Cloud DevOps Engineer

(Note: I took this course from May to June in 2022, so some things might have been improved since then.)

This is the worst MOOC I have taken in my life. Also the most expensive one: I paid 1200$ for 3 months access.
I'm completely disappointed in the content and in the assignments. For the price I've paid I had much higher expectations.

My background: I'm a senior fullstack engineer with 9+ years of Python, Java, Typescript experience, and a PhD in Math. I also have some real-life experience with CI/CD, many times I set it up by myself in my work projects. I have participated in many MOOCs, among them are wonderful AI courses from Andrew Ng on Coursera, couple of random programming courses on Udemy which happened to be decently good, I also took a quick look at EdX and came back to Coursera. I have a couple of Coursera certificates for my finished courses: Computer Networks, Nanotechnology, Learn how to Learn, Machine learning.

My impressions about the "Cloud Dev Ops Engineer" "nanodegree":
First two courses were quite boring, but it was not an issue as I expected it to be an introduction to the main part, so I patiently waited for more interesting content to come. But very abruptly the third course had an assignment that required more than 40 hours to implement. The time estimations in were ridiculously misleading even in the first course. After trying other MOOC platforms where they usually add some time buffer and you are happy to see that you are faster than expected, this approach was very demotivating. The estimations for the third course were especially wrong. There was a moment when I worked on the course assignment every evening for several days in a row and udacity kept showing me that remaining time is just one hour, exactly as it was a week ago. LoL.

In my opinion, it takes not less than several days of full-time employee efforts to finish the assignment of the third course completely. There is enormous amount of errors and issues embedded intentionally and accidentally into the instructions. A lot of tasks and efforts have no relation to cloud or devops, like for example fixing `npm audit` issues that took much more than estimated in the instructions. The course is outdated and those npm packages that were safe some time ago, now have critical issues, so this whole example repository needs to be refactored and updated by the course creators. Since, I'm a full stack engineer, I was able to do that. But a beginner dev ops would have a hard time with it. And it is just an example.

This example code provided in the instructions contains a trap:
#- name: Copy index test page
# template:
# src: "files/index.js"
# dest: "~/web/index.js"
It is suggested to use it for copying a tar.gz file, and for a beginner it will be really hard to understand why it is failing and to find an issue in it.
The suggested commands to run backend do not work. Sometimes even simple run instructions are incorrect, so I felt like I'm debugging the course material, instead of learning something new.
And to make it clear, every CI rerun requires at least basic jobs with infrastructure setup in the instances and takes not less than 12 min just to see that the code from the instructions doesn't work.

The idea to compress a backend folder with `node_modules` in it (!) and distribute that to ec2 instances is questionable. IMO the practices that are taught in this course are far from the best ones.

For the price this "nanodegree" has, all these instructions should have been polished and checked multiple times, so that the students don't spend time on debugging the instructions. The project must be up-to-date and the assignments must be somewhat fun to do. I got tired of uselessly spending time on something that is so broken and teaches me conceptually nothing new. It felt laughable that I also needed to pay for this torture. I have much more interesting to do at my work, and I'm getting paid for solving those tasks.

Put the assignment aside, the course content is really shallow and bloated with boring beginner content. Its maximum cost is 10$ for each course, so 50$ for the degree is a top. Luckily, I used my education budget to pay for this "nanodegree", I would be devastated if it were my own 1k+ eur.

I asked the support for the refund but they said: "Unfortunately you are outside refund window and no refund is possible as a one time exception we can give you additional one month free but no refund is possible"

You don't like our product? No, we cannot refund it, but maybe you want more?

All in all, avoid this course at all costs.