Operational Excellence For Software Engineers

Master the mindset, tools, and strategies behind building reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient systems.

What you'll learn

Define a framework for continuous improvement and apply it across operational workflows

Establish measurable operational targets and track SLAs using relevant KPIs

Identify common availability issues and implement mitigation strategies

Minimize the impact and duration of operational incidents

Optimize system performance using proven engineering techniques and design patterns

Forecast capacity and Manage budget to ensure cost-effective operations

Maintain reliable delivery pipelines through structured update and deployment practices

Design dashboards that provide actionable insights and enhance operational visibility

Requirements

Basic Software Engineering Experience, although we won't be coding

Basic Understanding of DevOps concepts, like: CI/CD Pipeline, Testing, Deployment

Basic Cloud Knowledge, like: Auto Scaling, API Gateway

Familiarity with Production Systems: Exposure to live systems, deployments, and incident handling (even at a junior level) is important for context.

Description

Operational Excellence is the backbone of resilient, scalable, and cost-effective software systems. This course is designed for software engineers, DevOps professionals, and technical leaders who want to elevate their operational mindset and take full ownership of system health. Through a structured, hands-on approach, learners will explore the methodology of continuous improvement, define and track operational targets like SLAs, and learn to identify and mitigate availability issues before they escalate.Students will gain practical skills to minimize the impact of incidents using deployment strategies, rollback mechanisms, and regional isolation techniques. The course dives deep into performance optimization, covering advanced engineering practices such as caching, parallelism, and request hedging. Budget and cost management are treated as first-class concerns, with strategies for forecasting demand, planning capacity, and reducing operational expenses.In addition, learners will master delivery pipeline hygiene and update methodologies, ensuring reliable deployments and long-term system stability. The course also teaches how to design dashboards that transform observability into actionable insight—empowering teams to monitor, respond, and improve with confidence.Whether you're scaling infrastructure, responding to outages, or refining deployment workflows, this course will help you build systems that are not only reliable and performant, but also aligned with business goals and engineering best practices.

Overview

Section 1: Course Overview

Lecture 1 Introduction - What is Operation Excellence

Lecture 2 What exactly are we trying to improve?

Lecture 3 OE Importance & what would you gain from this Course

Lecture 4 Course Topics

Lecture 5 DevOps Concepts

Section 2: Continuous Improvement Methodology

Lecture 6 Building a Mechanism for Improvement

Lecture 7 Learning from your own mistakes

Lecture 8 Applying past mistakes to future-proof operations

Lecture 9 Improvement Flywheel

Section 3: Operation Targets & Execution Tracking

Lecture 10 SLA - Service Level Agreement

Lecture 11 Availability

Lecture 12 Latency

Lecture 13 Additional external operational targets (Throughput, Freshness, Support etc.)

Lecture 14 Internal operational targets (Cost, KTLO, Tickets)

Lecture 15 Monitoring - Tracking execution

Lecture 16 Sharing operational performance publicly

Section 4: Availability Problems & Mitigations

Lecture 17 External Dependencies

Lecture 18 Mitigation - Dependencies Redundancy

Lecture 19 Mitigation - Asynchronous implementation

Lecture 20 Mitigation - Retries

Lecture 21 Unpredicted Demand

Lecture 22 Bugs

Lecture 23 Mitigation - Code Reviews and Tests

Lecture 24 Unpredicted Failures - Problem and Mitigations

Lecture 25 Performance Issues - Problem and Mitigations

Lecture 26 Gamedays: Real-World Performance Testing

Lecture 27 Breaking API Contract

Lecture 28 Neglected Operations

Lecture 29 Manual Operations Mistake

Lecture 30 Mitigation - Change Management

Section 5: Minimizing Incidents Impact

Lecture 31 Minimizing Blast Radius

Lecture 32 Minimizing Incident Duration & Auto Rollback

Lecture 33 Identifying there is a Problem

Lecture 34 Finding the Cause - Runbooks

Lecture 35 Finding the Cause - Correlations

Lecture 36 Finding the Cause - Logs

Lecture 37 Finding the Cause - Debugging

Lecture 38 The Art of Investigation

Lecture 39 Implementing a Solution

Lecture 40 War Room

Lecture 41 OE Flywheel - COE (Correction of Error)

Section 6: Performance Optimization

Lecture 42 Why is Performance Optimization important?

Lecture 43 Code Optimization

Lecture 44 Caching Overview

Lecture 45 Caching Types

Lecture 46 Prefetching and Lazy Loading

Lecture 47 Precomputation, Parallelism and Sharding

Lecture 48 Improving Tail Latency (Request Hedging)

Lecture 49 Scaling

Section 7: Budget and Cost Management

Lecture 50 Measuring Demand

Lecture 51 Scaling frequency: On-Premises vs. Cloud

Lecture 52 Forecasting Demand

Lecture 53 Capacity Planning

Lecture 54 Cost Savings

Lecture 55 Monitoring your Cost

Section 8: Software Delivery

Lecture 56 Dependencies Packages and Libraries Update

Lecture 57 OS Patching

Lecture 58 Pipelines Hygiene and Velocity

Lecture 59 Test/Prod environment Similarity

Section 9: Operation Dashboard

Lecture 60 Dashboard Structure and Design Principles

Lecture 61 Dashboard Sections

Section 10: Conclusion

Lecture 62 Wrapping Up

Software Development Engineers (SDEs) who want take ownership of system reliability, performance, and cost, and level up their operational thinking,DevOps Engineers looking to expand their impact beyond tooling into strategic operational practices,Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) aiming to strengthen their approach to incident response and system resilience,Architects and Software Engineering Managers (SDMs) seeking a structured framework for improving system health and delivery velocity