The Road Map#
You're about to undertake a big project, it's good to have an idea of what it is you're going to be doing. This roadmap is your plan. It's your literal map to success. Without it, you could end up in the wrong location, looking at the wrong technologies, and not getting to your objective: a job in IT.
This diagram represents the entire journey you'll be taking overall, but this course represents Stage One: Fundamentals. These fundamentals are critical because they're the foundations on which you'll entire career will stand. This isn't to be taken lightly. All of these topics are how everything else is made. Nothing, and we mean nothing, is built on anything outside of these fundamentals (minus some rare things.)
Big Versions!
You'll likely want a much bigger version of the roadmap, so I've provided two links to much bigger copies:
This course covers the "Fundamentals" section of the roadmap. The rest of the roadmap can be followed by signing up for one of our plans over at Upload Academy.
I've broken this down below, into a set of tables that will link you directly to each section of the ITOps Level One course, allowing you to quickly jump around.
These are the chapters of the course. These are further broken down into sections so that the massive topics these chapters represent can be consumed in managable chunks.
Breakdown#
Let's look at how each chapter and how it's broken down into smaller sections that will teach you the topics, skills, tools, etc.
Hardware Basics#
We'll explore the basic hardware components found inside of desktop and server computers. We'll also explore two pieces of fundamental networking components that make communication across the Internet possible today.
- Central Processing Unit
- Random Access Memory
- Disks
- Network Interface Card
- Graphics Processing Unit
- Switch
- Router
Operating Systems#
Explore some basic fundamentals about operating systems, so that you can better appreciated what's happening when you're running software and setting up (remote) servers for yourself and others. This simple bit of understanding is all you need to know about operating systems without getting deep into computer science topics.
Networking#
This is a critical topic. It'll be a core part of your day-to-day workload: understanding how data is being transmitted between your (corporate) network(s) and clients. Understanding the fundamentals of networking is one of the keys to a successful, long career in IT.
Cybersecurity#
You'll be dealing with a lot of information and you need to keep it secure. You also need to know how-to keep your own secrets (passwords, and more) safe from leaks, attackers, and more. Building systems that are as secure as possible, from day one, is good engineering practice.
Systems Administration#
A computer system without an administrator will quickly be overcome with outdated software, security problems (and breaches), utilisation problems, disk space issues, and more. We'll learn how-to navigate a Ubuntu Server 20.04 system so that we can manage its capabilities to benefit end users.
- The Shell
- Manual Pages
- The Root User
- File Systems
- File Management
- File Permissions
- Environment Variables
- User Management
- Software Management
- Service Management
- Network Management
- Resource Monitoring
- Secure Shell
Cloud Computing#
This is the final piece of hands on knowledge we'll learn, and it's going to bring everything you've learned together. We'll look at Cloud fundamentals, some providers available in the market, and then learn AWS fundamentals. You're going to build a real-world solution in AWS in this chapter.