New Content: AZ-500 and AZ-400 Updates, 3 Google Professional Exam Preps, Practical ML Learning Path, C# Programming, and More

This month, our Content Team released tons of new content and labs in real cloud environments. Not only that, but we introduced our very first highly interactive “Office Hours” webinar. This webinar, Acing the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification, started with a quick overview of the certification, followed by a sample question breakdown session, and then the rest of the webinar was dedicated to answering all of the questions that came from all of you. Don’t worry if you missed our first Office Hours webinar, we’ll have another one coming up real soon — 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.


AWS

Hands-on Lab: Migrating MySQL to PostgreSQL With the AWS Database Migration Service

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) is used to transfer data and database applications between different database instances. When migrating data, the source and the target databases can use the same database engine, or they can be different engines. The primary use case for DMS is to enable and support one-time, large-scale migration activities. In this lab, you will use DMS to migrate data from a database instance running the MySQL engine to an instance running the Aurora PostgreSQL engine.


Azure

(UPDATE) Learning Path: AZ-500 Exam Preparation: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies

This learning path is designed to help you and your team prepare for the AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Technologies exam. Even if you aren’t planning to take the exam, these courses and hands-on labs will help you get started on your way to deploying and managing Microsoft Azure security technologies.

(UPDATE) Learning Path: AZ-400 Exam Prep: Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions

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.

Course: Introduction to Azure Kubernetets Service

This course explores AKS, Azure’s managed Kubernetes service, covering the fundamentals of the service and how it can be used. You’ll first learn about how, as a managed service, it takes care of managing and maintaining certain aspects of itself, before moving onto the core AKS concepts such as cluster design and provisioning, networking, storage management, scaling, and security. After a quick look at Azure Container Registry, the course then moves on to an end-to-end demonstration that shows how to provision a new AKS cluster and then deploy a sample cloud-native application into it.

Course: Building Containers with Azure DevOps

This course is designed to give you a solid understanding of containers and how they are used in Azure DevOps. It begins by looking at creating deployable images through Docker containers, microservices, and at the various container-related services available in Azure, including Azure Container Instances, the Azure Kubernetes Service, the Azure Container Registry, Azure Service Fabric, and Azure App Service. The course also looks at Dockerfile and Docker multi-stage builds before finishing with a hands-on demonstration that shows you how to create an Azure Container Registry.

Course: Implementing Dependency Management With Azure DevOps

This course explains how to implement dependency management with Azure DevOps. It explores the strategies, tools, and methods used for creating and managing dependencies. First, you will learn what dependency management is and which packages are available for Azure DevOps. A practical demonstration then shows how to build a package.

Course: Configuring Azure VM and Container Security 

This course focuses on implementing security controls, maintaining the security posture of an Azure environment, and protecting data, applications, and networks, showing you how to configure security for your containers and virtual machines. The content of this course is ideally suited to those looking to become certified Azure security engineers.

Course: Getting Started with Azure App Service

In this course, you will learn how you can quickly and easily set up a website and publish your app to the world with Azure App Service. Of course, web apps are a lot more complex and varied than just HTML pages, and we will see how App Service supports a range of programming languages, frameworks, and even operating systems. We will explore features that greatly simplify application deployment and management, as well as those that will increase your app’s functionality like authentication and accessing on-premises data.

Course: Microsoft Azure Security Solutions

This course begins by looking at Azure’s shared responsibility model before moving on to look at various security topics within Azure: storage security, database security, identity & access management, and networking security. By the end of this course, you should have a basic understanding of all of the key security options and features available in Microsoft Azure.

Course: Getting Started with Azure Virtual Machines

This course will give you a basic understanding of Azure virtual machines (VMs) and how you can use them in your Azure environments. It begins by introducing you to Azure VMs and what resources are necessary to deploy them, before moving on to pricing and the different virtual machine options available. Next, the course explores availability sets and availability zones and gives a demonstration that shows you how to create an availability set using the Azure portal.

Course: Introduction to Azure Functions

This introduction explains how Azure Functions are little bits of your application logic that live in the cloud. The course includes how to activate—or what we call trigger—your Azure Functions, how to pass data to and from them, and also how to tie different Azure Functions together using an extension of Azure Functions called Durable Functions.

Hands-on Lab: Using Azure Databricks to Import and Analyze Data

Azure Databricks is an analytics platform powered by Apache Spark. Spark is a unified analytics engine capable of working with virtually every major database, data caching service, and data warehouse provider. In addition to it working with most providers, companies use Spark because it uses in-memory computing among other optimizations to offer very fast analytics.

Hands-on Lab: Working with Scala in Azure Databricks

Scala is a high-level programming language that combines aspects of both functional and object-oriented programming to form a concise language that is especially useful in an environment like Databricks. Using Databricks’s built-in support for data analytics with Scala’s ability to efficiently interact with resources in a customizable way gives companies a high level of control over their data and analytics. In this lab, you’ll use Scala in an Azure Databricks cluster to interact with Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), including ingesting, transforming, and writing data to the store.


Google Cloud Platform

(UPDATE) Learning Path: Google Professional Cloud Developer Exam Preparation

This learning path is designed to help you prepare for the Google Professional Cloud Developer exam. Candidates who pass Google’s exam will earn the Google Professional Cloud Developer certification. 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 a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) developer.

