Private corporate batches, live online cohorts and 1-on-1 mentoring in Apache HTTP Server administration — MPM tuning, virtual hosts, mod_proxy, TLS and hardening — taught by a practitioner who runs it in production.
20 years across DevOps, SRE and Security · 10,000+ engineers trained · Trained teams at JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Nokia and the World Bank
Principal DevOps Engineer & Architect
Rajesh teaches the Apache HTTP Server around request flow and process model rather than directive lists: how MPM choice and MaxRequestWorkers translate into real memory and concurrency limits, how directives merge across VirtualHost, Directory and Location containers, why .htaccess costs what it costs, and how mod_rewrite conditions and flags actually evaluate. The syllabus covers the operational surface an estate depends on — reverse proxying and balancing with mod_proxy, AJP to Tomcat, TLS and hardening graded against a scanner, structured logging, and honest comparison with NGINX for teams running or migrating between both.
Twenty years across DevOps, SRE and Security, in principal and architect roles at PayPay, SoftwareAG, ServiceNow, JDA Software, Intuit, Adobe and others. He has trained engineers at JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Nokia, the World Bank, VMware, Oracle, Mercedes-Benz and Airbus — more than 10,000 people personally. He teaches what he runs, not what he reads.
You are booked with a named engineer, and that is who turns up. Marketplaces and larger providers rotate whoever is free, so the person who sold you the agenda is rarely the person teaching it.
The same trainer is available for the next engagement, which matters when a team builds on what it learned last time.
Your batch is assigned a named trainer before it starts, and that is who teaches it. See the full faculty.
Engagements are matched on the tool, not the calendar. For Apache HTTP Server that means a trainer who has run it in production — Apache HTTP Server administration — MPM tuning, virtual hosts, mod_proxy, TLS and hardening — rather than whoever is free that week. You are told who is teaching before you commit, and that person is on the discovery call that shapes the agenda.
Where a batch is large enough to need a second trainer, the pairing is declared up front. The lead trainer stays accountable for the syllabus and the assessment either way.
Principal DevOps Engineer & Architect
Twenty years across DevOps, SRE and Security in principal and architect roles at PayPay, SoftwareAG, ServiceNow, JDA Software, Intuit, Adobe, IBM/Emptoris, Ness, MindTree and Accenture. He has trained more than 10,000 engineers personally, at organisations including JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Nokia, the World Bank, VMware, Oracle, Mercedes-Benz and Airbus. He teaches what he runs, not what he reads.
Teams of 8–30
Custom agenda, your timezone, onsite or online, NDA-friendly.
Request a quoteIndividual engineers
A private instructor and a curriculum built around your goal.
₹99,999Individuals who want peers
Scheduled batch, max 8 to 10 hours of live instruction.
₹34,999A private batch starts with a discovery call. We look at the stack you actually run — the CI system, the cloud, the constraints — and map the agenda onto it, so examples use your topology rather than a generic one.
Delivery is onsite at your premises, live online, or hybrid, scheduled around your release calendar rather than ours. Batches run 8 to 30 engineers.
Every attendee leaves with recordings, slides, lab repositories and a completion certificate. You receive an attendance and assessment report. Invoicing supports PO and GST.
Talk to us about a private Apache HTTP Server batchThe Apache HTTP Server, known on disk as httpd, is an open-source web server developed by the Apache Software Foundation. Its defining feature is a modular architecture: nearly everything beyond accepting a connection is provided by a module that can be compiled in or loaded dynamically, from authentication and rewriting to compression, caching, proxying and TLS. That modularity is why the Apache HTTP Server has stayed relevant across three decades of protocol and deployment change, and why two installations of the same version can behave very differently.
The second architectural decision that matters operationally is the multi-processing module. The MPM determines how the Apache HTTP Server handles concurrency — prefork with one process per connection, worker with threads inside processes, or event, which hands idle keep-alive connections back to a listener thread. Choosing the wrong MPM, or leaving MaxRequestWorkers at a default that does not match the memory the machine has, is behind a large share of the capacity problems teams attribute to the application.
