The operating manual. By those who build it.
Seven tracks. 237 lessons. Three certifications, earned not awarded. The same content our solution architects use to onboard customer engineering teams.
Written by the team behind ZopNight. Alumni of
Seven tracks,
built around real work.
Each track maps to a job-to-be-done. Not a vendor feature list. Skim the operator track in an afternoon; the architect tracks reward weeks of study.
ZopNight Architect. Design decisions that survive scale.
RBAC topology, multi-account credential strategy, showback dimensions, budget pyramids, dashboard governance, cost-flow Sankey. The choices a year-1 customer will still respect at year five.
Cloud Cost Foundations
Rack rate vs billing, the two-source cost model, multi-cloud taxonomy, the FinOps lifecycle, CDCR. The shared vocabulary every track builds on.
ZopDev Certified: Operator
Daily product walkthrough. Resources, schedules, overrides, recommendations, audit log. The complete operator surface, ready Monday morning.
ZopDev Certified: Engineer. How the product actually works.
Cluster discovery, recommendation pipeline, auto-remediation rules, override semantics, dependency-aware scheduling, anomaly detection. The biggest track. The one engineers come back to.
FinOps Mastery. The full Foundation framework, applied.
Crawl, Walk, Run. Showback vs chargeback. Unit economics. Budget governance. Anomaly response. Forecasting. Commitments. Sustainability.
DevOps Cost Discipline
Tagging hygiene, schedule patterns, Kubernetes cost, IaC cost gates, cost incident response.
AI-Powered Cloud Ops
MCP from first principles. Read-only by design. The 2026 differentiator.
One foundation,
three tiers,
seven tracks.
A new engineer reads T0 and T1, takes the Operator cert. Operators grow into T2 and T4, take the Engineer cert. Senior practitioners take T3 and T6, take the Architect cert.
Read a lesson
from the Architect track.
Every lesson follows the same five-part structure. Outcome, concept, demo, hands-on, knowledge check. Below is the first one, in full.
Concept. ZopNight's authorization model is built around a policy table that maps every protected endpoint to the policy a caller must hold. Every role is, fundamentally, a set of (entity, action) pairs that the role's members are allowed to invoke.
The table is not closed, and it should not be read as a fixed list. Every capability that ships with its own surface also ships its own entity and policies. What is fixed is the verb set, and that is what makes the model auditable: whatever the entity, the actions are the same four, so "what can your Admin role do?" is answerable by listing entities rather than by learning per-entity vocabulary.
ENTITY TYPICAL ACTIONS
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
resource view, manage (start/stop)
schedule view, create, update, delete
resource-group view, create, update, delete
override view, create, cancel
cloud-account view, connect, rotate, revoke
recommendation view, apply, dismiss
... + 9 moreThe entities cluster into three groups: operational (resource, schedule, override, recommendation), administrative (cloud-account, team, role, user), and read-only forensic (state-history, report, audit-log)...
Three tiers,
earned not awarded.
Pass the exams, earn the badge. The bar is real because engineering leaders ask for these on resumes.
ZopDev Certified: Operator
Twenty MCQs across T0 + T1. The cloud-cost vocabulary and the daily product surface.
ZopDev Certified: Engineer
Forty MCQs across T2 product internals, T4 FinOps Mastery, T5 DevOps Cost. The certification engineering leaders ask for.
ZopDev Certified: Architect
Fifty MCQs across T3 Architect, T4 FinOps Mastery, and T6 AI-Powered Ops. Design decisions, multi-account topology, RBAC, ROI defense, the senior credential.