As of 2020, Microsoft Azure has a 60% adoption rate with a whopping 95% of the Fortune 500 companies using Azure technologies. This makes Azure one of the most popular cloud services platforms used by enterprises, making it a crucial tool for cloud computing professionals — especially cloud developers — to add to their skillset.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently one of the most used cloud services providers in the market, with Amazon reporting $10.8 million in sales in Q2 2020 alone. With 29% growth in a single quarter, the adoption of AWS shows no signs of slowing down.
This growth means the demand for roles like AWS developers continues to increase.
The role of an AWS Developer offers a unique, engaging, challenging, and rewarding experience for those looking to break into these positions.
In June, Udacity announced our partnership with Microsoft to create brand new training programs to help professionals learn highly coveted skills. Udacity is excited to introduce the newest product of that collaboration with Microsoft: the DevOps Engineer for Microsoft Azure Nanodegree program. This program focuses on teaching principles for deploying and managing cloud infrastructure with Microsoft Azure.
With 95% of Fortune 500 companies using Azure and Azure-related jobs expected to grow by over 34% in the next 10 years, now is a great time to hone your DevOps skills with Microsoft’s platform. What’s more, Cloud DevOps Engineers with skills in Azure earn an average salary of over $99,000 a year according to Glassdoor. Cloud DevOps engineers in San Francisco make an average of $130,000 a year, with top earners bringing in over $166,000.
By completing the DevOps Engineer for Microsoft Azure Nanodegree program, you’ll be prepared for Microsoft’s AZ-400 DevOps Engineer Expert certification exam, thereby demonstrating to employers that you have the skills they need.
What is Cloud DevOps?
Cloud DevOps Engineers are the key link between development and deployment, leveraging agile methodologies to ensure efficient and reliable release cycles. This means working on deployment, integrations, services, and testing. DevOps Engineers are an essential part of getting code written by developers verified and released to customers. Often, DevOps Engineers are responsible for the reliability, scalability, and security of a company’s systems. While the work is not simple, it is extremely rewarding for those who enjoy tinkering and problem-solving.
Program Details
The DevOps Engineer for Microsoft Azure Nanodegree program will teach students to deploy cloud infrastructure, use Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) for cloud infrastructure management, and create test environments to run automated testing. All of this learning will be done in a Microsoft Azure environment, using Azure pipelines and Azure App services.
To get the most out of this course, it’s important for students to have at least one year of experience working with Python. Enrollees must have a solid understanding of foundational coding concepts, including loops, conditionals, data types, functions, classes, and objects, and have a fundamental knowledge of scripting and Linux shell commands.
Additionally, students should understand cloud computing, including core cloud components (like databases, virtual machines, etc). If you need a primer on cloud computing, Udacity’s free Intro to Cloud Computing course is a great place to start.
In as little as three months, students who enroll in the DevOps Engineer for Microsoft Azure Nanodegree program will thoroughly understand DevOps fundamentals, Azure Infrastructure, cloud computing security, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Agile project management methodologies in relation to CI/CD, and automated testing focused on performance, UI, function, and system integration.
Specific projects include:
Project 1: Deploy a Web Application
Students will use Terraform to deploy IaC and Packer to create reusable virtual machine images for deploying custom web applications. This project will help students become familiar with resource creation and management in Microsoft Azure using the portal and command-line interface (CLI), as well as solidify security best-practices in the Azure Security Center.
Project 2: Build a Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Deploy a Flask Machine Learning app by building a Continuous Delivery pipeline with Azure Pipelines and using Azure App Services to deploy Platform as a Service (PaaS). After this project, students will have experience leveraging Agile methodologies and tools, including Trello, to integrate Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) with Continuous Delivery of application to Azure.
Project 3: Run Automated Tests
Learn to create disposable environments to run automated tests using Terraform and apply IaC concepts to make different environment tiers for more comprehensive testing. This project covers performance, function UI, and integration testing. Students will also monitor app behavior and perform root cause analysis by observing log files.
Learning from Top Cloud DevOps Engineers
To develop this program’s world-class curriculum, we collaborated with professionals from top-rated tech companies, like Microsoft. Each of these collaborators contributed guidance and feedback to focus the program on the most in-demand skills. Each of the instructors has extensive technical experience with Cloud DevOps and Microsoft Azure, as well as teaching experience.
Instructors
Noah Gift, Founder of Pragmatic AI Labs, Consultant on AI, Cloud, Data Science
Nathan Anderson, DevOps Engineer at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company
Erick Galinkin, Principal AI Researcher at Rapid7 and Montreal AI Ethics Institute
Enroll Today
If you’re an engineer who wants to learn more about deploying applications securely and efficiently, this is a great course for you to take to advance your career. This course is also great for people with programming backgrounds who are interested in the Cloud Computing field or gaining familiarity with Microsoft Azure.
With Udacity’s combination of hands-on project-centric learning, technical mentorship, and industry-aligned career services, there’s no better way to meet the demand than by registering today for the DevOps Engineer for Microsoft Azure Nanodegree program. Enroll now!
Cloud computing used to be considered a buzzword a few years ago, but as of this year, over 88% of organizations that responded to the O’Reilly Cloud Adoption survey reported using some kind of cloud computing services — from databases, analytics, servers, and even software that is delivered via the Internet. By 2025, 80% of businesses are projected to fully move to the cloud.
Have you ever stayed at a hotel chain like Hyatt or Hilton, or at an Airbnb? Have you flown on a United plane or taken a ride in a Lyft? Have you watched a show on Netflix or played a game made by Activision? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions you’ve used Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS is a cloud platform created by Amazon that has over 175 services that function from data centers all over the world. Companies of all industries and sizes use AWS for their products — from tiny startups to enterprise behemoths.
AWS offers innovative tools with low costs and robust security that enable engineers to build out impressive applications without worrying about complicated IT details.
It seems that AWS is the underpinning of a lot of the technology we use today — websites, monitoring, data management, and more. What’s more, the prevalence of AWS cloud support engineers are more in-demand.
For the uninitiated, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud is Amazon’s cloud platform that offers over 175 applications, ranging from infrastructure and storage to blockchain and IoT. Many developers use AWS Cloud applications when building out their products.
For more information about AWS, check out our recent post, What is AWS?
With so many AWS applications and over 1 million customers, it takes a fleet of talented AWS Cloud Support Engineers to keep things moving. So what does being an AWS cloud support engineer entail?
This program is extremely relevant for anyone working in tech right now given that current projections state the public cloud service market will reach over $600 billion by 2023, with Amazon owning over 30% of the current market.
Getting a job title with buzzwords like “AWS” and “cloud” seems like it might be pretty profitable and cloud architects are in high demand. This is an exciting role perfect for anyone who wants to be at the forefront of an organization’s public cloud strategy.
