Greetings! Welcome to Cloud Academy's course on building applications using Azure Service Fabric. I'm delighted to have you join me on what is bound to be an educational and delightful adventure into the world of application development. 

First, I'll let you know a bit about myself before I get into the course outline. My name is Jonathan, I am one of the course developers with Cloud Academy. I work professionally as a technical consultant, specializing in DevOps, data engineering, and security. Long ago, in another life, I was a public school teacher. So I love educating people and I'm thrilled to be doing it again, only now with technology. 

So, this course is designed to be very practical. It is meant for technology professionals, developers, data architects, CTOs, et cetera with the goal of helping them get a solid understanding of how Azure Service Fabric can solve their problems. 

So what exactly are the prerequisites for a course like this? Well, it's actually less demanding than you might assume. You don't need to be an expert programmer or Azure Web Services veteran. The course will teach you enough coding, enough about Azure to build the app while explaining kind of the relevant services. It will be helpful if you have a basic understanding of things like virtual machines and containers, you should also have some familiarity with web service providers, like AWS and Azure, at least a high level, enough to understand the basic value they provide with things like storage and compute. 

So, what then are the exact learning objectives then for this course? Well, I've narrowed it down to four big ones that will guide each lesson. The first objective is to ensure that the student gains a thorough understanding of Azure Service Fabric itself. The student should become an expert, basically, at using it. Objective two is to ensure students understand the difference between stateless and stateful applications. This is an important theoretic component. On top of that, objective three is to ensure students understand the actor model for application design and finally, objective four is to ensure students have a strong understanding of collections in the context of service fabric. All of these theoretical components will be a part of our sort of practical section three demo section. So the theoretical objectives support objective one, actually learning to use service fabric. 

So lastly, I want to encourage everyone to leave feedback. Email support@cloudacademy.com if you have any questions or comments or suggestions or concerns. We always appreciate people taking the time. Now, without further ado, let's get started.