Up until now, the Nanodegrees offered by Udacity's School of Cloud Computing have related to Amazon Web Services. Now there's a program focused on the alternative big cloud platform, Microsoft Azure. 

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The DevOps Engineer for Microsoft Azure Nanodegree program, which focuses on teaching principles for deploying and managing cloud infrastructure with Microsoft Azure starts its inaugural presentation on September 2, 2020. 

We reported on the partnership between Udacity and Microsoft when it was announced in June when the emphasis was on Azure Machine Learning. This new Nanodegree is more about mainstream cloud computing and 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.

Providing the incentive to enroll in the 3-month program, Udacity states: 

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. 

Another reason for considering this program is that by completing the it you’ll be prepared for Microsoft’s AZ-400 DevOps Engineer Expert certification exam.

So what does Cloud DevOps entail? Udacity answers this with:

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.

Even if you don't consider yourself a DevOp engineer, this Nanodegree will be useful for for people with programming backgrounds who are interested in the Cloud Computing field or gaining familiarity with Microsoft Azure and for software engineers who wants to learn more about deploying applications securely and efficiently.

As with other Udacity Nanodegrees the approach is hands-on project-centric learning including the following:

• 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. 

Prior to enrolling on this course students should have at least one year of experience working with Python and have a fundamental knowledge of scripting and Linux shell commands. They should also understand cloud computing, including core cloud components (like databases, virtual machines, etc). For a primer on cloud computing, Udacity offers a free, beginner-level Intro to Cloud Computing course lasting 2 months. 

For students interested in Amazon Web Services the intermediate-level Cloud Dev Ops Engineer Nanodegree Program re-starts on September 2, as does the advanced-level AWS Cloud Architect Nanodegree Program. The Cloud Developer Nanodegree Program next begins on September 9. To know more about them, see New Udacity Cloud Nanodegree Programs.

More Information

DevOps Engineer for Microsoft Azure Nanodegree

Udacity School of Cloud Computing

AWS Cloud Architect Nanodegree Program

Cloud Developer Nanodegree Program

Cloud Dev Ops Engineer Nanodegree Program 

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