Free content on Cloud Academy
More and more customers are relying on our technology and content to keep upskilling their people in these months, and we are doing our best to keep supporting them. While the world fights the COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to make a small contribution to help you stay up-to-date with great cloud and technology skills.
We made a few courses and hands-on labs completely free for you. Feel free to share with your friends and colleagues.
- What is Cloud Computing?
- Compute Fundamentals for AWS
- Migrating Servers to Microsoft Azure
- Building a Cloud-Native Application
All these courses are part of our Learning Paths, longer guided paths with a mix of videos, hands-on labs, quiz sessions, and exams. You can always start a free trial if you want to get a sense of the full experience. If you are interested in our unique technologies that are part of our Hands-on Labs and Lab Challenges, we’ve also made three of our 300+ labs available.
- Lab Challenge: AWS Developer Tools Challenge
- Hands-on Lab: Create Your First Amazon S3 Bucket
- Hands-on Lab: Introduction to AWS Lambda
New content on Cloud Academy
In a single month alone, our Content Team published a new AWS Certification Learning Paths, 11 labs in real cloud environments, and 31 new courses! At any time, you can find all of our new releases by going to our Training Library and finding the section titled “New this month in our library.” You can also keep track of what new training is coming for the next 4-6 weeks with our Content Roadmap.
AWS
Learning Path: AWS Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) Certification Preparation for AWS
This certification learning path is specifically designed to prepare you for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) released in March 2020. It covers all the elements required across all of the domains outlined in the exam blueprint.
Course: Introduction to DNS and Content Delivery on AWS
This Introduction to DNS and Content Delivery on AWS course will introduce you to two services that are used to manage DNS and content delivery within AWS: Amazon Route 53 for DNS and Amazon CloudFront. It will give you an understanding of their features and use cases, as well as a high-level overview of how they operate.
Course: Understanding and Optimizing Costs with AWS Storage Service
With so many different storage solutions available in AWS, at times it’s difficult to determine the best way to architect your storage needs in the most cost-optimized way. This course has been designed to help you understand the different costs associated with each of the AWS services currently listed under the “Storage” category, and when you might select one option within a service over another one. This course explores the pricing metrics of a variety of AWS services including Amazon S3, Glacier storage classes, Elastic File System, FSx, Storage Gateway, and AWS Backup.
Course: Introduction to Amazon S3
This course introduces you to arguably the most widely used storage service within AWS, the Amazon Simple Storage Service, more commonly known as Amazon S3. You will learn about the characteristics of Amazon S3 and get a general overview of the service, before moving on and learning about the various storage classes it offers. Each storage class is different, and this course explains how they can be used.
Course: Using Amazon S3 Bucket Properties & Management Features to Maintain Data
This course will look at some of the management and bucket property features that Amazon S3 has to offer, as well as how you can use them to maintain and control your data. There are a number of different features available, some of which you may be familiar with and others perhaps not so much. This course has been designed to give you a full overview of what is available.
Course: Decoupled and Event-Driven Architectures in AWS
This course explores and introduces you to the concepts of both decoupled and event-driven architectures within AWS. It also provides an introduction to the Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Amazon Kinesis, and AWS Lambda.
Course: Securing AWS Organizations with Service Control Policies (SCPs)
This course explores the AWS Organizations service, and in particular how you can use Service Control Policies to help you centrally manage and control the highest level of security permissions within your AWS accounts.
Course: AWS Networking Features Essential for a Solutions Architect
This short course explores some of the different networking features and components across your AWS infrastructure. It looks at some important networking elements that are essential for a solutions architect to be familiar with at a high level. The main components of the course are set out in the learning objectives listed below.
Course: Using Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to Enhance Performance
This short course focuses purely on the DynamoDB Accelerator, more commonly referred to as DAX. DAX is an in-memory cache delivering a significant performance enhancement—up to 10 times as fast as the default DynamoDB settings—allowing response times to decrease from milliseconds to microseconds. It is a fully managed, highly available feature offered by AWS. This course takes a brief look at its features and use cases.
