Build, don't just watch
12 projects, one production engineer
Each project is a brief like one you'd get at work: a scenario, requirements, milestones with acceptance checks, a production checklist, stretch goals, and how to present it on your résumé and in interviews. They build on each other: the app you put on a Linux server in Project 1 ends up on a production-grade platform in Project 12.
- 1
Deploy Spring Boot on a Bare Linux Server
BeginnerUbuntu + Nginx + PostgreSQL + a Spring Boot service, installed and hardened by hand, the way everything worked before containers.
1–2 days · 5 milestones · Ubuntu 24.04, OpenJDK 21, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL 17…
- 2
Dockerize the Spring Boot Service
BeginnerA small, secure, cache-friendly image for the API, pushed to a registry with proper tags.
1 day · 4 milestones · Docker, Maven, Eclipse Temurin JRE 21, Spring Boot layered JARs…
- 3
The Full Stack in Docker Compose
IntermediateReact, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and Nginx running together locally with one command, with health checks, persistence, and environments.
2–3 days · 4 milestones · Docker Compose, React (Vite) + Nginx, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL…
- 4
CI/CD Pipeline with Jenkins
IntermediateA declarative Jenkins pipeline: checkout → Maven build and tests → quality gate → Docker image → registry, with credentials handled properly.
2 days · 4 milestones · Jenkins LTS (Docker), Docker agents, Maven, JUnit + JaCoCo…
- 5
Deploy the Complete App to Kubernetes
IntermediateThe Project 3 stack as Kubernetes manifests: Deployments, StatefulSets, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps, Secrets, probes, resources, and autoscaling.
3–4 days · 4 milestones · kind / k3d, kubectl, Deployments, StatefulSets…
- 6
Package Everything as Helm Charts
IntermediateTurn the Kubernetes manifests into a reusable, tested, versioned Helm chart with per-environment values.
2 days · 4 milestones · Helm 3, helm-unittest, chart-testing (ct), kubeconform…
- 7
AWS Infrastructure with Terraform
IntermediateVPC, EC2 behind an ALB, RDS, S3, IAM, and CloudWatch, built as reusable Terraform modules with remote state and dev/prod environments.
4–5 days · 5 milestones · Terraform, S3 remote state (with locking), VPC, EC2 + Auto Scaling + launch template…
- 8
Run the Stack on Amazon EKS
AdvancedAn EKS cluster built with Terraform, the app deployed with its Helm charts, managed data services, IRSA/Pod Identity, and the AWS Load Balancer Controller.
4–5 days · 4 milestones · Terraform (terraform-aws-modules/eks), EKS + managed node group / Karpenter, EKS Pod Identity, AWS Load Balancer Controller…
- 9
GitOps Delivery: GitHub Actions → ECR → Argo CD → EKS
AdvancedCI builds and pushes images; a config repo is the source of truth; Argo CD deploys to dev automatically and to prod by pull request, with canary releases.
3–4 days · 4 milestones · GitHub Actions, OIDC to AWS, ECR, Argo CD…
- 10
Full Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo
AdvancedInstrument the Spring Boot services with OpenTelemetry and build metrics, logs, and traces that connect, plus SLOs and alerting that pages the right person.
4 days · 4 milestones · OpenTelemetry Java agent, OpenTelemetry Collector, Prometheus (kube-prometheus-stack), Grafana…
- 11
A DevSecOps Pipeline: Scan, SBOM, Sign, Verify
AdvancedSAST, dependency and secret scanning, image scanning, SBOM generation, keyless image signing, and cluster-side signature verification, without slowing developers down.
3 days · 4 milestones · GitHub Actions, Semgrep / CodeQL (SAST), Dependency scanning (OWASP Dependency-Check / Trivy fs / Dependabot), Gitleaks…
- 12
Capstone: A Production-Grade Platform, End to End
AdvancedEverything combined: developer → GitHub → secure CI → ECR → Terraform-built EKS → Argo CD + Helm → observability → alerts → incident → runbook → recovery. Then prove it with a game day.
2–3 weeks · 5 milestones · Terraform, AWS (VPC, EKS, RDS, ElastiCache, MSK, ECR, Route 53, CloudFront, WAF), GitHub Actions + OIDC, Argo CD + Argo Rollouts…