The engineering notebook
One system, built from first principles and then operated.
Build Beacon, a reliability platform that watches endpoints for uptime, latency and certificate expiry, then deploy and operate it like production. Concept first, code second, every stage.
- SRE projects
- 7
- Challenges
- 67
- Verified
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Courses are independent and can be taken in any order. Check each course page for prerequisites and setup.
Lessons are open to read. A Vault account and project setup are needed to verify work and save progress.
01
Foundation — write the thing that measures
Beacon's reason to exist: a Go program that resolves a name, opens a connection, reads a certificate and records what it found, then grows into a service that runs on its own.
Beacon: build an SSL and uptime monitor in Go
Starting with no Go and no networking background, you finish able to resolve a name, open a connection, complete a TLS handshake, read a certificate's expiry, send a request, bound all of it with one deadline, and run many checks at once without leaking anything.
Prior knowledge: No Go, networking, or TLS knowledge is assumed. Be comfortable using a computer and following terminal instructions; the course teaches the programming and networking concepts as you build.
Beacon: turn a program into a service
You finish able to build a local Go service that schedules checks, loads validated configuration, stores recent and durable results, serves a versioned JSON API, writes structured logs, reports health truthfully and exits cleanly on SIGTERM.
Prior knowledge: Basic Go syntax, functions, and running a program are helpful. The provided starting project includes the monitoring code, and lessons explain service design, HTTP APIs, persistence, and shutdown.
02
Packaging — make it shippable
Turn a binary on your laptop into a signed, scanned, reproducible artifact that any machine can run and anyone can verify came from you.
03
Platform — give it somewhere to live
Run Beacon on Kubernetes, then build the infrastructure under it with code, so the whole environment can be destroyed and recreated on demand.
Beacon: give it somewhere to live
You can run Beacon on a local Kubernetes cluster, explain the controllers that keep it alive, expose it safely, preserve its SQLite state, and debug the common failure modes without guessing.
Prior knowledge: Basic terminal use and a general idea of containers are helpful. Docker, Kubernetes resources, networking, storage, and troubleshooting are introduced step by step; you do not need to complete earlier Vault courses.
Beacon: build the ground it stands on
Starting with no Terraform or cloud background, you finish able to read plans, protect state, compose modules, design a small network, provision cheap compute, handle identity without long-lived keys, bootstrap hosts with Ansible and destroy every billable resource deliberately.
Prior knowledge: No Terraform or cloud experience is assumed. Basic command-line use and familiarity with infrastructure concepts are helpful; the course begins with local exercises before optional cloud work.
04
Operations — keep it alive
Ship changes safely and know, with numbers rather than opinions, whether Beacon is healthy — then handle it like an on-call engineer when it is not.
Beacon: ship it without fear
You can design and implement a zero-cloud-cost delivery path for Beacon: CI checks, supply-chain gates, digest promotion, Argo CD GitOps on kind, Kustomize overlays, progressive delivery, rollback runbooks and meaningful releases.
Prior knowledge: Basic Git and container concepts are helpful. The course explains continuous integration, artifact promotion, GitOps, deployment safety, and rollback using a prepared project; completing earlier courses is optional.
Beacon: run it like an SRE
You finish able to instrument a Go service with Prometheus metrics, scrape and query it, build useful dashboards, define SLIs and SLOs, alert on burn rate, route notifications, run incidents and write postmortems that change the system.
Prior knowledge: Basic terminal use and familiarity with Go services and containers are helpful. Metrics, dashboards, service objectives, alerting, and incident response are taught; monitoring-platform experience is not required.