New on Cloud Academy: Intro to GitOps; AWS Courses; Java, Python, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, & Docker Playgrounds; and much more

New Lab Playgrounds

This month, our Content Team released six new “playground labs.” Our playground labs provide a safe and secure sandbox environment for you to explore your own ideas, follow along with Cloud Academy courses, or answer your own questions — all without having to install any software on your local machine. The playground provides you with ample time to play to your heart’s content. You should feel free to take risks and try unfamiliar tools and commands to learn more about working in a live environment — even if it means running into a dead end and needing to start the lab over. Have fun in the playground!

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

Course: Sharing Secrets Between Multiple Accounts Using AWS Secrets Manager

This course covers how you can share secrets, such as database API keys and database credentials, between different AWS accounts through the use of resource-based policies and AWS Secrets Manager. It explains the key aspects of the service before moving onto a real-world demonstration on the AWS platform to show you how it all works.

Course: Configuring Multiple AWS Accounts with Amazon Macie to Protect PII Data in S3

Within this course, you will get an overview of the relationship between Amazon Macie Master and Member accounts and a demonstration on how to configure this relationship allowing you to centralize S3 data compliance findings. By the end of this course, you will understand the core principles of amalgamating multiple accounts to help you protect S3 data using automatic detection and classification of PII data.


Azure

Lab Challenge: Intro to SQL Challenge

In this lab challenge, you’ll be provided with a SQL environment and complete several SQL tasks in order to pass. This is a real environment, meaning you’ll have the chance to show practical experience rather than answer questions in a multiple-choice scenario.

Hands-on Lab: Using Text Analytics in the Azure Cognitive Services API

Azure AI is Microsoft’s solution for many of the most popular and widely-used AI and machine learning needs today. In this lab, you will practice making requests to the Text Analytics API within the Azure Cognitive Services API, using an Azure function app to make the API requests.


Google Cloud Platform

Course: Implementing a GCP Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

This course guides you through the key steps to configure a Google Cloud Platform virtual private cloud (VPC), which allows you to connect your GCP services with one another securely.

Hands-on Lab: Develop, Build, and Deploy a Container Application on Google Compute Engine

In this lab, you will create a Python application and you will create a Dockerfile that specifies how to build the Docker image. You will then containerize the application and create a Docker image that will be stored in the Container Registry. You will then deploy the Docker image on a Compute Engine instance that will run your container application.


DevOps

Learning Path: Introduction to GitOps

This Learning Path will get you started with GitOps and will bring you quickly up to speed with the basic features and processes involved in a GitOps workflow.

Courses: OpenShift 101 – Quick Start

This introductory level training course is designed to bring you quickly up to speed with the key features that OpenShift provides. You’ll then get to observe firsthand how to launch a new OpenShift Container Platform 4.2 cluster on AWS and then deploy a real-world, cloud-native application into it.

Hands-on Lab: OpenShift – Build and Deploy a Simple Web Application

In this lab scenario, you’ll first use S2I to create a basic builder container image. The builder container image will then be used to build a runtime container image containing a simple static web portal application frontend. You’ll then use the oc tool to launch and expose the containerized web portal application.

Lab Playground: Amazon Linux 2 Playground

Amazon Linux 2 is a popular, community-supported, free and open-source Linux operating system used by companies around the world. The playground is a safe and secure sandbox environment for you to explore. The extended duration of this playground provides you with ample time to play to your heart’s content.

Lab Playground: Ubuntu Playground

Ubuntu is a popular, community-supported, free and open-source Linux operating system used by developers and companies around the world. This playground is a safe and secure sandbox environment that allows you to take risks, try unfamiliar Linux tools and commands, and learn more about working with Linux, even if it means running into a dead end and needing to start the lab over.

Lab Playground: Docker Playground

Cloud Academy provides a wide variety of training content to help you boost your skills with Docker. This Docker playground supplements that content by providing you with a ready-to-use Docker installation. The playground provides full access to an instance with Docker, Docker-compose, and relevant command-line completions already installed and running.

Lab Playground: Docker Windows Containers Playground

This Docker playground supplements instructional content by providing you with a ready-to-use Docker Windows installation. The playground provides full access to an instance with Docker already installed and running. You have full access to the underlying host as well.


Programming

Lab Playground: Java Development Playground

This Java development playground supplements instructional content by providing you with a ready-to-use Java integrated development environment (IDE). In addition to Java, the host has common development tools such as jshell and git installed and ready for you to play with.

Lab Playground: Python Development Playground

Python is one of the most popular programming languages around. It is a common choice for general-purpose programming, scripting, data science, and more. Cloud Academy provides a wide variety of training content to help you boost your skills with Python. This Python development playground supplements that content by providing you with a ready-to-use Python integrated development environment (IDE).


Just a few reminders of our recent updates

Training Tips

At Cloud Academy, we’re constantly looking for new ways to help keep you — or your team — on track. In case you missed our first three Cloud Academy Training Tips, we’ll do a quick recap of the highlights:

  1. Install the app: It only takes a minute and it can save you from mindlessly scrolling when you’re waiting for an appointment or at the airport.
  2. Set a study time reminder: Create recurring calendar events to remind yourself to study. Just click “Add a Training Reminder” on your Cloud Academy dashboard.
  3. Set a goal: You’re 10x more likely to hit your goal if you actually set a date to complete it. Whether you want to get an AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud certification, or you want to master creating Pythonic code, set a date to hit that goal or schedule the exam — and stick to it.

Platform Speed Improvements

We’ve improved loading times for the most popular pages on our platform. 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:

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