FAS — System Administration Fundamentals

About the course

Fondamenti di Amministrazione di Sistema (FAS) is a hands-on systems administration course at the University of Trento. It approaches infrastructure from a software developer's perspective: from the command line to containers, from shell scripts to full CI/CD pipelines. The course works through the entire modern sysadmin toolkit — scripting, provisioning, containerisation, deployment, and observability — with an emphasis on practical, production-ready techniques. The exam required building and presenting real projects that applied the course concepts end-to-end.

Course Curriculum

Shell Text Editors & Data Wrangling Shell Scripting Python Scripting Version Control (Git) Local Infrastructure Provisioning & Config Management Virtualization Containers & Cloud Intro to DevOps Deploying & CI/CD Monitoring & Observability Infrastructure as Code

Exam Projects

Two projects were required for the exam: one personal, one in a group.

personal

svdev — Dev Environment Manager

Python CLI that manages the full lifecycle of isolated multi-tenant development environments via Docker Compose. Installable as a package, with runtime-generated Compose files and dynamic route loading via importlib.

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group

Link Shortener

Self-hosted URL shortener with a production-grade observability stack: Prometheus metrics (P50/P95/P99 latency), Loki log aggregation, auto-provisioned Grafana dashboards, and Sentry error tracking. Deployed via Ansible.

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