Azure
Course: Implementing and Managing Azure Build Infrastructure
Azure DevOps has many great tools for implementing and managing your build infrastructure, and this course walks you through how to use them. With a mix of theory and real-life demonstrations from the Azure portal, you will learn how to create Azure pipelines, use them to integrate third-party build systems, utilize agent pools, and put it all together to set up an automated workflow that can potentially save you hundreds of hours.
Course: Designing for Quality and Security With Azure DevOps
This course covers topics to help you learn how to design a quality strategy in Azure DevOps. It shows you how to analyze an existing quality environment and how to identify and recommend quality metrics, as well as what feature flags are and how to manage the feature flag life cycle.
Course: Designing Solutions Using Azure Cognitive Services
Microsoft has created a predefined set of AI models called Cognitive Services. They’re available for companies of all sizes, and best of all, they require little to no knowledge of data science. In this course, you will learn how to infuse your apps—on an architectural level—with the intelligence that Cognitive Services provide. We will cover what Cognitive Services are and how to use the various solutions they provide, including vision, speech, language, decision, and web search.
Hands-on Lab: Creating and Deploying a Bot-to-Azure Bot Service
Teams use Azure Bot Service for their bot needs because of the tight integration it offers with other Azure services and the ease with which enterprise-grade bots can be deployed, among other reasons. Azure Bot Service makes it simple to get up and running locally with a bot, test it, then deploy it to Azure. In this lab, you will create a bot, test it locally, then use the Azure CLI to deploy it to Azure Bot Service.
Lab Challenge: Azure Bot Services Challenge
In this lab challenge, you’ll be asked to publish a functioning bot to Azure Bot Service. You’ll be given a Windows environment that is set up to create and deploy bots, but how you publish your bot to Azure Bot Service is up to you.
Google Cloud Platform
Learning Path Update: Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam Preparation
This learning path is designed to help you and your team prepare for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer exam. Even if you aren’t planning to take the exam, the courses in this learning path will provide you with a solid understanding of how to set up a cloud solution environment; how to plan, configure, and deploy a cloud solution; and how to ensure successful operation of a cloud solution built with GCP resources and services.
Course: Planning and Configuring a Google Cloud Platform Solution
Google Cloud Platform has become one of the premier cloud providers on the market. It offers the same rich catalog of services and massive global hardware scale as AWS, as well as a number of Google-specific features and integrations. Getting started with GCP can seem daunting given its complexity. This course is designed to demystify the system and help both novices and experienced engineers get started.
Course: Managing Google Kubernetes Engine and App Engine
Google Cloud Platform has become one of the premier cloud providers on the market. It offers the same rich catalog of services and massive global hardware scale as AWS, as well as a number of Google-specific features and integrations. Mastering the GCP toolset can seem daunting given its complexity. This course is designed to help people familiar with GCP strengthen their understanding of GCP’s compute services, specifically App Engine and Kubernetes Engine.
Course: Introduction to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Kubernetes has become one of the most common container orchestration platforms. It has regular releases, a wide range of features, and is highly extensible. Managing a Kubernetes cluster requires a lot of domain knowledge, which is why services such as GKE exist. Certain aspects of a Kubernetes cluster vary based on the underlying implementation. In this course, we’ll explore some of the ways that GKE implements a Kubernetes cluster. Having a basic understanding of how things are implemented will set the stage for further learning.
Hands-on Lab: Host a Static Website Using a Cloud Storage Bucket and Cloud CDN
Using a cloud storage bucket instead of a server for your website offers many advantages. It allows you to deep-handle the security of the objects you upload, pay only for the storage space you use (thus avoiding a standard monthly fee), and distribute your content within a single region, dual-region, or multi-region. In this lab, you will create a regional cloud storage bucket and upload the files of your static website to it. You will then create a load balancer and a CDN distribution, allowing you to have an efficient caching and file serving approach.