Configuration is directive-based and container-scoped. Directives apply globally or inside VirtualHost, Directory, Location and Files containers, merged according to documented rules, with optional per-directory .htaccess overrides that cost performance and are frequently misused. Around that core sit the modules operators actually live in: mod_rewrite for request manipulation, mod_proxy and mod_proxy_balancer for reverse proxying and load balancing, mod_ssl for TLS, mod_deflate and mod_expires for delivery, and the logging directives that make an incident diagnosable after the fact.
The Apache HTTP Server is still carrying an enormous amount of production traffic, and much of it sits in exactly the situation where training matters most: long-lived estates, configurations accreted over years by people who have left, and now owned by a platform or SRE team that never chose it. The knowledge that built those configurations was not written down, and the person who understood why a particular RewriteRule exists is no longer there.
The common failures are consistent. An estate runs prefork with a PHP module because that is what the original install did, sized so that a modest traffic increase pushes the machine into swap. .htaccess is enabled across the whole document root, so every request walks the directory tree looking for override files. A reverse proxy is configured without preserving the client address, so downstream rate limiting and audit logs are wrong. TLS is terminated with a cipher list copied from a blog in 2015. ServerTokens and ServerSignature expose version detail that a scanner will report. Each is a configuration decision that has never been revisited.
There is also a migration and coexistence dimension. Many organisations are moving traffic from Apache to NGINX, or running both — Apache in front of Tomcat over AJP, NGINX at the outer edge — and someone has to be able to read both configurations and translate between them accurately. That is a specific, well-paid skill, and it depends on understanding request mapping, module behaviour and MPM tuning rather than on copying directives across.
How httpd is put together and how it handles concurrency. The modular architecture and the request processing phases, the three multi-processing modules and their memory and threading behaviour, installation from distribution packages and from source, and the directory layout differences between Debian-style and Red Hat-style packaging that confuse everyone once.
Topics: Apache HTTP Server architecture and request processing phases · Static versus dynamic modules and the loading model · MPM prefork, worker and event compared · Choosing an MPM against the workload and language runtime · Installation from packages and from source · Layout differences between Debian and Red Hat packaging · Service management, graceful restart and configuration testing
Where directives apply and which one wins. Global configuration, the container types and their merge order, Include and IncludeOptional for file organisation, the DocumentRoot and alias mechanisms, and .htaccess — how it works, what it costs, and how to replace it with server-context configuration.
Topics: Directives, contexts and configuration file structure · Directory, Location, Files and their regex variants · Container merge order and the directives that override · Include, IncludeOptional and configuration organisation · DocumentRoot, Alias, ScriptAlias and DirectoryIndex · AllowOverride, .htaccess and its performance cost · Predicting which configuration a request will actually get
Serving many sites from one server correctly. Name-based and IP-based virtual hosts, the default host trap, per-host logging and document roots, content type and character set handling, directory indexing and negotiation, and the delivery modules that decide how much data actually crosses the network.
Topics: Name-based and IP-based virtual hosts · The default virtual host and how requests fall through to it · Per-host DocumentRoot, logging and error documents · MIME types, character sets and content negotiation · Directory indexing and autoindex configuration · mod_deflate for compression · mod_expires and cache-control headers for static content · Custom error documents and redirects
The most powerful and most misused module in the server. How the rewrite engine evaluates rules and conditions, the flag set and what each one changes, per-directory versus server context and the loop behaviour that differs between them, rewrite logging for diagnosis, and the many cases where a Redirect or ProxyPass is the correct answer instead.
Topics: The rewrite engine, rules and evaluation order · RewriteCond and its test types · Rewrite flags: L, R, P, QSA, NE and the rest · Per-directory versus server context behaviour · Rewrite maps and conditional logic · Diagnosing rewrites with rewrite logging · When Redirect, Alias or ProxyPass is the better tool
Apache in front of something else. mod_proxy configuration and the trailing-slash semantics that catch everyone, preserving client address and host for downstream systems, mod_proxy_balancer with balancer members, load-balancing methods, sticky sessions and the balancer manager, plus mod_proxy_fcgi for PHP-FPM and AJP for Tomcat.
