Red Hat Training accelerates time to market using DevOps and Agile principles

DevOps is transforming IT by automating processes and breaking down walls between functional teams. This results in reduced time to market and greater value to the business. The Red Hat Training and Certification curriculum team applies the same concepts and processes to deliver updated training to our customers faster and at a higher quality.

A parallel trend is the rapid rise in digital learning, which has reshaped  the way professionals stay on top of rapidly evolving technologies. Over the past several years, we have seen a radical change in our modality mix where our digital training offerings, like live virtual ILT, self-paced online learning, and video classroom training, have substantially increased. Within the next few years, over 50% of our training will be delivered through these online digital offerings.

The curriculum team has adopted DevOps tactics to redesign our content and processes, optimized for digital delivery.

The first key step was to establish a “single-stream” development model whereby both course content and labs are authored once and then published as both self-paced online and traditional course book formats. To achieve this, the team authors course materials optimized for self-paced consumption, adding more narrative supported by embedded videos, providing context often missing in self-paced training. In parallel, the team designed a universal lab platform allowing labs to be developed once and deployed unmodified into both the public cloud or physical systems. Through these changes, customers get the same content and labs regardless of modality, enabling them to choose the modality that best fits their needs without concern for quality.

The second phase in our journey was to move to an Agile development methodology.

Through a sprint planning process and daily stand-ups, we have greatly improved collaboration and communication between team members who are spread across five continents. This has allowed us to have larger teams working modularly on a single course, thus reducing time to market for course releases, which is another key customer benefit. Agile also increases our velocity and reduces friction as the course moves through multiple review and editing processes. Agile sprint and project retrospectives have also improved our ability to identify and apply improvements and codify best practices.  

The third phase is to apply DevOps concepts to our development workflow resulting in continuous integration and continuous delivery of course content to our customers.

The Red Hat Training and Certification curriculum team is using git, Jenkins, Ansible, and other tools to automate our content and lab development so that as course developers commit content and labs, they are automatically rendered out to our staging infrastructure.

After going through content editing and technical QA, individual chapters can automatically be pushed out to our Red Hat Learning Subscription customers as “Early Access” courses. This Early Access content is currently in beta and coming soon to subscribers. This is ideal for early adopter customers anxious to learn the latest from Red Hat, and in turn, provides a feedback loop to improve our materials prior to the full course release.

Through this ongoing evolution, Red Hat Training customers are getting higher quality training and accelerated time to market, with more choices to choose the best consumption method for their learning needs.

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