Systems & Infrastructure Professional (Foundation Certificate)

"A short orientation. What "infrastructure" is -- the computing, networking and storage systems everything digital runs on -- and what makes it reliable, scalable, secure and resilient. The shape of an infrastructure professional's work, how the three levels build, and where the pathway leads."

"What a computer actually is and how an operating system runs it. CPU, memory, storage and I/O; processes and threads; the kernel and system calls; filesystems and virtual memory; how an OS shares one machine among many programs. Vendor-neutral -- the model that makes Linux, Windows and a cloud VM all make sense."

"The operating system infrastructure actually runs on, hands-on. The shell and the filesystem, users and permissions, processes and services, package management, systemd, logs, networking from the command line, and SSH. You finish able to administer a Linux server confidently."

"How data gets from one machine to another, and how to tell why it did not. The TCP/IP model, IP addressing and subnetting, routing and switching, DNS, DHCP and NAT, HTTP and TLS on the wire, load balancing, and troubleshooting with ping / traceroute / dig / tcpdump."

"The infrastructure professional's first automation tool: shell and Python for the repetitive work. Bash for file, process and system tasks; Python where Bash runs out; scheduled jobs; parsing logs; and -- the part that matters -- writing scripts that are safe to re-run and fail loudly when something is wrong."

"Git, kept but reframed. Commits, branches, merging and collaborative workflows, then the infrastructure angle: configuration, scripts and infrastructure-as-code live in version control, changes are reviewed in pull requests, and an intro to GitOps -- the repo as the source of truth for what is deployed."

"Standing up the machines that serve things. Web servers and reverse proxies (nginx / Apache), application servers, TLS termination, virtual hosts, and putting a real application behind a load balancer -- the stack between a user's browser and the code."

"The two technologies modern infrastructure is built on. Virtual machines and hypervisors, then containers in depth: images and layers, registries, container networking and volumes, Docker Compose for multi-container apps, and container orchestration at an awareness level (Kubernetes concepts -- the depth is Specialize)."

"Provisioning and running infrastructure on a cloud platform, hands-on. Compute, storage, networking and identity as cloud services; regions and availability zones; the shared responsibility model; and standing up a real workload with a VPC, instances, a database and a load balancer -- plus what it costs."

"Describing infrastructure in files instead of clicking in a console. Declarative provisioning with Terraform, configuration management with Ansible, and the ideas that make both work: idempotency, state, modules, and infrastructure changes that are reviewed in a pull request like any other code."

"Reframed from "design an application schema" to run the database. Installing and configuring a database server, connections and pooling, backups and tested restores, replication basics, the storage types underneath, and planning for capacity and growth."

"Getting software onto the infrastructure, reliably and repeatably. Build pipelines, artifact and image management, deploying to servers and to the cloud, deployment strategies (blue-green, rolling, canary), health checks, and a rollback that actually works."

"The public edge of infrastructure. DNS zones and record types, delegation, split-horizon and internal DNS, TLS certificates (wildcard and SAN), automated issuance and renewal with ACME / Let's Encrypt, and CDN configuration -- plus troubleshooting when a change has not propagated."

"Where the learner moves from "I can build infrastructure" to "I can work out what infrastructure a system actually needs." From "we need some servers" to real requirements: expected load and growth, availability targets, security and compliance constraints, and cost -- then sizing it and writing an infrastructure design a team could build from and you could defend."

"Authentication and authorization, reframed for infrastructure. Who and what can access which systems, and how that is controlled: SSH key management, cloud IAM roles and policies, RBAC, secrets management (a vault, not a config file), bastion / jump hosts, MFA, and service accounts for automation."

"Defending the infrastructure and knowing when it is under attack -- two halves of one job at Foundation level. Hardening and patching, firewalls and security groups, network segmentation, TLS everywhere and CIS benchmarks; then log aggregation, host and network monitoring, SIEM basics, and detecting a compromise from the signals. A SIA-native course combining the territory of Network Security and Threat Detection for infrastructure."

"Keeping it up, seeing inside it, and getting it back when it falls over. Metrics, logs and traces; dashboards and alerting on the signals that matter; SLIs, SLOs and error budgets; incident response and blameless postmortems; and the recovery side -- backup strategy, tested restores, RTO/RPO, high availability and disaster-recovery drills."