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Compute Central

Practical, lab-tested guides for the infrastructure you actually run — Linux, containers, Kubernetes, automation, CI/CD, observability, and AI engineering, explained from first principles all the way to production.

  • Free and open source
  • Hands-on labs and case studies
  • Updated September 2026
$ docker compose up -d✔ Container caddylab-db-1      Healthy✔ Container caddylab-api-1     Started✔ Container caddylab-caddy-1   Started$ curl -s localhost/api/todos | jq length3

0 Guides and lab-tested chapters

0 Learning tracks, foundations to production

0 Hands-on labs and case studies

2016 Notes and lessons collected since

Learning tracks

Pick a track, or filter by what you're working on. Every track stands on its own.

The path through this site

Most readers move left to right — but jump in wherever your work is today.

  1. 1Linux & shellSafe scripts and system basics
  2. 2ContainersHow Docker really works
  3. 3KubernetesOrchestrate workloads
  4. 4AutomationAnsible and Terraform
  5. 5DeliveryCI/CD and code quality
  6. 6ObservabilityMetrics, logs, traces
  7. 7AI engineeringLLMs, RAG, and agents

What's new

Learning paths by goal

Pick the goal closest to yours — each tab is a short, ordered route through the material.

Try the Minikube lab, the kind lab, or the Podman lab.

Provision with Terraform, configure hosts with Ansible, and glue it together with shell scripts.

Stand up the monitoring stack and review Kubernetes troubleshooting.

How to use this site

Start with the topic you need, then follow the examples in a local or test environment before using them in production. Most pages explain the reason behind each step, not just the command.

Best way to learn

Read the short explanation first, run the example safely, then write down what changed and why it worked.

Production reminder

Always review commands, credentials, namespaces, and environment names before running anything against shared or production systems.

Browse every section

About

I’m Sameer Alam, a DevOps Engineer and SRE practitioner focused on reliable, automated, observable, and secure systems. My work spans infrastructure design, deployment automation, monitoring, incident response, and platform operations.

I started documenting what I learned in 2016. Compute Central brings those notes, experiments, and real-world lessons into one organized place.

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