. It’s self-paced, meaning the employees can watch the materials whenever they have time for it and re-watch specific parts, when they work on that specific task. The time and eventually money saved is huge, because the engineers don’t get stuck for hours or even days, trying to find the solution across the internet.

YES!

We’ve all been there—struggling through outdated courses or tutorials that waste our time and money. It’s frustrating and unproductive.

So from day 1, we made it a core principle of our programs to keep our curriculum fresh and relevant and fully focused on delivering the best learning experience for our students.

These are two types of updates:

1) Continuous Urgent Fixes:

When a demo breaks, e.g. when a new technology version is released, we jump on it immediately. Whether it’s fixing broken demos or addressing compatibility issues, these updates ensure you’re never stuck with something that doesn’t work.

2) Complete Bootcamp Updates

Beyond fixes, we periodically re-record the entire bootcamp to incorporate the latest technology versions—whether the content still works or not. This proactive approach ensures that you’re always learning with the most up-to-date tools.

Why it's so important to us?

Each year, thousands of new students join us and our goal of getting them job-ready stays the same. So it’s our responsibility to ensure our programs stay up-to-date and aligned with real-world needs to help them achieve that!

You will have access to the bootcamp AND the daily professional support for 2 full years. This duration is much longer than what it takes to complete the bootcamp (which is 6 months, part-time), so even if you need to take several breaks in between, there will be enough time to complete the program 😊

But the great news is that, we provide an option to extend the access to the materials as well as the daily support. So you don’t have to re-purchase the bootcamp after 2 year access expiration.

Plus, after 2 years, you automatically become an honorary member of our TechWorld with Nana alumni group 💪

Generally if something is unclear or you have problems with the bootcamp, we will try to support you immediately to answer all your questions. We are also happy to hear your feedback or criticism immediately, so we can fix it for you.

However, if you are still unsatisfied with your purchase, you can request a refund within the first 30 days.

Check out our refund policy here: https://www.techworld-with-nana.com/terms-bootcamp

To ask for a refund, just send us an e-mail at bootcamp@techworld-with-nana.com

Please include the reason why you're asking for a refund and the email address you use for your DevOps Bootcamp account.

We are always improving the bootcamp and adding more value based also or especially on student's feedback, so we would like to know what we can do better.