In May, Cloud Academy hit the road running to attend several AWS Global Summits — free events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about Amazon Web Services (AWS). We started the month in Atlanta and London, and then we finished strong with our final AWS Summit in Chicago.
Events like these are meaningful ways for us to connect with our customers and prospective customers. Let’s face it: promising and delivering organizational and technical change is difficult— especially at large enterprise organizations. But while some of us were at events comparing notes with people like you, others were launching several brand new training assets and platform features to make that difficult work a bit easier. Let’s take a closer look.
New Platform Features
Cloud Academy’s Product Development team worked around-the-cloud to implement multiple new features on our platform, helping you deliver truly effective training. Based on your feedback, we are continually implementing new features to ensure targeted, measurable training programs that your teams will love.
Here are few of the platform highlights (click through for more detail):
Redesigned Exam and Assignments UI: Our redesigned user interface (UI) makes it even easier to create custom Exams and allows you to assign multiple assessments to your teams. Read more…
Training Plan Objectives: Cloud Academy’s new Training Plan objectives allow you to connect your training goals to your organization’s initiatives, making it easy to establish and evangelize the measurable steps needed to achieve overall training goals. Read more…
Over 180 New Training Assets
In May alone, we made 188 additions and hundreds more updates to our Training Library. Here are the most popular releases to our training platform from last month:
Roundup of the Latest in AWS Machine Learning: This is a short refresher of the seven AWS machine learning services announced at Re:invent 2018. Learn about Amazon SageMaker, Forecast, Comprehend Medical, Textract, Personalize, SageMaker RL, and AWS DeepRacer.
Introduction to Python: If you have some experience with applications and want to get started as a Python programmer, this Learning Path is an ideal starting point for you.
AZ-900 Exam Preparation: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals: This Learning Path is designed to help you and your team prepare for the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam.
Notable New Courses and Learning Paths
- Understanding Azure Pricing and Support
- AZ-103 Exam Preparation: Microsoft Azure Administrator
- AZ-203 Exam Preparation: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure
Feeling Up for a Challenge?
We now have four Lab Challenges that, for a limited time, you can take regardless of whether you have a paid Cloud Academy account or not. Hands-on Lab Challenges test your skills on AWS, Kubernetes, Azure, and more. This month we released beginner, intermediate and advanced levels that will take your skills to the next level. Like a high-intensity escape room, you will have one hour to demonstrate your problem-solving skills in a production-like environment. View all Lab Challenges
Brand New Hands-on Labs
It’s one thing to claim expertise, but it’s quite another thing to prove it. If you aren’t quite ready for a Hands-on Lab Challenge, try one of our new guided Hands-on Labs. They’ll push you to the next level, providing guidance along the way and will help you build the familiarity and problem-solving skills you’ll need. You can start any of our new Labs, including:
- Lab Respond to Events with Google Cloud Functions
- Create Containerized Solutions with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Programming with Python DateTimes
- Working with JShell
- And more…
Current customers and partners can start using the new features immediately from the Cloud Academy platform.
If you are not yet a Cloud Academy customer, see what you can customize for your team by browsing our Training Library. We offer independent, expert-led Learning Paths that deliver the theory, technical knowledge, and hands-on practice to get certified and operate across the cloud ecosystem.
To learn more about deploying Cloud Academy at your organization, request a demo.

