Two live classes — 3 hours each
Roughly 50 classes across the program, taught live. Not pre-recorded, not a teaching assistant reading a deck. You can interrupt and ask a question in the middle of a sentence.
How it works
What the 25 weeks actually ask of you.
Two live classes a week, three hours each. Roughly six to eight hours of lab work on your own time. Twenty-five weeks of it, with a private session with your instructor every month and a support team you can reach in between. This page is the honest version of that arithmetic — the schedule, what you need before day one, the people it isn’t for, and why we don’t publish a tuition number.
The rhythm
The shape of a week.
Same shape, every week, for 25 weeks. Nothing here is a surprise you find out about in week 3.
Whiteboard teaching in every class
All 50 class plans have a whiteboard explanation written into them. The concept gets drawn out in front of you before the commands land — so you learn why the thing works, not just what to type.
~6–8 hours of lab work
Per week, outside class, on your own machine. That is the real number, not a marketing number. Add the six hours of class and you’re looking at roughly 12–14 hours a week.
A private session every month
One-to-one with JD Lincoln about your progress, your work and your portfolio. Six to ten of them across the 25 weeks, on top of the 50 classes. Not a support ticket. Not a queue in a chat server.
A support team between classes
Separate from the monthly one-to-one, our support team helps with setup, tools and the things that block you between classes — so a bad install doesn’t cost you a week.
English or Bengali
Learn in the language you think in. We run classes with a Bengali-speaking instructor as well as in English. Ask admissions which option fits you.
Decide about the 6–8 hours now, not in week 3.
We put that number on the page on purpose. The labs are the program — skip them and the classes stop making sense, because week 12 assumes you built the thing in week 5. If your next six months can’t hold twelve or so hours a week, this is the wrong time, and we’d rather you knew that today than three payments in.
If your schedule is tight but workable, bring it to the free first class and ask. JD Lincoln will tell you honestly whether it fits.
The route
The two phases.
One path. Phase 1 builds the engineering foundation so that Phase 2 — where the production-shaped work happens — doesn’t lose you.
Phase 1
Engineering Foundation
Weeks 1–16
Sixteen weeks of fundamentals, in the order they actually depend on each other: Linux and Git, then a safe entry into AWS, networking and access control, then Bash and Python automation, automated testing and releases, Docker, Kubernetes and Helm, then Terraform and a full setup for seeing what your system is doing.
Nothing here assumes you’ve done DevOps before. It assumes you’ll do the labs.
Phase 2
Enterprise Skills & Final Project
Weeks 17–25
Nine weeks of the work senior teams do: running many AWS accounts safely, keeping the cloud bill under control, security checks that block a bad release before it ships, building a ready-made setup other engineers can reuse, measurable reliability targets with alerts that fire on real user impact, a live incident drill and testing under load — finishing with a final project you build and defend.
Phase 2 is only possible because Phase 1 happened. That is why the program is 25 weeks and not 12.
Together, the two phases prepare you for the jobs this work is hiring for: DevOps engineer, cloud engineer, site reliability engineer (SRE) and platform engineer. Different titles, one shared skill set — build the infrastructure, automate it, and keep it running. Which one you end up in depends on the team you join.
Prerequisites
What you need before day one.
Short list. Honest list. No prior DevOps experience is required — that is not a softening, it’s how the curriculum is built.
If you can install software, follow written instructions carefully, and you’re willing to be a beginner at a command line for a few weeks, you have the entry requirements.
- Basic computer literacy. Files, folders, installing an application, using a browser. That’s the floor.
- Comfort learning the command line. Not knowing it — learning it. Week 2 starts you at the beginning. What we need is that a black window with text in it doesn’t make you close the laptop.
- A computer you can install things on. Your own machine, with admin rights. A locked-down work laptop will fight you the whole way.
- An AWS account — free tier plus a small budget. You will build real cloud systems, which means some of it costs real money. You need to be able to spend a few dollars and then shut it down.
About that AWS bill
Every project is build → check → shut down.
Real cloud work costs real money, and pretending otherwise is how people get a surprise invoice. So we teach the habit from the first AWS week: you build the thing, you run an automatic check that proves it does what it should, and then you shut it down. Shutting it down is part of the project, not an afterthought.
You also learn the safety nets on purpose — spending limits, alerts, labeling what you built — and week 18 is an entire week on cloud cost. The AWS account stays yours, in your name, under your control, with your own spending limits. We never ask for your login details.
What we won’t do is quote you a dollar figure for the whole program, because it depends on your region, what you leave running and how far you push the optional work. Ask at the free first class and you’ll get a straight answer about the labs you’re looking at.
Fit
Who this is for — and who it isn’t.
The second list is the one that matters. We’d rather lose you here than have you sitting in week 9 realizing it.
This is for you if…
- You’re starting from zero DevOps experience and you want a structured path with a person in the room.
- You’re in IT, support, testing or development and you want to move toward cloud, platform or reliability work.
- You’ve tried self-paced video courses and stalled, and you know why: nobody noticed when you stopped.
- You want to be able to build the thing, not just recognize the words in a meeting.
- You can protect roughly 6–8 hours a week for labs on top of two three-hour classes.
- You’d rather be told your code fails than be told you did great.
This is not for you if…
- You want a certificate without doing the work. The projects check themselves. There is nothing to hand in that an automatic check won’t test, and no way to be marked complete without passing.
- You can’t commit ~6–8 hours a week outside class. The curriculum compounds. Skipped labs are not recoverable by attending the next lecture harder.
- You want a promise that you’ll be hired. We don’t make one, and we won’t imply one. Anyone selling you a certain outcome is selling you something they don’t control.
- You want a purely theoretical course. If your goal is to understand the ideas without building anything, a book will serve you better and cost less.
- You won’t touch a command line. There is no path through this material that avoids the terminal. Not a preference — a fact about the field.
Tuition & admissions
Tuition and admissions.
We don’t publish a tuition number on this page, and here is the actual reason. The intake you join, the schedule that works around your job, and the payment options available to you are set with admissions for your specific class. A number posted here would be right for some people and wrong for others, and the wrong ones would find out late. So we’d rather you got a real figure from a person.
Email or call. You will get an accurate figure for your situation, with no obligation and no sales sequence attached. If the answer doesn’t work for you, that’s a fine outcome and we’ll say so.
The first class is free.
No payment. No card required to attend. Nothing is charged automatically, and there is no enrollment you can fall into by accident. You attend a real class, watch how it’s taught, ask the instructor whatever you want, and then decide.
Next intake date: contact admissions. Dates are set per class and we’re not going to invent one to create urgency.
No tuition figures, discounts or financing terms are published on this site. Talk to admissions and you’ll get the real ones.
Four steps
How enrollment works.
The whole process. There isn’t a hidden fifth step.
- Book the free first class. A short form — name, email, and when you can make it. No payment details. Book it here.
- Attend, and ask anything. A real live class, not a sales webinar. Ask about the labs, the hours, the AWS costs, the final project, or the fact that we’re new.
- Talk to admissions about dates and tuition. This is where you get the number, the intake date and the payment options — from a person, for your situation.
- Enroll and get portal access. Once you’ve enrolled, your classes, labs and materials live at learn.leadsacademy.org ↗ — that’s where sign-in happens from then on.
Start with the free class.
You’ve now read the real hours, the real prerequisites and the real reasons this might not be for you. If it still sounds right, come and see it taught before anyone asks you for anything.
No payment and no card required to attend. Contact admissions for the next intake date.