Build a company’s cloud network — and explain your choices
Design and build the private network a real business runs on, then walk an interviewer through why you built it that way.
DevOps · Cloud Engineering · SRE
25 weeks. 50 live classes. A career in cloud engineering.
Live, instructor-led training that takes you from the command line to running real systems on real cloud infrastructure — with a private session with your instructor every month and a support team behind you the whole way.
Your first class is free — no payment and no card required to attend. No experience needed. Classes available in English or Bengali.
Where the 25 weeks take you
- Weeks 1–3 Start from zero Linux, the command line, and how software teams actually work together.
- Weeks 4–7 Your first real cloud Build live servers, private networks and databases on your own AWS account.
- Weeks 8–13 Ship like a professional Automate the boring parts, package your apps, and run them the way big companies do.
- Weeks 14–22 Keep it running Infrastructure as code, monitoring, security, and staying calm when things break.
- Weeks 23–25 Your final project — and the job hunt Build a complete system, present it, then get your résumé, portfolio and interviews ready.
25Weeks
50Live classes
21Hands-on projects
6–10Private 1-to-1 sessions
2Portfolio projects
What you’ll be able to do
Not “familiar with the cloud.” Actually able to do the job.
Every line below maps to a week and a project you can read before you enroll. If any of it sounds like something you want to be able to do on a Monday morning, you’re in the right place.
Fix an app that’s running but nobody can reach
One of the most common real-world problems there is. You’ll learn to follow the evidence to the actual cause instead of guessing — on a live system you broke on purpose.
Ship software safely, automatically
Set up the pipeline that takes code from a developer’s laptop to live customers — tested, security-scanned, and reversible if something goes wrong.
Know when a system is about to fail
Set measurable reliability targets, then build alerts that wake someone up for real customer pain — and stay quiet otherwise.
Stay calm when production breaks
Take a live outage — spot it, limit the damage, get it back, and write the honest review afterward. Practiced, before it’s your job.
Explain a surprise cloud bill
Tell the difference between real growth and waste, and recommend savings a finance team will actually sign off on.
Where this leads
The jobs this program prepares you for.
These are the roles the 25 weeks are built around — the same work the classes and projects put in front of you.
DevOps Engineer
Automate how software gets built, tested and released, so teams can ship safely and often.
Cloud Engineer
Design and run the cloud infrastructure a company’s products actually live on.
Site Reliability Engineer
Keep systems fast and available — and lead the response when they aren’t.
Platform Engineer
Build the internal tools and shortcuts that make every other engineer at the company faster.
Cloud Infrastructure & Support
Operate, secure and troubleshoot production systems that people depend on.
Where people come from
IT support, sysadmin, QA, development — or a career outside tech entirely. Week 1 starts at the beginning.
What these roles pay — and what we will not promise you
In the United States, DevOps, Cloud and SRE roles are commonly advertised somewhere in the range of about $120,000 to $350,000+ a year. Where a given job falls in that range depends on the role itself, your experience, your skills, and where you live.
That is a description of the job market, not an offer and not a prediction about you. LEADS Academy is a new school with no graduating class yet, so we make no promise about employment or earnings, and anyone who does is guessing. What we can tell you is exactly what we teach and what you will have built by week 25 — and that the final week is spent entirely on your résumé, your portfolio and interview practice.
The route
One path, two phases, twenty-five weeks.
Phase 1 builds the engineering foundation so that Phase 2 — where the real production work happens — doesn't lose you.
Phase 1
Engineering Foundation
Weeks 1–16
- Weeks 1–3 — How the industry works, using Linux servers with confidence, and working on code as a team.
- Weeks 4–7 — Getting into the cloud safely: accounts, private networks, security, servers, storage and databases.
- Weeks 8–9 — Automating repetitive work, then building the pipeline that ships software for you.
- Weeks 10–13 — Packaging apps so they run anywhere, and running them the way large companies do.
- Weeks 14–16 — Describing your whole infrastructure as code, then watching what it does in real time.
Phase 2
Enterprise Skills & Final Project
Weeks 17–25
- Week 17 — How large companies structure and police their cloud accounts safely.
- Week 18 — Cloud cost: investigate a runaway bill and recommend savings that hold up.
