New Content: Alibaba, Azure Cert Prep: AI-100, AZ-104, AZ-204 & AZ-400, Amazon Athena Playground, Google Cloud Developer Challenge, and much more

This month, our Content Team released 8 new learning paths, 4 courses, 7 labs in real cloud environments, and 4 new knowledge check assessments. Not only that, but we introduced our very first course on Alibaba Cloud, and our expert instructors are working ’round the clock to create 6 new Cloud Academy Alibaba Learning Paths — so stay tuned!

New Content on Cloud Academy

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.


Alibaba

Course: AliCloud Fundamentals – Elastic Compute Service (ECS)

This course introduces you to Alibaba’s Elastic Compute Service, or ECS, one of the most common services within the Alibaba platform. It is a high-performance, stable, reliable, and scalable compute service that allows you to deploy virtual servers within your Alibaba Cloud environment. Most people will require some form of ECS Instance running within their environment as a part of at least one of their solutions.

AWS

On March 23, Stuart Scott (Cloud Academy, AWS Lead) launched the new AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) Learning Path. Since its launch, we’ve had 1,000+ users start this new certification learning path with 100% positive feedback. Thanks to all of you who started this certification learning path, and good luck to everyone who is working toward this certification as a goal!

Learning Path: Serverless Platform on AWS

This learning path has been designed to provide an understanding and insight into some of the different serverless platform services offered by AWS. The services covered will include those from the following AWS categories: Application integration, Customer engagement, Media services, Compute, Storage, Database and Networking, and Content delivery.

Course: Amazon DynamoDB High Availability

This course explores Amazon Web Service’s DynamoDB and teaches you how to architect DynamoDB setups—with an emphasis on high availability—ensuring that your internet-scale applications are always available. The course begins by looking at the various option offered by DynamoDB, before moving onto on-demand backup and restore, and rounding off by looking at point in time recovery.

Course: Amazon Aurora High Availability

Amazon Aurora is a next-generation, cloud-native relational database, providing unrivaled performance and availability features. This course explores the various configuration options and techniques that you can use to create highly available Amazon Aurora databases.

Hands-on Lab: Automating Code Reviews with Amazon CodeGuru

Amazon CodeGuru is a machine learning-powered solution for automating performance reviews and improving application performance. It does so by acting both on your code repositories and actual applications, and it currently supports Java code. In this lab, you’ll associate an Amazon CodeCommit repository with CodeGuru and create a pull request to be analyzed.

Lab Playground: Amazon Athena Playground (COVID-19 Data) 

This Amazon Athena playground lab provides you with an Athena sandbox for you to query COVID-19 data provided by the AWS COVID-19 data lake. The playground configures AWS Glue tables that are backed by the AWS COVID-19 data lake which is hosted on Amazon S3. You can query the Glue tables with Athena using SQL.


Azure

Learning Path: AI-100 Exam Preparation: Designing and Implementing an Azure AI Solution

The AI-100 exam tests your knowledge of three subject areas: analyzing solution requirements, designing AI solutions, and implementing and monitoring AI solutions. This learning path starts by giving you an overview of Azure services. Once you have that foundation, we’ll dig into how to use the various Cognitive Services.

Learning Path: AZ-104 Exam Preparation: Microsoft Azure Administrator

The AZ-104 exam replaces the AZ-103 exam, which will be retired on August 31, 2020. This exam is part of Microsoft’s role-based certification program. Candidates who pass the AZ-104 exam will earn the Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate certification.

Learning Path: AZ-204 Exam Preparation: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure

This learning path is designed to help you prepare for the AZ-204 Developing Solutions for the Microsoft Azure exam. Even if you don’t plan to take the exam, these courses will help you gain a solid understanding of developing applications on Azure. Candidates who pass the AZ-204 exam will earn the Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate certification.

Learning Path: AZ-400 Exam Preparation: Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions (preview)

This Learning Path is designed to help you and your team prepare for the AZ-400 Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions exam. Even if you don’t plan to take the exam, these courses and hands-on labs will help you get started on your way to becoming an Azure DevOps specialist.

Hands-on Lab: Managing Azure Storage Accounts

Storage accounts in Azure have a wide range of uses and can store many different types of data. In this lab, you’ll dive deep into the creation and configuration of storage accounts by creating one yourself and managing many of the settings it offers.

Hands-on Lab: Monitoring Resources with Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor provides a comprehensive solution for gathering, querying, and acting on data in Azure. In this lab, you’ll learn more about Azure Monitor by configuring metrics, saving visualized data in dashboards, setting alerts, and automating responses to your data with action groups.

Hands-on Lab: Automating Infrastructure Health with Azure Automation Runbooks

Azure Automation is a service that offers the ability to automate almost any kind of resource management and administration across both your cloud and non-cloud environments. In this lab, you’ll practice setting up a runbook to remediate a high CPU usage problem with an Azure VM.


Google Cloud Platform

Lab Challenge: Google Cloud Developer Challenge

In this lab challenge, you will prove your general knowledge of content related to storage, load balancing, CDN, networking, and monitoring services offered by Google Cloud. The goals you will need to achieve represent essential skills that a Professional Cloud Developer must have. You’ll be given a desired end state and be required to reach it using your knowledge of Google Cloud services.


Data Science

Learning Path: Practical Data Science with Python

This learning path provides two learning experiences in one: it explores the world of data science while at the same time giving you hands-on, practical tutorials on how to use Python at an advanced level.


Programming

Learning Path: Fundamentals of R

This learning path introduces the fundamental concepts and knowledge you need to use the programming language R, a mathematical and statistical modelling language used extensively in data analysis and big data.


Business Transformation

Course: Simple Explanations to Technical Topics

Want some simple explanations to some of the technical terms and concepts about the cloud that everyone else seems to know already? This course is here to help!

Security

Learning Path: Introduction to Ethical Hacking Tools

 This learning path has been designed to introduce you to a number of different ethical hacking tools, covering:
  • Nmap network scanner
  • Netcat network utility
  • Metasploit vulnerability exploitation tool
  • Nikto web app scanner
  • SQLmap SQL injection tool
  • Burpsuite web app proxy
  • Dirbuster vulnerability scanner
  • Droopescan vulnerability exploitation tool

Learning Path: Preparation for the (ISC)² CISSP Certification

The Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) is one of the most globally recognized certifications in the information security profession. The following content was added to this learning path.

DOMAIN 8 – Software Development Security

Module 1:

  • Understanding and applying security in the software development life cycle
  • Enforcing security controls in the development environment

Module 2:

  • The database environment
  • Software development and the world of the web

Module 3:

  • Considerations or secure software development
  • Assessing the effectiveness of software security
  • Assessing software acquisition security

Platform updates

Multi-year plans

You can now purchase two- or three-year plans at a significant discount. The two-year plan provides a 15% discount and the three-year provides an amazing discount of 25%!

How it works for non-customers

  1. Choose either the enterprise plan or personal plan.
  2. Use the drop-down field to select the subscription length.
new subscription length field

How it works for personal plan customers

    1. Go to https://cloudacademy.com/pricing/update/
    2. Select the subscription length.
    3. Your plan will be pro-rated based on the number of months you have left in your current plan.
Upgrade plan

Note: Current enterprise customers must contact us at support@cloudacademy.com to upgrade to a multi-year plan.

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