Well, welcome to 2020 cloud Guru's.
We're just a few weeks into the new year and a new decade and we are kicking
things off with some notable new courses,
new episodes of your favorite series and helpful new projects for Azure and GCP.
I'm Sam Kroonenburg,
CEO and cofounder of A Cloud Guru and I'm really excited to show you what we've
been busy working on here.
Well first up is our new AWS certified Alexa skill builder specialty course.
Alexa's, kind of a big deal. Now over 10,000 Alexa skills,
growing attention and investment from companies of all stripes and now its very
own AWS specialty certification.
Our new course prepares you for the exam using real world case studies to teach
you how to design and build engaging voice experiences.
In this course join AWS machine learning hero,
Alexa champion and ACG instructor,
Kesha Williams and her co-instructor Alexa and learn how to use voice first
design patterns,
navigate the steps to architect an Alexa skill in AWS and tap into advanced
features like visual elements, sound effects and video.
No experience building Alexa skills is required.
If you've been looking to get into skill building and voice applications,
then this is definitely the course for you and you can get certified. Well,
you can't venture far out into the world of AWS without running into the shared
responsibility model. Now,
it's one thing to know that AWS is responsible for security of the cloud and
you're responsible for security in the cloud,
but it's another to put it into practice.
In our new AWS best practices security course,
Lee Atchison explores the theory behind various security topics to applying best
practices to keep your applications secure and well protected.
By the end of this course,
you'll understand how AWS provides a more secure environment than on-prem data
centers.
What security leavers you can use to protect your applications and how best to
employ them. What is data analytics? What is data visualization?
What's the difference between the two? And why is Jupyter spelled with a Y?
Romeo Rodanyi answers all of these questions and more in our new Introduction to
Jupyter Notebooks course. In this course,
you'll get up to speed on data analytics and visualization,
setting up and using Jupyter Notebooks,
taking a real data set beyond charts and graphs to create interactive elements
and predictions,
leveraging machine learning to get even more from your data and putting it all
in the cloud with AWS, Google and Azure hosted notebooks services.
This course is designed for beginners.
You do not need to know anything about data science or ML.
All you need is an interest in getting started. It's really cool,
worth checking out. Late last year we released our AZ500 course in preview.
Well now it is out of preview and live as a full course.
This course led by Paul Schwarzenberger will teach you how to design and
implement security technologies and services in Azure and is a really great way
to prepare for your AZ500 exam and earn your Azure Security Engineer Associate
certification. Now moving on from courses,
we have two new ACG projects that are designed to help you build your cloud
skills. First up is an Azure project called the Smile Detector.
You don't need a PhD in data science to tap into AI. Nowadays,
developers can harness the power of AI in their own solutions.
Henk Boelman shows us how by building a smile detector using the face API from
Microsoft Azure cognitive services.
Henk walks us through what the API is capable of and shows us how to build a
program in Python that takes full advantage of the face API.
Check it out it might just make you smile.
Next up in projects we have build high availability databases in the cloud using
Google Cloud SQL when your database needs to be online 24/7 high availability is
not just a nice to have.
Databases going down leads to users freaking out, phone's blowing up.
Support tickets flooding in and database admins kissing their Good night,
good night. In this project Alessandro Falanque
simulates what to do when your e-commerce database goes down and how to prevent
the situation from ever happening again.
It's a great way to get hands on with Google Cloud SQL and learn how to
configure it for high availability.
We've also got a slew of new original series episodes for your enjoyment.
Relive the best of reinvent 2019 with our series of videos from the event.
Join our expert instructors as they recap,
review and react to the announcements that excited them the most.
We have a couple of new episodes of ACG Release Review out now.
Join Travis Ralph as he breaks down Amazon Elastic Container Service,
what it is, how it works,
and how you can quickly scale docker images through container deployments.
Travis also tackles Amazon LEX,
a service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text.
Now in both episodes,
Travis provides an in depth demo and weighs in with his pros,
cons and verdict about whether you should invest, evaluate,
or maybe revisit using these services.
And have you watched our DeepRacer series yet it's called DeepRacer The Fast and
The Curious. In this final episode,
Nick and Scott Head to the DeepRacer finals at re:
invent 2019 where Scott is ready to lay claim to the inaugural DeepRacer cup.
But is the cup ready for him?
We've also got two new Azure Fireside Chats where Lars sits down with Azure
experts as well as new installments of GCP This Month and Kubernetes this Month.
In addition to all of these new courses, projects and episodes,
we have a bit of news to share since our last update.
In December A Cloud Guru acquired Linux Academy. By joining forces,
we're going to be able to bring you more than we ever have before.
This isn't about cost cutting or taking things away.
It's about teaching the world to cloud with the largest,
most effective cloud training library in the world.
We have only just started the process of integrating our two companies together,
but we're finding out more and more that we are better together.
Very excited about this. What does it mean for you? For the immediate future,
nothing at all.
Both companies will continue to operate as normal while we work to bring the
offerings and the teams together.
We are planning to combine our two platforms and have very ambitious internal
deadlines because we know that such a platform is going to be a great win for
all our customers.
There's still a lot to work out so we aren't publicizing timeframes just yet,
but rest assured we are moving fast. Okay,
that's all for this month.
Stay tuned as we continue to bring you great things and as always,
keep being awesome cloud gurus.