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5 lessons
124 min
DevOps Automation
Learn how to design production-safe scheduled automation for backups, cleanup, monitoring, ETL, log rotation, and maintenance.
What you will learn
- Choose the right scheduler for each automation task.
- Design idempotent scheduled jobs with clear ownership.
- Add logging, monitoring, alerts, and runbooks.
- Avoid overlap, timezone, and data-loss incidents.
Course lessons
1. Automation design principles
22 min
Treat scheduled jobs like production services.
Ownership
Runbooks
Idempotency
Failure modes
Exercise: Write a checklist for a production cleanup job.
2. Backups and disaster recovery
28 min
Schedule backups that can actually be restored.
Backup windows
Retention
Verification
Restore drills
Exercise: Design a daily backup schedule with weekly restore verification.
3. Database and log maintenance
24 min
Automate maintenance without creating lock or disk incidents.
Database cleanup
Vacuum
Log rotation
Disk pressure
Exercise: Create a maintenance schedule that avoids peak traffic.
4. Monitoring scheduled jobs
26 min
Detect missed, late, failed, and slow scheduled jobs.
Heartbeats
Metrics
Logs
Alerts
Run duration
Exercise: Add heartbeat monitoring to a nightly ETL job.
5. Scheduler selection
24 min
Choose cron, Kubernetes CronJobs, EventBridge, CI schedules, or workflow engines.
Cron
Kubernetes
AWS
CI
Workflow orchestrators
Exercise: Pick a scheduler for five real-world automation scenarios.