DevOps Students Learn the Value of Uptime With 3 a.m. Calls

Students at Holberton School, San Francisco's innovative training institution for full stack software engineers, are participating in a unique on-call experience to understand DevOps realities.

The DevOps Philosophy

DevOps represents a fundamental shift in how software organizations operate. Rather than maintaining separate engineering and operations departments working in opposition, DevOps practices emphasize collaboration throughout the entire product lifecycle — from design and development through production support.

Learning Through Real Experience

Holberton has partnered with PagerDuty, an IT incident management platform, to place students on 24/7 on-call rotations for both personal and group projects. This mirrors real industry practice where engineers support systems they didn't originally build.

According to Casey Brown, Site Reliability Engineering Manager at LinkedIn: "Uptime is the number one goal of any SRE/DevOps/System administrator team." He notes that major tech companies now expect developers to take full responsibility for production systems, yet traditional education rarely prepares students for this reality.

Innovation in Education

Beyond on-call training, Holberton implements distinctive approaches including project-based learning, peer collaboration, blockchain-based credential verification, and an alternative tuition model.

The school's philosophy emphasizes learning through doing. Students receive increasingly challenging programming problems with minimal initial guidance, naturally developing problem-solving skills and collaborative abilities.

Through this intensive on-call program, Holberton students will accumulate approximately one-and-a-half years of operational experience before graduation — including those inevitable 3 a.m. emergency calls that define real DevOps work.