In this Education Paper we outline a course and exercise design aimed at teaching students knowledge and skills in refactoring (“strangling”) a monolith architecture into a microservice equivalent using a cross team DevOps process. The core aim of our proposed exercise design is that students are engaged in a realistic DevOps process in that groups of students are responsible for developing their respective and separate microservice while interacting to ensure their contribution will interact correctly to provide the overall behavior. Our main contribution is to outline the challenges faced when designing such a challenging exercise, our proposals for solving them, the exercise design itself, as well as present experiences from two courses using this approach.