(PREVIEW) Learning Path: Google Professional Cloud Network Engineer Exam Preparation

This learning path is designed to help you prepare for the Google Professional Cloud Network Engineer exam. Candidates who pass the exam will earn the Google Professional Cloud Network Engineer certification.

(PREVIEW) Learning Path: Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer Exam Preparation

This learning path is designed to help you prepare for the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer exam. Candidates who pass the exam will earn the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification.

Course: Integrating Google Cloud Platform Services

With so many services of varying levels of complexity, it can be overwhelming to develop cloud-based solutions. Throughout this course, we’ll cover some of the topics that will help you to integrate your applications with Google Cloud Platform’s compute services and REST API.

Hands-on Lab: Managing Encryption Keys With Google Cloud KMS

If you are a security engineer or if you are responsible for the security of the resources in the cloud, you know that encryption keys are essential for encrypting data at REST. For this purpose, Google launched Cloud KMS (Key Management Service). In this lab, you will first learn the basic concepts of Cloud KMS. Then you will create a Key Ring—a symmetric encryption key—and you will understand how to manually rotate and destroy an encryption key.

Hands-on Lab: Improve Cloud SQL Infrastructure Using High Availability

The high availability configuration allows data redundancy in multiple zones inside the region you choose while deploying your DB instance. In this lab, you will set up high availability for a Cloud SQL instance, and you will manually simulate a failover to check whether the traffic is automatically routed to the healthy standby instance.


Machine Learning

Learning Path: Practical Machine Learning

This learning path is an intense deep dive into the world of machine learning. In it, you’ll learn how to implement different machine learning models, validate their quality, and how to implement them practically.

Hands-on Lab: Getting Started with Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing is a form of computer learning that can understand human speech and text to drive insights. This lab is aimed at machine learning beginners who want to gain familiarity with Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts. After completing this lab, you will be able to classify text and gather insights. Additionally, you will gain familiarity with the Amazon Comprehend UI and basic Python concepts for interacting with NLP APIs.

Hands-on Lab: Machine Learning – Training Custom Models

This lab is aimed at machine learning beginners who want to understand how to train custom models. After completing this lab, you will understand how to create a machine learning model based on a categorized set of images. Additionally, you will gain familiarity with Amazon Rekognition and basic Python concepts for interacting with the sample model.

DevOps

Courses: AKS Networking

This course explores AKS, Azure’s managed Kubernetes service, covering the fundamentals of the service and how it can be used. You’ll first learn about how as a managed service it takes care of managing and maintaining certain aspects of itself, before moving onto the core AKS concepts such as cluster design and provisioning, networking, storage management, scaling, and security. After a quick look at Azure Container Registry, the course then moves on to an end-to-end demonstration that shows how to provision a new AKS cluster and then deploy a sample cloud-native application into it.

Course: Introduction to Knative

Knative is a general-purpose serverless orchestration framework that sits on top of Kubernetes, allowing you to create event-drivenautoscaled, and scale-to-zero applications. This course introduces you to Knative, taking you through the fundamentals, particularly the components Serving and Eventing. Several hands-on demonstrations are provided in which you’ll learn and observe how to install Knative, and how to build and deploy serverless, event-driven scale-to-zero workloads.


Programming

Hands-on Lab: The C# Programming Language

This lab concentrates on the C# programming language itself, to fully prepare delegates in readiness for using the .NET Framework/Core. No object-orientated knowledge is assumed—the course provides a suitable OO primer. From basic procedural syntax to sophisticated object-oriented programming techniques, delegates will learn how to write .NET applications with code that is robust and maintainable. The lab is presented as a mixture of instructional guides and hands-on exercises.

Hands-on Lab: Programming in C

C is one of the most widely-used languages for systems software and workstation application programming, largely due to its power and flexibility. This lab will provide you a highly effective, structured approach to learning the C language.

Hands-on Lab: C for Experienced Programmers

This lab for experienced programmers is outstanding because of its emphasis on writing style, pitfalls to avoid, and techniques to use that make the code clear, concise, and maintainable. It is designed to accelerate through the foundations of C programming as appropriate to the skill level.

Hands-on Lab: Understanding the Java Spring Framework

This lab starts with how to set up simple Spring projects and define beans. We then move on to web-based MVC projects. Persistence and transactions are covered, looking at both JDBC and Hibernate ORM implementations. Finally, we cover how to secure an application, including authentication methods and user roles.


Webinars

Office Hours: Acing the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification 

Do you want to take a really impactful step in your technical career? Watch this on-demand webinar with our experts, Stuart Scott, AWS Content & Security Lead, and Stephen Cole, AWS Certification Specialist, to learn about how to attain the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification, a.k.a. the most sought-after AWS cert around.


Platform updates

New enterprise plan invoicing

Our enterprise plan customers can now complete a purchase by invoice and have instant access to our platform. Our new accepted payment methods for the invoice include:

  • Wire transfers
  • ACH

How it works:

  • There is a new “invoice” payment method option on the checkout page for enterprise customers
  • If you select the new invoicing option, you can immediately start the enterprise onboarding without waiting for the invoice to be paid
  • All enterprise members of that account have full access to content but limited labs sessions

Note: Member limitations are removed once the invoice is paid or when phone verification is completed

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