Topics: mod_proxy: ProxyPass, ProxyPassReverse and path semantics · Preserving client address and host with proxy headers · mod_proxy_balancer, balancer members and set configuration · Load balancing methods and member weighting · Sticky sessions and session affinity · Health checking and draining balancer members · mod_proxy_fcgi to PHP-FPM · AJP and mod_proxy_ajp to Tomcat · The balancer manager interface and its exposure risk
Making the server fit to face the internet. mod_ssl configuration, protocol and cipher selection, SNI for multiple certificates, OCSP stapling, HSTS and automated renewal — then the hardening work: reducing the loaded module set, access control and authentication, request limits, and removing the version disclosure a scanner will flag.
Topics: mod_ssl configuration: certificates, chains and key handling · Protocol and cipher selection, and grading the result · SNI and hosting multiple certificates · OCSP stapling, HSTS and redirect strategy · Automated certificate issuance and renewal · Authentication and authorization with the mod_auth modules · Require directives and IP-based access control · Reducing the loaded module surface · ServerTokens, ServerSignature, TRACE and request limits
Keeping it fast and being able to explain it when it is not. Tuning MPM parameters, keep-alive and timeouts against real traffic, caching with mod_cache, structured access logging and conditional logging, error log levels, mod_status for live process state, and a diagnostic method for the failures that actually occur.
Topics: MPM tuning: workers, threads, spare servers and request limits · KeepAlive, timeouts and connection handling · mod_cache and caching proxied content · Access log formats and machine-parseable logging · Conditional logging and log rotation · Error log levels and per-module logging · mod_status and reading live process state · Benchmarking and load testing honestly · A diagnostic method for slow responses and 503s
We rebuild the agenda around the tools you actually run.
Request a custom agendaMeasure per-process footprint under load, derive MaxRequestWorkers for the available RAM, then prove the old default drove the machine into swap.
Work through a configuration with overlapping Directory, Location and .htaccess settings, predicting the effective configuration for ten requests and verifying each.
Take a rewrite set that loops and returns 500, find the cause using rewrite logging alone, and rebuild it with the minimum number of rules.
Configure mod_proxy_balancer across three backends, drain one gracefully and kill another abruptly, documenting client impact in both cases.
Fix protocols, ciphers, stapling and headers until a scanner grades the site top, then automate renewal and simulate a renewal failure.
Take an accreted multi-site configuration, refactor it into a reviewable structure, harden it, tune it, and prove behaviour is unchanged with a request-by-request comparison.
Billed yearly at ₹9,996
Max 8 to 10 hours of live instruction
Full program, private instructor
8–30 engineers · custom agenda · onsite or online · PO and GST invoicing
Refunds. If we cancel or postpone a cohort, you get a full refund within 15 days. There is no money-back guarantee otherwise.
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Certificate of completion
Very good training session. Well explained from the basics to the complex concepts. Also tried to cover practicals and demos within the 3 hour sessions. The learning content and videos are of a great deal of help.
Basics explanation was exemplary from Rajesh where he dealt with complicated topics to be simple. Great learning stuff personally for me.
Very detailed explanation and has lots of patience in attending the questionnaire. Thanks again for your wonderful sessions.
Good discussion, helped us to understand different tools in SRE.
Got good lab sessions which kept the new DevOps tool learnings to the point and it helped a lot in my career.
I took Terraform training with the tutor named Mithilesh. I requested to tailor the course curriculum for my needs. He did an excellent job of showing me how to write the Terraform script per the instructions provided.
| What matters | YouTube + blogs | Generic online course | Freelance marketplace | DevOpsSchool |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Named practitioner | No | Rarely | Varies per booking | Yes — same trainer each time |
| Production experience | Unknown | Unknown | Unverified | 20 years, named employers |
| Custom agenda | No | No | Sometimes | Built from your stack |
| Onsite delivery | No | No | Sometimes | Yes |
| Lab environment | None | Sandbox that expires | Varies | Your own cloud — skill goes with you |
| Assessment | None | Quiz | Rarely | Assignments + capstone per module |
| Per-attendee certificates | No | Sometimes | Rarely | Yes |
| Corporate invoicing | No | Limited | Varies | PO and GST |
| Post-training support | None | Forum, time-limited | None | Lifetime forum access |
Tell us the team, the stack and the timeline. You'll get a straight answer, not a sales sequence.
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