Organisations across Africa and beyond are moving core systems to public cloud, only to discover that migrating servers is the easy part. Teams struggle with sprawling accounts, inconsistent environments, slow release cycles, security gaps and invoices nobody can explain. The response of the last few years has been platform engineering, which provides developers with a reliable paved road, and FinOps, which brings engineering, finance and business together to manage cloud value.

This ten-day advanced programme brings these disciplines together. The first week establishes a solid base: cloud architecture and landing zones, infrastructure as code, containers, Kubernetes operations, CI/CD and secure software delivery. The second week moves into platform and reliability territory: GitOps, multi-cluster and multi-cloud patterns, policy as code, service mesh, observability, incident response, and capacity and cost engineering. A dedicated FinOps thread teaches participants to tag, allocate, forecast and optimise spend and to express it as unit cost per customer or transaction.

Nearly every session is a lab in a real cloud account. Participants work in teams on a capstone that provisions an environment, deploys an application through a pipeline, instruments it and reports on its cost, and they leave with reusable code and a platform roadmap for their own organisation.

By the end of the programme, participants will be able to:

• Design secure, well-governed cloud landing zones and network architectures.
• Provision and manage infrastructure with Terraform modules, state management and testing.
• Deploy and operate containerised applications on Kubernetes with sound scaling and security settings.
• Build CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows that release changes safely and repeatably.
• Embed security through image scanning, secrets management and policy as code.
• Define service level objectives and implement observability with metrics, logs and traces.
• Apply FinOps practices to allocate, forecast and reduce cloud spend without harming reliability.
• Design an internal developer platform with golden paths and self-service capabilities.

The programme assumes some prior cloud or Linux experience and is aimed at technical professionals such as:

• DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers
• Cloud engineers and cloud architects
• Platform engineers and infrastructure team leads
• Senior software developers who own deployment pipelines
• Solution architects in banks, telecoms and technology firms
• IT operations managers leading a move to cloud
• Security engineers working on cloud and container workloads
• FinOps practitioners and technical finance analysts
• Engineering managers responsible for developer productivity

Participants leave with working assets and plans:

• A library of Terraform modules for networking, compute and a Kubernetes cluster.
• A tested CI/CD and GitOps pipeline template.
• A baseline observability stack with dashboards and alert rules.
• A tagging standard and FinOps reporting model with showback views.
• Draft service level objectives and an incident response runbook.
• A platform engineering roadmap with golden path candidates for their organisation.

This is a laboratory course in which most time is spent building:

• Individual cloud sandbox accounts for every delegate
• Guided labs for each topic followed by open-ended challenges
• A running sample application that grows in scope across the ten days
• Architecture reviews where teams defend design and cost choices
• A team capstone assessed against a checklist covering delivery, security, reliability and cost

Delegates who attend the ten days and complete the labs and capstone are awarded a CPD-accredited Certificate of Completion by Vision Reach Global Consultancy. Preparation for vendor certifications is not part of this award.