New on Cloud Academy: Git Labs, CKA and CKAD Lab Challenges, AWS and Azure Learning Paths, AGILE, and Much More

We just kicked off our first Free Weekend of 2020. This means we’ve unlocked our Training Library for just 72 hours. Until Sunday at 11:59 pm (PST), you can get unlimited access to our industry-leading learning paths, courses, certification prep exams, and our most popular hands-on labs and lab challenges.

If you’re already a Cloud Academy member, then we’re happy to have you part of our community! Feel free to share the free weekend landing page along with our friend referral promo code FRIEND25 to save you both $25.

Now let’s dive right into this month’s new content. 

New content on Cloud Academy

In a single month alone, our Content Team published eight new learning paths, eight new labs, and 41 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: Implementing Mechanisms to Enforce Multi-Account Security in AWS

This learning path will look at how to implement controls to resolve this constant challenge by analyzing some of the AWS services and features available to you to help you implement refined security controls across all of your accounts.

Course: Managing Findings from Multiple Accounts Using Amazon GuardDuty

This course looks at how to collate and manage findings from multiple AWS accounts with Amazon GuardDuty. Amazon GuardDuty is a regionally based, intelligent, threat-detection service which will monitor unusual and unexpected behavior.

Hands-on Lab: Encrypting S3 objects using SSE-KMS

This lab focuses on Server-Side Encryption with CMKs Stored in AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS). This approach gives you control of the master key that generates data keys used by S3, performing encrypt and decrypt operations.


Azure

Learning Path: DP-200 Exam Preparation: Implementing an Azure Data Solution (preview)

This learning path is designed to help you prepare for Microsoft’s DP-200 Implementing an Azure Data Solution exam. Even if you don’t plan to take the exam, these courses and hands-on labs will help you learn how to deploy and manage a variety of Azure data solutions.

Course: Implementing Azure Network Security

This course covers how to implement Azure network security. Through a combination of both theory and practical demonstrations, you will learn how to create and configure a range of Azure services designed to keep your network secure. This includes topics such as virtual network connectivity, the Azure Front Door Service, NSG configuration, Azure firewall configuration, and application security groups.

Course: Using Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

The most effective way to do big data processing on Azure is to store your data in ADLS and then process it using Spark (which is essentially a faster version of Hadoop) on Azure Databricks. In this course, you will follow hands-on examples to import data into ADLS and then securely access it and analyze it using Azure Databricks. You will also learn how to monitor and optimize your Data Lake Storage.

Course: Implementing Continuous Delivery on Azure

This course deals with how to implement continuous delivery with the Azure DevOps solution. In particular, we will be exploring how to design different release strategies and some factors you need to consider while setting up release pipelines. This will include looking at release triggers, release gates, and other areas associated with releasing code, including working with different environments.

Exam: DP-200 LP Exam (Preview)

This is Cloud Academy’s preview exam for the Microsoft Azure Implementing an Azure Data Solution (DP-200) certification exam preparation. This preview exam focuses on the skills you will need to pass the DP-200 exam. Please note that this is a preview exam, and does not include all areas of the actual exam. A comprehensive exam will be released soon with our complete certification learning path.

Hands-on Lab: Advanced Data Security for Azure SQL Database

In this lab, you will demonstrate the capabilities of each of these services and understand how ADS provides security as a service for your database. Specifically, you will see how ADS can help your organization achieve security compliance, proactively remediate vulnerabilities, and protect your data from attacks.


Google Cloud Platform

Course: Building and Testing Applications on Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a powerful platform that brings the flexibility and reliability of Google’s infrastructure to your projects. As a leader in AI, machine learning, and networking, GCP has a suite of tools and services for developers to use for almost any circumstance. This course will cover the Google best practices for setting up a CI/CD pipeline on GCP.

Hands-on Lab: Deploy a Message Queuing Solution With Google Cloud Pub/Sub

In this lab, you will understand the core components of a Pub/Sub system, you will create a topic and attach a subscription to it, you will send a message to the topic, and you will create a batch job using Cloud Dataflow to import messages to your topic from a text file stored in a Cloud Storage bucket.


DevOps

Learning Path: Learning Git First-Hand

Git is a widely-used version control system for code repositories. In this lab-exclusive learning path, you’ll learn everything you need to start using Git by working in several hands-on, real-world scenarios.

Hands-on Lab: Implementing GitOps for Kubernetes in AWS

In this lab, you’ll start with a pre-provisioned environment that hosts Kubernetes on an EC2 instance and uses AWS CodePipeline to manage an automated deployment pipeline for a simple containerized Node.js application. You’ll then update the setup to manage the configuration, deployment, and automation of the app using GitOps principles and tools, including Weave Flux and Helm.

Lab Challenge: Introduction to Git Challenge

In this lab challenge, you will be provided with a web browser-based integrated development environment (IDE) and the URL of a locally-provisioned Git host. You must fulfill several tasks in what emulates a real-world scenario to complete the challenge. This is a real environment, meaning you have the opportunity to prove your practical knowledge of Git rather than answer multiple-choice questions.

Hands-on Lab: Using Git for Version Control: Managing Workflows

In this lab, you’ll practice working with multiple remotes to show the distributed nature of Git. You’ll also use Git to undo a commit.

Hands-on Lab: Using Git for Version Control: Top 10 Git Commands

Git is a version control system for managing and tracking changes in code. In this lab, you’ll work a subjective list of top 10 Git commands. These commands will cover a wide range of use cases and with them, you’ll be equipped to efficiently manage workflows like an expert.


Business Transformation

Learning Path: Applying AGILE Techniques to Build a DevOps Practice

This practical learning path provides an ideal baseline for product teams wanting to implement AGILE principles and practices in DevOps workflow. We start out explaining the working concepts of AGILE. We then put into practice how AGILE techniques can be applied to workloads deployed on RedHat and OpenShift.

Learning Path: AGILE Scrum Master Blended – The Scrum Master as a Change Agent

The Scrum Master Learning Path aims to introduce learners to the Scrum project management methodology. The modules take the learner through all of the key areas of Scrum, as well as some of the other Agile concepts that underpin Scrum to be able to understand and implement scrum as a working methodology within their organization.

Learning Path; AGILE Scrum Master Blended – Managing Conflict in Agile Teams

When a team sees conflict as a natural part of working in an agile way, they’re in a good place to deliver value to stakeholders and meet new challenges. That’s the essence of a strong conflict management process and why you need to effectively manage conflict to reach positive outcomes for your teams. This course will help you achieve that.

Learning Path: Facilitating Effective AGILE Workshops

As a Scrum master, you always need to aim to get the most out of any workshop you are facilitating. This course will give you the knowledge you need to avoid harmful practices and arm you with tips and tricks to inspire and empower your development team.


Kubernetes

Lab Challenge: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Challenge

In this lab challenge, your Kubernetes skills are put to the test. You need to complete several tasks using a real Kubernetes cluster to complete the challenge. The lab challenge simulates the experience of the real Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam. Note that the challenge covers topics that are specific to only the CKA certification exam.

Lab Challenge: Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Challenge

In this lab challenge, you will need to complete several tasks using a real Kubernetes cluster. The lab challenge simulates the experience of the real Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam.


Security 

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

The Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) is one of the most globally recognized certifications in the information security profession. This learning path is suitable for anyone wanting to become certified as a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).

The following courses have been added to this learning path:

  • CISSP: Domain 5
  • CISSP: Domain 6
  • CISSP: Domain 7

Just a few reminders…

Platform Speed Improvements

We’ve improved loading times for the most popular pages on our platform. This all started because we felt that we could improve load times on some pages. It may not be flashy, but it’s at the core of the user experience and was something we really wanted to improve.

As always, we set some unbelievably high expectations. Every time we were asked, “How much do you want to improve the loading time…” our answer was, “by one hundred percent.” We were really impressed that our dev team was happy to accept the challenge.

Here some amazing results:

  1. Mobile App: Both the Android and iOS apps are now blazingly fast (and by that we mean 0 milliseconds of loading time) for the most common use cases, i.e. Training Plan loading, Continue Studying content loading, Search, and our library.
  2. Learning Paths: Pages load in less than 500 ms.
  3. Labs: If you go back to the last lab you visited, the subsequent loads take 0 ms. Advancing to the next step in a lab is now immediate.
  4. Courses: Just like with our labs, the loading of the next lecture is now immediate.

Management Dashboard Improvements

Customer Success Manager contact box

We have a fantastic Customer Success team involved in helping our customers thrive within our enterprise products. Now you can reach our Customer Success team directly from our platform to help you address any challenges in your company’s training program.

Reaching the Customer Success Manager (CSM) of your account is as simple as clicking on the dedicated box and sending a message.

Customer Success Box

Enterprise Report sent via email

Cloud Academy reports are an easy way for exporting activities and performance of your company for in-depth analysis. Team managers now can have these reports be delivered directly to your email inbox.

The feature is automated: every time you request the generation of a new report, it is sent automatically to you as soon as it’s ready.

Enterprise Report sent via email

Teams Navigation

When you’re in the Cloud Academy management dashboard, you get everything you need for insight into your teams. The dashboard enables you to organize your company members in dedicated groups and follow them individually along their training journey.

With our new improvement, we streamlined the UI to let you navigate faster between the Team and Members page. Here’s how to get a glimpse of the functionality:

1 – From the Members page, you can jump directly to a user’s team detail just clicking on the “Team” tag.

Teams Navigation

2 – On the Teams page, you get an immediate overview of what users are team managers. This has an added bonus of easily highlighting which teams haven’t yet been assigned a manager.

New “Move to Team” action

Within dynamic organizations, it’s common to create temporary teams or rearrange them periodically. To support this, we added another action called “Move to Team”.

This new action complements the current “Add to Team” action. While the “add” action helps you to allocate a single member to multiple teams, the new “move” action forces a user to be part of only one team.

You can find the new action on both the Teams and Members area, and you can trigger it on multiple users at once.

“Move to Team” Action

New Search Engine

Our new search engine allows you to easily find the exact piece of content you need — as quickly as possible. We wanted to give you a different way to find search results with smaller, “bite-sized” pieces of content. Not only can you find what you’re looking for faster, but you can now quickly filter down to find individual quiz or exam questions and even blog posts and whitepapers! With this new search engine, you’ll now be able to easily find all of our content. 

Check out all of the content types that we added to our search results. 

Cloud Academy Search Engine

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:

Cloud Academy