Two new Pluralsight Courses: Heroku & Cloud Computing Fundamentals

Over the past couple of months I have been hard at work on some more Pluralsight courses. I am excited to announce that today I released 2 new courses on Pluralsight! These are both cloud related courses. One course is more DevOps focused and the other is focused more on cloud security. One of the courses is intermediate while the other is for those beginning with cloud. It’s pretty cool to have two courses listed on Pluralsight’s new releases!

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Here are the courses:

Heroku: The Big Picture

This course will teach you the basics of Heroku from; architecture components, developer and operational tooling, along with limitations and benefits of using the platform.

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Heroku: The Big Picture 
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Heroku is a cloud PaaS service that enables companies to speed up the application lifecycle; building, delivering, monitoring, and scaling applications without the headaches of standing up infrastructure to support the application. 

Some of the major topics covered in this Cloud Computing course are:

  • Learn about the components of the Heroku platform and how it works including the architecture, idea to running app, the runtime, Dynos and the various Heroku services.
  • Gain an understanding about the benefits and limitations of the Heroku platform such as pricing, language support, and ecosystem.
  • Insight into the developer and operational experience on Heroku.
  • And you will also see demos on the Heroku Dashboard, Using the Heroku Estimators, and deployment of an application to the Heroku platform.

By the end of this course, you will gain a better understanding of the Heroku platform all up including how to build and operate an application on it.

Check out the course here: https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/heroku-big-picture

Cloud Computing Fundamentals: Governance, Risk, Compliance, and Security

This course will teach you the fundamental knowledge needed to understand the essentials of cloud Governance, Risk, Compliance, and Security.

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Some of the major topics covered in this Cloud Computing course are:

  • Identifying the importance and impacts of compliance in the cloud
  • Understanding cloud policies or procedures
  • Recognizing risk management concepts related to cloud services
  • Security concerns, measures, or concepts of cloud operations

This Cloud Computing course will help you prepare for the CompTIA Cloud Essentials+ exam. This course is also useful if you don’t plan to take the CompTIA exam and just need to ramp up on cloud security.

Take this course if you want to learn cloud essentials, what it takes to successfully adopt cloud, the impact of cloud on IT service management, how security, and risks apply to cloud as well as consequences. This course is for someone with some exposure to cloud technologies and a general background in Information Technology at the minimum of a business analyst level.

Check out the course here: https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/cloud-computing-fundamentals-governance-risk-compliance-security

I hope you find value in each of these courses. These two courses bring me to a total of 5 courses now published on the Pluralsight platform. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses! I will be releasing more courses soon!

Here is the link to my Pluralsight profile to follow mehttps://app.pluralsight.com/profile/author/steve-buchanan

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Microsoft Professional Program for DevOps Finished!

I am a firm believer that no matter how old you are, how far along you are in your career, and regardless of the industry you are in it is important to continue educating yourself. This helps you expand your skillset, stay relevant, and sets you up for new opportunities as they come along. My field of information technology has been changing at a rapid pace and so for a while, I wanted a good way to ramp up on DevOps as a whole. A while back I found out that Microsoft added a new track to their Professional Program for DevOps. When I checked it out I found it to be very thorough and it was not just focused on Microsoft’s DevOps tooling but included non-Microsoft as well. I jumped in without hesitation and started learning.

I finally completed the program last week. Here is my certificate https://academy.microsoft.com/en-us/certificates/67284e84-8afe-4f13-b477-d7620949fb18. I am planning to dive into the program they have for cloud next. If you have not heard of Microsoft’s Professional Program DevOps before here more information about it:

“DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to end users. This program helps the student learn about continuous integration and deployment, infrastructure as code, testing, databases, containers, and application monitoring: skills necessary for a DevOps culture in today’s workplace. This program focuses on Microsoft DevOps technologies as well as some OSS (Open Source Software) DevOps tools. Some of the Microsoft DevOps technologies covered in this course consist of Azure, Azure Resource Manager, IaaS, PaaS, IIS, Azure App Service, DevTest labs, Desired State Configuration (DSC), Azure Automation, OMS, Application Insights, SQL, Nuget, TFS, VSTS, and Visual Studio. Some of the OSS DevOps tools covered in this course consist of Jenkins, Git, Github, New Relic, Nagios, Chef, Docker, DC/OS, swarm, and Kubernetes.”

Here is a link to it:  https://academy.microsoft.com/en-us/tracks/devops

This program consists of 8 required courses. Each course runs for three months and starts at the beginning of a quarter. In the end, there is a capstone that has to be completed. This capstone course is the 8th one. You have four weeks to complete the capstone. The capstone is a bunch of hands-on stuff you have to do. Courses average 16-32 hours per course to complete and are taken via the edX.org platform https://www.edx.org/microsoft-professional-program-devops.

Here is a list of all of the DevOps program courses:

      • Introduction to Dev Ops Practices
      • Infrastructure as Code
      • Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
      • Configuration Management for Containerized Delivery
      • DevOps Testing
      • DevOps for Databases
      • Application Monitoring and Feedback Loops
      • Microsoft Professional DevOps Capstone Project
      • The DevOps Capstone Project contains:
        • Automation
          • Use ARM templates to deploy and configure Infrastructure in Azure
        • Continuous Integration
          • Implement Continuous Integration solution using Visual Studio Team services (VSTS)
        • Continuous deployment
          • Implement Continuous Deployment solution using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)
        • Testing
          • Implement Unit tests
          • Implement Testing in Production
        • Application Monitoring
          • Implement application monitoring solution using Application Insights

As you can see from that list this program is not just all about VSTS. There is a lot of Azure baked in as well as other non-Microsoft DevOps tooling. I highly recommend this course for anyone jumping into DevOps, or CloudOps and especially for folks with an IT pro background. If CloudOps is foreign to you here are a couple of blogs related to this topic: Sys Admin to Cloud Admin…ITSM to CloudOps…On-Prem to Azure Stack/Azure and Native Cloud Management in Azure.

My personal opinion is that Microsoft should move away from the certifications as they are and to this format. This format combines training and testing. When Microsoft first started the Professional Program for they only had a track for data scientists. They have added more and more tracks over time. Today there are tracks also for Big Data, Web Development, Software Development, AI, IT Support, and Cloud Administration.

Here is a link for all the tracks so you can check them out: https://academy.microsoft.com/en-us/professional-program/tracks. These programs are a great way to expand your learning. Check them out!

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