What you should know

- [Instructor] This course combines software architecture principles with cloud computing and discusses how these concepts can be combined to achieve enterprise agility. Basic knowledge of software application architecture especially around code organization and deployment will be helpful to get the most out of this course. So knowledge of interior architecture, principles of low coupling between software components, web application architecture and application deployment will help you understand the lessons better. This course also assumes that you understand cloud computing at a conceptual level. Implementation experience of various cloud computing platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP is not needed. In other words, you should know what cloud computing is and how it is beneficial to organizations at a high level. It is not a strict prerequisite but if you understand concepts of containers and have some experience with the container runtime environment like Docker that will be an added benefit. This course is not a tutorial and is not implementation-centric by design. I will provide course handouts with additional information and links to other resources that will help you learn more about the concepts covered in this course, so you can try things yourself. I'll also include resources that will help you spin up and tear down an entire infrastructure in AWS cloud to see a few concepts in action. These resources use an AWS service called CloudFormation which is essentially infrastructure as code. CloudFormation lets you create and manage AWS resources with the help of templates. All CloudFormation templates needed for this course are included in the course handout section. The CloudFormation section of the handout and hands-on exercises are optional but highly recommended. If you would like to see these concepts in action please use these CloudFormation templates. If you want to try the hands-on exercises you will need an AWS account but no prior AWS knowledge is necessary. All the instructions will be included in the course handout. Also multiple cloud service providers have similar services which you are welcomed to explore on your own. The ideal audience for this course is solution architects, application developers and technical managers that work on application design and deployment. But if you have basic application architecture knowledge and are interested in how cloud computing could enhance your organization's agility, you will surely benefit from this course.