What happens when the Titans of cloud learning join forces,
the new A Cloud Guru.
This launch is really the culmination of many months of hard work.
We've taken two incredibly successful companies in their own rights and combined
the best of both to form a brand new A Cloud Guru.
I have been really fortunate to work across so many teams at the company for the
one platform launch.
And it's just been really incredible to see all of these talented individuals
coming together to achieve this milestone for the company.
It's something that hundreds of people have been working towards for over eight
months.
The projects I've been working on throughout this process are our combined
roadmap.
So that's the content we have planned for the next year and bringing together
our teaching principles for our content. It has been a roller coaster.
Um, it's been a lot of fun. It's been a ton of work,
and I was glad to play a small part in where we are today.
We have over 400 people brought together all over the world.
So what does our company stand for now? Why is it amazing to work here?
I had the really fun job at being able to explain that is that after a lot of
interviews,
I'm so happy with where we're at now because the new career site really shows
the true diversity and the energy and the excitement around not
just how we got here and how amazing the story that is.
But now where we're going.
I'm really glad that it looks quite seamless. And we've,
I think created an amazing polished product,
but there is a lot of complexity in the different backends.
So we came from two organizations that had very similar views and
missions and goals, but completly different tech stacks,
different ways of working and different approaches to engineering.
So not only did we have to figure out which parts of which platform we were
going to bring into the new product,
but how we were going to work together as a team.
Pretty much the birth of a new company, right?
We've had 350 very talented individuals that have worked so hard
to get us to this point. And I'm, I'm excited. I am nervous,
but I am excited.
When I think about what it meant for our customers specifically. I think,
you know, anytime you're bringing two businesses together,
two products together,
the only way that works really well is if you keep the customers front and
center and you keep asking, are we doing what's right for the customer?
What is the best?
Not what is someone else doing? But you know,
how do we make the best product?
How do we make learning be in the hands of our students be
all that it can be.
I was focused on the Hands-on Labs and playgrounds.
We integrated the Hands-on Labs within the courses,
so hopefully the experience of interacting with the Hands-on Labs will be super
seamless.
You will just go from watching a course video and transition into a Hands-on Lab
and you'll just start taking it.
And the experience should feel really fluid and consistent throughout that
journey.
I think the engineers and product designers have done a fantastic job at making
the experience seem seamless, uh,
while there's a lot of little cogs and engines running.
So to allow each of these subsystems to work.
Imagine having 15 different plugs into a socket and that socket is your users
and your authentication, right. Uh, and then having to, um,
take that one socket and move it somewhere else.
And you have to take out 15 different plugs.
We've really been trying really hard to get our platforms integrated,
and there's been a huge piece of work.
And now we're looking at how we can make sure that we're bringing all the
students' data and history across to provide that really good experience for
them. So launching our integrated platform was the first stage.
We still have a way to go.
And we're really looking forward to bringing all of our students onto the A
Cloud Guru platform.
We've moved over, you know, thousands of thousands of gigabytes of video that,
that had to be transferred from one video ingestion system to
another.
A lot of prep work.
I was put into making sure that the right content was getting launched
out at the right time.
Making sure that it's accessible to our students.
There's over 1500 labs now available on our one platform.
We added in 230 courses to the one platform,
as well as 27 additional courses to our Linux Academy platform.
I needed to start learning stuff about Docker because traditionally I've been
purely a serverless developer,
and I've been able to now go into the global search,
and actually even before this has been released to production.
Go in and type how to use ECR and then take one of the Hands-on Labs.
And that Hands-on Lab has come over from an LA course that was not
previously available.
So I definitely think that that is a perk of working at A Cloud Guru is that you
get to have early access to some of the upcoming content.
So we surveyed thousands of our students to understand what they liked most
about the content on Linux Academy and on A Cloud Guru.
And then we turned that into a new approach that brings the best of both worlds
together into something we think our students are really going to love.
We had many committees, uh, video production, audio production,
exam questions, labs,
and we took all of those guidelines and came up with a
one content team bootcamp where a group of Training
Architects met for a week virtually of course.
And we went over everything that you could learn about the way we are going to
produce content in the future.
The most, um, most fun I had, uh, during the merge was,
um, working out how all of, uh, the content people were the,
new folks that have joined us and the new folks that we have joined could, uh,
come together to produce content in a new and third way that would appeal to
both sets of students.
What we have is this group of very talented individuals who have such passion
and experience both in technology and also in training.
Now we have this capability to really provide this really fantastic deep
technical hands-on content to our students. So You Want To Be A,
and then a role.
This is kind of like my project of putting the two platforms together and
getting a product out. So we've got, um,
Training Architects from both legacy ACG and legacy LA. We've got,
um,
collaboration of the two teams of the new community team with the new content
team.
One thing that I've been working on recently,
and that I am super excited about is my ACG project called Embrace The Chaos.
And it's all about getting started with chaos engineering.
Everything changed instead of me creating one big certification
course leadership had decided to switch to a certification path
consisting of five separate courses.
Plus I was now collaborating with two other Training Architects.
We did get some feedback about creating more learning paths, now there's,
you know additional content floating in and ensuring that the platform will be
that like very seamless experience. Um,
and so to that I'd say we're really listening to it and that kind of really gets
escalated and we'll implement them as we move forward to ensure that we're
really making that best possible product moving forward.
Out of rainstorms comes a rainbow. And I think in many ways,
that was the case for, um, ACG and Linux Academy coming together.
I've been through four acquisitions in one form or fashion.
And this has been by far the smoothest acquisition.
Have we had bumps in the road and hiccup? Sure. Oh, that just happens,
but it's been fantastic.
It's still about helping the engineer out that is trying to
get into tech,
but doesn't feel like they have the skills or the engineer
that feels like they're too old to compete with the kids coming out of
college, like no. Cloud is leveling the playing field.
So the new ACG is just going to bring more folks to the field.
I'm proud of that.
This is an incredible time to get into tech, to get a new job to upskill.
Technical education is changing very rapidly just as the
industry is changing day by day. The future is really, really wide open.
And I see that as being the opportunity to just be able to do it all and do it
all very well.
The pace of change, uh, in cloud and in the market, um,
you know, it's going to move quickly.
I think there'll still be some major players.
What the power of the technology enables, who knows. Um,
so I just hope that we're there for the ride and that we continue to be one of
the biggest players in this world.
And we're able to keep offering something really amazing to those students and
those customers.
When you have education available, regardless of your economic position,
you're really providing power to those who would otherwise be powerless.
And I see in five years, ACG as a key, not only contributor,
but a driver to providing power to those that want it through
education and knowledge. Whether you are an individual,
whether you're a business, we know that getting to the cloud,
isn't easy and there are different paths you can take.
There's a lot of false starts that people can have. You know,
this is what we do.
This is what we live and breathe and we're here to be your guide,
to be your coach and to help you get there in the most efficient and
engaging way, possible. Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.
Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus. Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.
Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus. Keeping awesome Cloud Gurus,
and we'll see you next time.