A Dev-Ops Practicum Course for Information Technology Majors

Abstract

Since the inception of the CSUN CIT major one decade ago, the IT industry has experienced two large paradigm shifts: from on-premise virtual servers to scalable cloud-hosted services, and from full virtual machine deployment to containerized application deployment. Many IT professionals are now dev-ops specialists. Rather than install and configure individual servers, dev-ops specialists program and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC). In this manner, application testing, deployment, and scaling can be orchestrated automatically to respond to changing network and service conditions. Such dev-ops skills are increasingly demanded of new Information Technology graduates. Thus, we have redesigned our experimental senior-level CIT project course to be structured as a dev-ops practicum. This course now comprises six hands-on projects in web application deployment, automated testing, source code repository management, cloud hosting, infrastructure as code, and application containerization. Student outcomes were extremely positive, owing to individual rather than team projects, synchronous (virtual) lecture format as opposed to a flipped classroom, a broad set of project topics and practiced skills, and frequent one-on-one help sessions.