Coursera and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have joined forces to provide a course that introduces the core services and infrastructure of AWS. Through demonstrations participants will learn how to use and configure AWS services to deploy and host a cloud-native application.

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Announcing the new partnership with AWS, the Coursera blog refers to the growing dominance of cloud computing, a refrain that crops up repeatedly, and notes the high level of demand for the requisite skills: 

At Beginner level AWS Fundamentals: Going Cloud-Native, is taught by Allen Goldberg, Senior Technical Program Manager at AWS and two AWS Senior Technical Trainers, Morgan Willis and Blaine Sundrud. It opened on November 15th and is nominally 5 weeks in length with a time commitment of 2-3 hours per week, but as all the material is already available this is fairly flexible. There is a quiz associated with each week's module, but you'll have to purchase the course, at a cost of around $50 to submit your multiple choice answers. You'll earn a certificate if you achieve a score of 80% or above on all of the quizzes. 

The course focuses on key technology areas and services provided by AWS. For compute it looks at Amazon Elastic Cloud Computer and Amazon Lightsail. For storage it concentrates on  Amazon S3, Elastic Block Storage and Elastic File Service and also explores Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Relational Database Service. For monitoring and scaling the application environment it uses Amazon CloudWatch and Auto Scaling.

To introduce all these elements, as the course progresses it builds a cloud-based, corporate directory applications that stores images and information about fictional employees in a company. The AWS Management Console used for the examples and demonstrations and students are encouraged to take advantage of the  AWS Free Tier to follow along.

This course is the first of four courses leading to the AWS Fundamentals Specialization.

Coursera also offers a range of specialization options at Intermediate level for those who want to get involved with the Google cloud. They all incorporates hands-on labs using the Qwiklabs platform. When you enroll you have a 1-week free trial  after which you need to pay a subscription of around $50 per month.

For developers, the most obvious one is:  

• Developing Applications with Google Cloud Platform consisting of four short (1-week) courses, each requiring 6-10 hour which between them cover how to design, develop, and deploy applications that seamlessly integrate components from the Google Cloud ecosystem.

Other Google Cloud specializations are:

• Developing APIs with Google Cloud's Apigee API Platform consisting of three courses, two of 15-24 hours, the other of 40 hours which introduce you to the many out of box capabilities of the Google Cloud Platform (Apigee) and how to apply them to your APIs to properly implement and secure them.
  
  
• Architecting with Google Cloud Platform consisting of six 1- or 2-week courses requiring 6-10 hours per week, which introduces participants to the comprehensive and flexible infrastructure and platform services provided by Google Cloud Platform.
  
  
• Networking in Google Cloud Platform consisting of three 1- or 2-week course, each 6-10 hours in total,  which give participants a broad study of core infrastructure and networking options on Google Cloud Platform. 

More Information

AWS Fundamentals: Going Cloud-Native

AWS Fundamentals Specialization

Coursera and AWS Join Forces

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