Bridging the Gap Between Academic Curricula and Industrial Practice with DevOps Education

Feedback from industry on graduate Software Engineers found that students lack an academic foundation on broader systems design and development beyond the isolated nature of university assignments. To solve this, we introduced a workshop course focused on DevOps into the degree. This paper outlines the design and delivery of a course on maintaining a DevOps cloud ecosystem, simulating a real-world company environment in which students contribute software. The course proved highly successful, with areas to improve in the future surrounding the logistics of maintaining a large ecosystem, and providing technical support to students not familiar with complex toolchains.