The ‘From Zero to Hero’ – Training
It has become tradition for anynines to give the Cloud Foundry training at Summit for beginners: From Zero to Hero. As a silver member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and a permanent sponsor of the Cloud Foundry Summit in North America and Europe, anynines has been doing this kind of course for several years now. This time Oliver and I held it at the Cloud Foundry Summit in Philadelphia on Tuesday, April 2, 2019.
It was my first time giving such a training, even though I am not new to Cloud Foundry. I started my Cloud Foundry journey three years ago when I was engaged by anynines. Besides developing at the a9s Data Service Framework, I also do consulting and I am the responsible developer for the a9s Data Services for VMware Cloud Foundry. In this blog post I will describe my experience to be able to give such a course and the workshop itself.
Hands-On Cloud Foundry Training
We started well-prepared at 9:00am with four course participants. After a while, two other participants joined the training.
Experienced in the technical trainings which anynines provides for clients, Oliver guided the users throughout the course. Based on the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s training material, we stepped through several chapters and discussed topics like ‘What is Cloud Foundry?’ or ‘What components does it consist of?’ The training mainly focuses on people with little or no Cloud Foundry experience but with some knowledge concerning web-based applications.
Our main goal is to teach how to deploy and manage applications on Cloud Foundry. The participants get an overview of Cloud Foundry and learn how the technology works, including specifics relating to services, buildpacks, and architecture.
To give you insight into the course agenda, please find the chapter topics below:
- What is Cloud Foundry?
- Interacting with Cloud Foundry via the CLI
- Pushing Your First App
- Buildpacks
- Resilience and Availability
- Debugging
- Dealing with State
- Domains & Routes
Due to our years of experience with Cloud Foundry and its ecosystem, it was no problem for us to answer question from any of the participants.
After Staging the Course
The advantage of a small group was we were able to give maximum attention to each attendee. We also adapted the speed of the course based on the students’ knowledge to make sure they were able to learn and internalize the content.
It was really interesting to see what each person’s motivation was in attending the training. We met developers new to Cloud Foundry in addition to managers who wanted to know what Cloud Foundry is to get a deeper understanding of what their teams use every day. We think it’s very admirable when managers use their spare time to acquire practical knowledge and empathize with their teams!
Each of the eight chapters was accompanied by exercises in which the attendees had the chance to try what they had learned so far. In these hands-on labs, we deployed our first applications. Later in the course we tried out the self-healing capabilities of apps within Cloud Foundry. Running applications were updated with a newer version and zero downtime, and blue-green deployment.
With data services, such as a9s Redis, the anynines public PaaS offering formed the perfect playground for such exercises. One of the tasks was to bind an application to a deployed backing service which makes use of it.
See you at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe
After six hours of training with some coffee breaks, we ended the course with a positive reaction from our participants. Fun fact: Five minutes before the course ended, a seventh trainee joined us. He had forgotten about the course and unfortunately we could only give him the training material. But this was not the last Summit and hopefully, we will have the chance to give the training another time at the Cloud Foundry EU Summit in The Hague this September 11-12, 2019.
I’m proud to be part of the Cloud Foundry community and I’m glad I had the chance to get this amazing experience. I’m looking forward to showing more interested people – from developers to managers – just how easy and intuitive Cloud Foundry is!
