Cloud Foundry Certified Developer Training at CF Summit

May 2, 2017| Daniel Jones

EngineerBetter are teaming up with Resilient Scale to deliver the full three-day Cloud Foundry Certified Developer training course in the days before the Cloud Foundry Silicon Valley Summit 2017.

It’s $1,975 for all three days with lunch provided. The course is held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, which is conveniently the same location as CF Summit. You can enrol via Eventbrite.

It’ll be a packed few days, full of hands-on practical exercises, interactive walk-throughs, and surprisingly few slides. The course is programming-language agnostic, and students also get the pick the brains of two highly-experienced Cloud Foundry consultants - Steve Greenberg and I.

What’s on the course?

Everything you need to cover in order to stand a good chance of achieving Cloud Foundry Certified Developer status. It’s significantly more in-depth than Zero To Hero.

The syllabus:

• Why Cloud Foundry is important in today’s world
• Technical overview of Cloud Foundry features
• Logging & metrics
• Resiliency
• Services
• Routes, route services & TCP routing
• App staging & execution
• Platform & microservice security (OAuth2 & UAA)
• Docker apps on Cloud Foundry
• Microservices
• 12 Factor & cloud native apps
• Distributed tracing
• Avoiding cascading failure
• Managing app lifecyles on Cloud Foundry
• Non-breaking changes
• Continuous integration, delivery and deployment

What’s the course like?

The course consists of a few activities:

1. Presentations to introduce concepts
2. Hands-on exercises on a real Cloud Foundry to learn techniques and details
3. Interactive architectural walk-throughs to recap what was just learnt
4. End-of-day agile retrospectives, so students can give feedback and we can make the course better

Presentations are no longer than 20 minutes, and typically involve Steve or I getting quite animated about something. We don’t put tedious details on the slides - this helps keep students awake, and prevents slides becoming outdated.

The bulk of the learning is done in the exercises, which means that the slides are blissfully free of tedious details. Students are posed problems to solve, deploying and configuring a menagerie of pre-written apps on a real Cloud Foundry instance.

The exercises don’t have copy/paste solutions. This helps students avoid the fluency effect, whereby it feels like you’ve learnt something because you’ve just done it, even though you haven’t really learnt it.

We encourage students to collaborate and help each other. There’s good evidence that humans learn more effectively in a social setting.

Interactive architectural walk-throughs offer a recap of what was just learnt in an exercise, allowing instructors to make sure everyone is brought up to the same level of understanding, whilst also providing an opportunity for clarifications and more-detailed explanations of what happened ‘under the hood’. These recaps also allow us to leverage both the compressed spacing effect and pre-testing by asking questions as we perform the walk-through.

Not only are EngineerBetter and Resilient Scale the only companies licensed to deliver the Certified Developer course, but we also created it. We’re intimately familiar with both the material and the psychology behind the techniques it employs.