Introduction
I’ve recently been working on building a video course titled “Azure Functions for DevOps Engineers”, and I’m really happy to announce that the course is now live on the CloudSkills.io platform. For the next week or so, the course is available for $7 USD (yep, seven), and I know I’m biased, but I think that’s a great deal! If you head on over to check it out, I’d also recommend browsing through the other content available at CloudSkills, there’s been so much success from students of the courses and there’s also some awesome upcoming workshops planned that you can enroll for.
Before I talk a little about the course, I need to say a massive thank you to Mike Pfeiffer for providing the opportunity to build content and for providing guidance, structure and experience. In addition, a thank you to the general CloudSkills community as well. The CloudSkills community is one of the most uplifting I’ve been involved with in quite some time. Everybody wants to see everyone else succeed, I feel psychological safety within the community, there is great morale and it is so uplifting to be a part of.
Why Create This Course?
Like many, my background in IT is built from the IT Pro / Systems Administrator perspective. Over the past few years I’ve shifted in to architecture and design roles, with a focus on cloud and automation. Due to my background, especially early on in the the Microsoft Exchange and Windows ecosystem, PowerShell is my go-to language from a scripting and automation standpoint. I’ve been working with Azure Functions for a little while now, pretty much only with PowerShell based functions.
There’s a lot of content around Azure Functions coming from a developer background for building serverless applications, which is fair enough too beacuse it’s an amazing platform for application development and that’s been the primary use case for the platform, but I’d often see comments in various places online where people with an ops background would try to start learning how the Azure Functions platform works, but then get caught up when trying to read code examples written in unfamiliar languages to them, such as Javascript or C#.
The power of Functions and PowerShell really hits home for event-driven automation. The idea being that an event occurs which in turn triggers a function, and the event data from the event is passed in to your function, allowing you to execute custom logic, or process the data within the PowerShell code, or react in certain ways to particular events.
So, why create this course? I truly believe that PowerShell based Azure Functions will be a game changer for many IT pros, DevOps engineers, cloud practicioners and infrastructure teams. I like to think of PowerShell functions as the glue that will hold workflows and integrations together in the Azure cloud, and I want to try and help enable people in these types of roles to realise the power of the Azure Functions platform with a familiar language, being PowerShell.
What’s Included in The Course?
Because the cloud is the cloud, the Azure Functions UI in the Azure Portal got a massive overhaul a couple of months ago, luckily for me it happened just as I was about starting to record this course. To my knowledge, this is the only video based course available right now that is recorded with the new interface and updated workflows.
The best way to see what is included is to head over to the CloudSkills page which has it all laid out. The course introduction clip is on that page so you can see what it is all about. With that said, at a high level there are 6 modules that are broken down in a way that takes you from knowing nothing at all about Azure Functions, all the way through to deploying an Azure Function using a YAML based CICD pipeline and an ARM template, to go from nothing provisioned in Azure right through to a fully deployed function app managed in source control. The content in between teaches you everything you need to know to be successful with Azure Functions. Even if you want to use a language other than PowerShell, this course will still cover everything a lot about the Azure Functions platform.
Summary
My biggest hope from creating this course is that it helps educate and enable you to be successful in your roles and open up a different way of finding solutions to problems. I’d love to hear from those of you who take the course as to what ideas you came up with while watching the course, or telling me about what you’ve built on the Azure functions platform. The best place to reach me is on twitter or LinkedIn. Thank you for taking the time to read this post, and if you decide to purchase the course, thank you and I truly hope you find it valuable.