🔒 Free DevSecOps course: security explained to developers
Welcome to the most educational DevSecOps discovery course. In 7 short lessons, you will understand why security placed at the end of a project systematically fails, and how modern teams make it automatic, day-to-day and sustainable.
What this course aims for: answering once and for all the questions "what is DevSecOps?", "shift left, in concrete terms?", "SAST, DAST, SCA — what's the difference?", "where should I store my API keys?", "how could Log4Shell paralyze the entire planet?" — with real incidents analyzed and no jargon.
What this course does not do: teach you how to configure an analysis tool or harden a Docker image line by line. That hands-on mastery is the subject of the Premium Security DevOps course.
What you will discover
Course contents
| No. | Lesson | Main objective | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The problem DevSecOps solves | Understand why end-of-chain security fails | 7 min |
| 2 | What is DevSecOps? | Shift left, rigorous definitions, history | 6 min |
| 3 | Real-world vulnerabilities | OWASP Top 10, CVE, CVSS, explained simply | 8 min |
| 4 | The software supply chain | Dependencies, SBOM, signatures, typosquatting | 7 min |
| 5 | Secrets and identities | Where to store keys, least privilege, OIDC | 7 min |
| 6 | Containers, cloud and tools | SAST, DAST, SCA, images, IaC, CSPM | 7 min |
| 7 | Real incidents + FAQ | Log4Shell, SolarWinds, xz + 14 questions | 6 min |
| 8 | Quiz and attestation | Validate what you've learned in 5 corrected questions | 3 min |
Is this course for you?
- You are a developer and the security team sends you reports you don't know how to read.
- You are a system administrator or DevOps engineer and you want to secure your pipelines without paralyzing them.
- You have already put an API key in a Git repository and you want to understand the right practice.
- You are transitioning into DevOps and DevSecOps comes up in every interview.
- You are a project manager or CTO and you have to arbitrate between delivery speed and security level.
No heavy prerequisites. Reading CI/CD Discovery and Docker Discovery beforehand helps to grasp the examples, without being essential.
The course plan at a glance
What you will know by the end
No commands to memorize. By the end of the course, you will be able to:
- Explain why end-of-project security fails, with numbers.
- Define DevSecOps and shift left without hesitation.
- Distinguish SAST, DAST and SCA, and know which one delivers value earliest.
- Read a CVE and a CVSS score without being intimidated.
- Understand what an SBOM is and why it changes everything during an incident.
- Know where to store your secrets, and why a secret in the Git history is definitively compromised.
- Tell the story of and understand Log4Shell, SolarWinds and the xz backdoor.
- Approach the Premium Security DevOps course with confidence.
⏱️ Estimated duration
About 48 minutes of reading in total. Each lesson is self-contained — you can read one per day, or go through everything in one evening.
Prerequisites and recommended companions
Useful prerequisites:
- Linux Discovery — permissions, users, least privilege.
- Docker Discovery — understanding what an image is and its attack surface.
- CI/CD Discovery — the pipeline is where DevSecOps is put into practice.
Natural next steps after this course:
- Premium Security DevOps course — SAST, DAST, Vault, hands-on hardening
- Observability Discovery — detecting an intrusion requires knowing how to observe
- Kubernetes Discovery — RBAC, network policies and security context
Frequently asked questions in one answer
DevSecOps, in one sentence?
Integrating security at every stage of the development cycle, in an automated way, with responsibility shared by the whole team — instead of a final audit performed by a separate team.
The most important change is not technical, it is organizational: security stops being someone else's job. Lesson 2 goes deeper.
Shift left, in concrete terms?
Moving security activities to the left of the project timeline: towards design and development, rather than just before going to production.
The reason is purely economic: fixing a vulnerability while the code is being written takes a few minutes. Fixing it after a data breach costs hundreds of times more. Numbers in lesson 1.
SAST, DAST, SCA — what's the difference?
- SAST — analyzes your source code without executing it, looking for dangerous patterns.
- DAST — attacks your running application, as an attacker would, without knowing the code.
- SCA — examines your external dependencies to find those containing known vulnerabilities.
Start with SCA: the majority of a modern application's code comes from third-party libraries. Details in lesson 6.
Where should I store my API keys?
Never in the code, never in Git — even in a private repository. A secret present in the Git history stays there indefinitely, and removing it requires rewriting the history.
Use a secrets manager: HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, or your CI tool's encrypted secrets. Lesson 5 explains everything, including the modern approach without any long-lived secret.
What is an SBOM?
A complete, machine-readable inventory of all the software components of your application, indirect dependencies included.
Its value becomes obvious during an incident: when Log4Shell appeared, teams with an SBOM knew within a few seconds whether they were affected. The others searched for days. See lesson 4.
Will security slow down my deliveries?
Done badly, yes. Done well, no.
What slows things down: a three-week manual audit just before going to production, and tools that raise 4,000 alerts of which 3,900 are false positives.
What doesn't slow things down: a ten-second automatic analysis in the pipeline, which blocks only on critical and exploitable vulnerabilities. Lesson 6 details how to calibrate this.
This discovery course explains what to secure and why, without any configuration. To integrate analyses into a pipeline, manage secrets with Vault, harden container images and interpret real vulnerability reports, move on to the Premium Security DevOps course — included in all our paid plans.
Other discovery courses not to miss
- CI/CD Discovery — the pipeline where security gets automated
- Observability Discovery — observing to detect
- Docker Discovery — an image's attack surface
- Kubernetes Discovery — RBAC and network policies
- Cloud Discovery — the shared responsibility model
- Terraform Discovery — securing infrastructure as code
Ready? Start with lesson 1 →