Hands-on Lab: Balance the Traffic to Compute Engine Instances Through a Load Balancer
In this lab, you will create an instance group and attach to it two Compute Engine instances that you will find in your GCP environment. Then, you will create a load balancer that will be associated with the instance group. This will allow you to create a single entry point for your virtual machines and balance the traffic directed to them.
Hands-on Lab: Monitor Compute Engine Resources Through Cloud Monitoring
In this lab, you will work with an existing Compute Engine instance in a GCP environment. You will install the Cloud Monitoring agent and then start practicing with Cloud Monitoring. You will create an uptime check and an alert policy triggered when the uptime check fails. You will also create a chart with the CPU metrics of your Compute Engine instance.
Programming
Hands-on Lab: Web Development Fundamentals – HTML and CSS
You’ll begin at square one, learning how the Web and web pages work, and then steadily build from there. By the end of the course, you’ll have the skills to create a website that is responsive to the device it is being viewed on and that contains features needed for good website development. Learn how to use the latest techniques, best practices, and current web standards — including HTML5 and CSS3.
Hands-on Lab: Web Development Fundamentals – JavaScript
This hands-on lab teaches the basic skills of web development in JavaScript. Using the latest version of JavaScript and developer tools, this lab starts with the basics needed to write simple scripts, and builds on this to prepare you for using modern JavaScript frameworks and libraries such as React and Angular.
Hands-on Lab: Developing Applications Using ReactJS
This lab is designed to show you how to create user interfaces using the ReactJS library. It will discuss how ReactJS can be used to create reusable, interactive UI components; single-page applications using React Router; and an introduction to Flux and Redux. The aim of the lab is for delegates to develop their skills, knowledge, and understanding so that they can confidently use ReactJS to create user interfaces.
Hands-on Lab: Programming with TypeScript
In this lab, you will learn the core and advanced topics related to TypeScript. TypeScript is a superset of the JavaScript language that introduces type safety to the language. This programming lab will introduce you to scalable, safe and maintainable JavaScript code that can be used with any modern framework including Angular2+ and ReactJS.
Hands-on Lab: Using Node.js and the MEAN Stack
In this lab, you will learn how to leverage JavaScript in end-to-end application development. Using Node.js and the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node.js), you will learn how to build open-source modular and component-based web applications to build service-driven applications with a single web page user interface.
Platform updates
Chat with Customer Support
Have a question? You can now chat directly with a live Customer Support representative. Simply go to our new pricing page and click the “Support” button on the bottom right. You can navigate through top questions or start a chat with a live representative. As always, you can still email support@cloudacademy.com if email is more your style.
Purchase new or additional licenses online
- To purchase new enterprise licenses, go to our new pricing page and click “Buy Now.” You can now purchase up to 15 licenses online — all without a single sales call. You can always explore a demo or contact sales to speak with one of our solution specialists.
- To add additional licenses, go to the member panel (you must be the account admin), mouse over “Licenses left” and click “Add more licenses.”
Check out the new Training Plan features
As you may know, the Training Plan feature is a powerful tool that gives you centralized control of the training experience for your entire team on the Cloud Academy platform. You can assign content to your team, set a clear goal, set a due date, and keep your team on track.
We’re happy to announce that you can now assign a Training Plan to a single user. Check out our blog, Announcing New Training Plans, for a complete list of the new and improved features. Here are the additional highlights:
- Easy planning: Assign multiple training plans in a sequence.
- Skill improvement graphs for teams: Know your team is ready with newly acquired skills.
- Expanded monitoring: Set up notifications for any members in your Cloud Academy ecosystem.
- Improved filtering and searching for Training Plans: Find the content you need easier and faster.
- Simplified creation and customization of Training Plans: Customize your training plans on the spot.
- Fine-grained control: Assign plans to a single member, not just an entire team.
Stay updated
As always, we use Cloud Academy Blog to keep you up-to-date on the latest technology and best practices. All of our new blogs, reports, and updates go directly to our Cloud Academy social media accounts. For the latest updates, follow and like us on the following social media platforms:
