July has been a very exciting month for us at Cloud Academy. On July 10, we officially joined forces with QA, the UK’s largest B2B skills provider (read the announcement). Over the coming weeks, you will see additions from QA’s massive catalog of 500+ certification courses and 1500+ instructor-led courses. Plus, you’ll see some innovative, blended training delivery mechanisms that combine face-to-face and our digital training platform — truly the best of both worlds.
We’re excited for our next phase of growth and to be a part of the QA family. But we know if you’re reading this blog, then you’re here for one thing one, and one thing only: Technical Blog Updates! Our monthly blog digest allows you to get the main highlights to stay informed and inspired on everything cloud.
As always, our goal is to provide you with actionable insights to accelerate your career in tangible ways. We are consistently striving to keep our blog and technical content relevant and informative. If you want to inspire us with some new ideas, feel free to drop a comment with your suggestions. You can view all of our articles on the Cloud Academy Blog, and here are some highlights of our favorites:
AWS
AWS Machine Learning Services
The speed at which machine learning (ML) is evolving within the cloud industry is exponentially growing, and public cloud providers such as AWS are releasing more and more services and feature updates to run in parallel with the trend and demand of this technology within organizations today. In this article, we give an overview of the seven AWS machine learning services.
Working with AWS Networking and Amazon VPC
Many services within AWS require you to create and configure a VPC to provision and distribute your resources. For example, by using the AWS global infrastructure and networking services you can architect high availability and resilience into your deployment using availability zones and regions. This article describes the AWS services and components that relate to VPC management, control, and operation.
AWS Fundamentals: Understanding Compute, Storage, Database, Networking & Security
If you’re just starting out on your journey toward mastering AWS cloud computing, then your first stop should be to understand AWS fundamentals. This will enable you to get a solid foundation to then expand your knowledge across the entire AWS service catalog. This article covers the components of Cloud Academy’s updated Learning Path: Fundamentals of AWS.
AWS Control Tower & VPC Traffic Monitoring
This year’s AWS re:Inforce keynote, presented by AWS Vice President and CIO, Stephen Schmidt, announced the general availability of AWS Control Tower and the new VPC Traffic Mirroring feature. This article expands upon the two announcements to help you gain valuable insights into how Amazon Web Services manages security at scale.
Cybersecurity
Top 10 Things Cybersecurity Professionals Need to Know
Understanding the challenges behind a cybersecurity role is fundamental to tackle the problems that may arise when dealing with a security threat first-hand. In this post, we take a look at what cybersecurity professionals should be able to do to prevent exposing their teams, projects, and wider organizations to security attacks.
Microsoft Azure
Understanding the Core Azure Architectural Components
Microsoft Azure relies on a few key architectural components to provide redundancy and high availability. Core Azure architectural components include Azure regions, Azure Availability Zones, resource groups, and the Azure Resource Manager. In this article, we’ll discuss the basics of each component and the functionality each provides.
DevOps
How to Become a DevOps Engineer
How does one become a member of these elite “special forces” known as DevOps Engineers? This blog covers the basics of what it takes to become a DevOps certified professional. Learn about the DevOps mindset and culture as well as concrete examples of how this culture is enabled through through use of specific tools and philosophies.
Scaling Velocity and Increasing Quality with DevOps
DevOps is a key methodology to leverage a competitive advantage, ultimately allowing practitioners to accelerate software delivery and raise quality levels. Some are skeptical of this claim or dismiss it outright — at their peril. The first step towards maximizing the benefits of a DevOps mindset is to understand that velocity and quality are related in an unexpected and beneficial way. Leverage this spirit of quick and well-planned actions by reading through this article.
Top 20 Open Source Tools for DevOps Success
Certain tools make achieving DevOps flow, feedback, and learning easier, and you don’t have to shell out big bucks to third party vendors to get them. In this article you’ll read how you can build a DevOps value stream with established open source tools — many of which are industry standard — to empower your DevOps trajectory.
Cloud Foundry Benefits
Cloud Foundry has made a big impact on the PaaS landscape, empowering enterprises to quickly build cloud-based applications with much less attention to infrastructure. In this article you’ll learn introductory-level usage concepts about Cloud Foundry, including deployment models on public and private cloud offerings. You’ll also get insight into the specific industry needs it meets, and basics around getting started with Cloud Foundry.
Microservices: Using Distributed Tracing for Monitoring & Troubleshooting
In this article, we discuss some key topics in instrumentation, distributed tracing, and modern distributed applications. To better understand distributed tracing in modern applications, sign up for our free webinar on July 25 at 10:00 a.m. PST. All registrants will receive the recording of the webinar via email.
Introduction to Streaming Data
Designing a streaming data pipeline presents many challenges, particularly around specific technology requirements. When designing a cloud-based solution, an architect is no longer faced with the question, “How do I get this job done with the technology we have?” but rather, “What is the right technology to support my use case?” In this article, we will walk through some initial scoping steps and walk through an example.
Kubernetes
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes was born from Google’s 15-year experience running containerized production workloads. It’s designed to grow from tens, thousands, or even millions of containers. Kubernetes is container-runtime agnostic, with widespread application — including rkt. This article covers Kubernetes basics including the ecosystem and security considerations.
