DevOps Learning Resources
Over the course of the last 12+ months different teams at Microsoft have put together a large number of valuable resources to provide IT Ops and developers an understanding of DevOps, the concepts, processes, and tooling involved to support DevOps on-premises and in the cloud. Everything is available on Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA). Some of the sessions listed below are part of a bigger course and the MVA will guide you through the content.
While there is plenty more content relevant in the context of DevOps, below my biased guide to DevOps content on MVA. I suggest taking the courses in the order listed.
Courses
DevOps: An IT Pro Guide
DevOps is one of the most written-about terms in the world of agile development and continuous delivery. Watch this session, and explore the critical role that the IT Professional plays in DevOps. From this foundational event, learn how DevOps can help you accelerate delivery of software and updates, optimize resources, and reduce mean time to repair.
Sessions are hosted by DevOps expert David Tesar and IT Pro Evangelist Morgan Webb. Hear how to build and grow a high-trust relationship between the Business, Development, and Operations teams throughout all phases of Application Lifecycle Management.
The course explores relevant high-level, on-premises, and public cloud scenarios, highlighting System Center, Azure, and Visual Studio Online technologies. Check out this transformative Jump Start!
Instructor | David Tesar – Program Manager/Microsoft; Morgan Webb - IT Pro Evangelist/Microsoft
Assessing and Improving Your DevOps Capabilities
Why DevOps, why now, and how can it help you? Build your resume and confidence by knowing how to answer these questions, which tools to use, and how to resource your projects. DevOps can mean the difference between being a leader in a market or a follower behind the competition.
Watch industry experts, executives, and thought leaders, including Gene Kim of The Phoenix Project, as they take a deep dive into DevOps and how it can help streamline your workload and enable continuous delivery. Get practical tips you can implement immediately in your company, and gain an understanding of how a maturity model can transition your organization into a meaningful DevOps practice.
Instructors | Brian Harry - Microsoft Corporate Vice President; Sam Guckenheimer - Microsoft Visual Studio Product Owner; Gene Kim - Author and Researcher; David Tesar- Microsoft Technical Evangelist; Doug Seven -Microsoft Principal Program Manager; Richard Campbell - Campbell & Associates President, Microsoft Regional Director and Microsoft MVP; Kris Lankford - Microsoft Senior Product Manager; Michelle Bishop - Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) Principal Consultant
Application Performance Monitoring
Would you like an overview of the application performance monitoring (APM) solutions Microsoft has to offer for Operations and Development teams? Look no further. APM solutions offer your teams true insight into their applications.
Watch expert Morgan Webb step through Application Insights and System Center Operations Manager to explain these solutions, along with their integration with Visual Studio. Get a full picture of Microsoft end-to-end monitoring options and our strategy going forward to cater for true hybrid cloud application monitoring.
Instructor | Morgan Webb - Microsoft IT Pro Evangelist
Dev/Test Scenarios in the DevOps World
Devs, want a deep dive into the dev/test portion of DevOps and application lifecycle management (ALM)? Explore modern tools for unit testing, functional UI testing, load testing, and more, see helpful demos on debugging Azure workloads using Visual Studio, and learn about the fundamentals of source control in TFS.
Watch as leading experts Bret Stateham, Cale Teeter, Jeff Levinson, and Charles Sterling walk through the entire ALM cycle. See how to access the platform, explore how the tools fit together, and get the details on real-world practices you can use today to improve your dev process. Get the pros and cons of different tools, so you can pick what works best for you. If you've got questions about using current ALM tools in a real production environment, check out this course.
Instructor | Bret Stateham - Microsoft Senior Technical Evangelist; Owner of Net Connex; Cale Teeter - Microsoft Consultant; Chuck Sterling - Microsoft Program Manager; Jeff Levinson - Microsoft DX Technology Solutions Professional
Azure Resource Manager DevOps Jump Start
Developers and IT Pros, do you want to make management and deployment of Azure resources more efficient? If you want faster and more repeatable application deployments across all your Azure environments, add to your skill set and walk with the experts through Azure resource management.
This course promises lots of helpful demos, an exploration into the JSON language for creating resource templates, and a look at Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) integration. And it takes a deep dive into some DevOps best practices, like implementing infrastructure and configuration as code. Watch the experts and experience the new declarative model at work, complete with templates to define, configure, connect, and deploy your infrastructure resources.
Instructor | David Tesar - Microsoft Technical Evangelist; Kevin Lam - Microsoft Principal Program Manager
Automating the Cloud with Azure Automation
Check out this course to explore the process of automating the cloud with Azure Automation. Find out how to get started and how to connect to Microsoft Azure. Learn how to import and publish a Connect-Azure runbook, and create and publish your first runbook. Finally, invoke Azure Automation runbooks, and discover next steps.
Instructor | Keith Mayer – Microsoft Senior Technical Evangelist
DevOps - Visual Studio Release Management Jump Start
Does your organization release software manually, with time-consuming outages and difficult processes? Do you lack project-to-project standards, or do you have different processes for different environments? These challenges in releasing software can threaten the bottom line. Continuous delivery is quickly becoming the standard to resolve these issues. But how do you implement that standard?
Join Microsoft experts in the fifth event of our popular “ALM Wednesdays” series, as they equip users of Visual Studio ALM with the necessary skills to build an effective release pipeline with the Release Management functionality provided by Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. DevOps principles stress collaboration, and Visual Studio ALM offers the ability to bring IT and Dev together to create predictable, efficient releases.
Instructor | Micheal Learned - Microsoft Senior Premier Field Engineer; Krithika Sambamoorthy - Microsoft Senior Premier Field Engineer
And if you are looking for more …
Resources:
DevOps Homepage
Microsoft Virtual Academy Homepage
Have fun.
@volkerw