About this Course

What makes this course different?

There’s a lot of learning material to be found online about serverless and cloud. But most of this content is about small slices of the subject matter, so it's left to you to piece it all together.

What makes this course different is that it provides a comprehensive learning path for serverless. All the key elements, including the tools, the supporting services, and the core API, compute, and database building blocks are all brought together in one place, where you can build your knowledge step-by-step.

Who should take this course?

This course is written for experienced software developers and architects. It assumes that you’re reasonably well-versed in building backend services, using modern platforms, tools, and technologies, but that you may have little to no prior experience working with serverless or cloud.

How is this course organized?

The course is divided into sections, one for each major technology that’s covered. Each section includes backgrounders that teach basic concepts, tutorials that step through the sample code, and hands-on labs where you apply what you’ve just learned.

How long does this course take?

The content in this course is equivalent in scope to a traditional technical book. So you can expect to spend a handful of days, or perhaps a couple weeks of evenings, to work through it.

What programming languages are used?

At launch, this course prioritizes C# and Java — languages that are widely used in established organizations but are not always well-represented in online learning materials. In the future, this course may be supplemented with additional sample code for languages like Python and Node.js.

What development tools are used?

The sample code for this course is set up to use Visual Studio Code as the code editor with matching scripts for Z shell on MacOS and PowerShell on Windows. This course also makes use of GIT for source control and Postman for API testing. For those who have not used any of these tools before, support documents are provided to get you started. The sample code and all the tools listed above have been tested on clean installs of the latest MacOS and Windows operating systems.

What sample code is used?

The sample code is a serverless implementation of the “ConnectedCar” service, with versions available for both Java and C#. This service consists of three APIs for an imagined car manufacturer, designed to support real-time vehicle event reporting, customer service bookings via smart phone app, and dealer management of customers, vehicles, time slots, and appointments.

You'll find links to information about the ConnectedCar service, along with help getting started with the sample code and checklists for your online account and workstation setup, all in the “Before You Start” lesson at the end of this section.