About LiveStudy
LiveStudy was born in 2022 out of a simple observation: the gap between reading about cloud infrastructure and actually building it is enormous, and almost nothing in the market bridges it well. University courses teach theory without production systems. YouTube videos teach tricks without architecture discipline. Certification exams test memorization without hands-on competence.
Our three founders — a former head of platform engineering at a Chicago SaaS company, a DevTool product leader, and an education-technology researcher — set out to build something better. They designed a platform where learners follow structured curricula while provisioning real infrastructure in sandboxed cloud environments that mirror production conditions down to the IAM policies and network topology.
The first cohort of 30 students graduated in early 2023. By mid-2024, LiveStudy had trained over 2,000 individuals across four program tracks, and our graduates were placing at cloud providers, SaaS companies, and DevOps consultancies at a rate that outpaced traditional bootcamps. Today we operate from New York and run live cohorts every quarter, with asynchronous modules available on demand.
We are funded by a combination of tuition revenue and a seed round from education and DevTool investors who share our belief that access to high-quality cloud engineering education should not depend on already having a job at a FAANG company.
Our Mission
To democratize access to professional-grade cloud and AI education by combining rigorous curricula with realistic practice environments.
Our Values
Mastery Through Practice
We believe skills are built by doing, not by watching. Every concept we teach is paired with hands-on exercises in our cloud lab environment, because an engineer who has debugged a failed Kubernetes deployment in practice handles it better the first time it happens in production.
Intellectual Honesty
Production systems are humbling, and our curriculum reflects that. We teach reliability engineering before feature development, emphasize what can go wrong alongside what can go right, and grade students on operational discipline rather than speed alone, because sustainable performance comes from understanding failure modes.
Accessible Excellence
World-class cloud engineering education has historically been locked behind closed doors at elite companies. We are building the open alternative: affordable, structured, and taught by practitioners who have operated production infrastructure at scale.