- Weeks 19–20 — Security built into the pipeline so bad code stops before it ships — then a ready-made setup other engineers can reuse.
- Weeks 21–22 — Reliability targets and alerts that matter, a live outage drill, and handling real traffic.
- Weeks 23–25 — Your final project, start to finish: build it, present it, defend your choices. Then résumé, portfolio and interviews.
Projects, not slides
Every project checks your work for you.
Twenty-one hands-on projects. Each one gives you real, half-finished files to complete — then runs an automatic check that tells you, honestly, whether what you built actually works.
Not a progress bar. Not a ticked box. Not someone’s impression of how hard you tried. It either works or it doesn’t — the same standard a real job will hold you to. It’s also why an AI can hand you an answer and you’ll still find out the truth.
Twenty of the twenty-one come with a finished example you can compare against afterward. The final project doesn’t — because that one is yours.
What one project looks like
- 1 You get real files to finish Working code with the important parts left out, and clearly marked.
- 2 You build it for real On your own cloud account, with your own credentials. Not a simulator.
- 3 The check tells you the truth One command. It passes, or it tells you exactly what is still wrong.
- 4 Then compare with a pro’s version See how an experienced engineer solved the same thing.
Fourteen of the projects also hand you something that is already broken, on purpose. Finding out why is the actual job.
You are never stuck alone
The part that decides whether you finish.
Most people who quit a self-paced course don’t quit because the videos were bad. They quit because nobody noticed they had stopped.
Two live classes a week
Three hours each, taught live — not a pre-recorded video, and not a stand-in reading slides. You can interrupt and ask.
A private session every month
One-to-one with your instructor, on your progress, your work and your portfolio. Six to ten of them across the program, on top of the 50 classes.
A support team that answers
Stuck at 11pm on a Tuesday? You’re not filing a ticket into the void. Our support team helps with setup, tooling and the things that block you between classes.
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.
Every class starts at the whiteboard.
All 50 class plans include a whiteboard explanation — the idea gets drawn out in front of you before anyone types a command. You learn why the thing works, which is what survives after the tool changes.
The tools
The exact tools these teams use in 2026.
You don’t need to know what any of these are yet — that’s the point of the 25 weeks. We list them because these are the names on the job adverts you’ll be answering, and every one of them is taught in a numbered week you can go and read right now.
Cloud & IaC
AWSIAM Identity Center
VPCEC2S3
RDSDynamoDB
OrganizationsSCPs
CloudWatchCost Explorer
TerraformOpenTofu
Checkov
Containers & orchestration
Docker
ComposeKubernetes
HelmKustomize
HPANetworkPolicy
kindEKS
Argo CD
Delivery & automation
GitHub ActionsGitLab CI
OIDC keylessGit
BashPython
Ansiblepre-commit
ShellCheck
Observability & SRE
PrometheusGrafana
PromQLOpenTelemetry
LokiTempo
Reliability targets
k6
Security & supply chain
TrivyGrype
Syft (SBOM)gitleaks
SemgrepCosign
OPA / ConftestKyverno
KMSSecrets Manager
Also covered as concepts
Deploying by merging code, internal developer platforms, software supply-chain provenance, and the standard measures of how often a team ships and how often it breaks — covered so the ideas and trade-offs transfer, with the hands-on depth focused on the tools above.
Before you decide
We're new. Here's exactly what that means.
LEADS Academy ran its first orientation on 6 July 2026. We have no graduating class yet — which means we have no placement statistics and no student testimonials to show you, and we're not going to invent any. If you find a new school quoting a hire rate, ask them where it came from.
What we can show you is the thing most schools won't: the entire curriculum, all 25 weeks, every tool named, every lab described, before you pay anything. Read it. Send week 19 to a DevOps engineer you know and ask whether it's the right list.
What being early actually gets you: a small class, taught live by the people who designed it, plus a private session with your instructor every month. That is not something a 900-student program can sell you at any price.
Come to the first class. It's free.
Sit in on a live class, watch how it's taught, and ask the instructor anything. If it's not for you, you've lost an evening — not a tuition payment.
No payment and no card required to attend. Talk to admissions about dates and tuition before you enroll — nothing is charged automatically.