IBM – Microservices Specialization on Coursera – a learning journey

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About this specialization:

IBM – Microservices Specialization is intended for application developers seeking to understand the benefits of microservices architecture and container-based applications. The student learns how to develop and deploy microservices applications with Kubernetes on IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Private via a continuous release pipeline.

There are four self-study courses in this specialization, each course offers exercises followed by a badge quiz for the course. When you compete all the courses and earn the badge for each course, you will also earn the IBM Microservices Specialization badge which will become available soon. You can also take each course by itself if you only need skills in one area, by going directly to the course page.

 Course 1: Microservices – Fundamentals

In enterprise environments, the architectural style of microservices is gaining momentum. In this course, you will learn why microservices are well-suited to modern cloud environments which require short development and delivery cycles.  You will learn the characteristics of microservices.  You will compare the microservice architecture with monolithic style, emphasizing  why microservices are well suited to continuous delivery.

While microservices are more modular to develop and may look simpler, you will discovery that the complexity does not go away, it shifts.  An inevitable organizational complexity comes along with many small interacting pieces.  Managing, monitoring, logging, and updating microservices creates a greater operational complexity. In this course you learn about the tools necessary to successfully deploy, manage and monitor microservice based applications.

After taking this course, you will have a much better understanding of why microservices are so well suited to cloud environments, the DevOps environments in which microservices run and the tools to manage the complexity that microservices bring to the operational and production environment.

Course 2: Developing and Deploying Microservices with Microclimate

This course provides an introduction to Microclimate, an end-to-end development environment that lets you rapidly create, edit, and deploy applications that run in containers. Microclimate can be installed locally, or on IBM Cloud Private, where you can create a pipeline for continuous integration and delivery.

In this course, you learn how to quickly set up a development environment for working with Microclimate, and import a sample application. Using the Integrated Jenkins pipeline and Github, you also learn how to deploy a microservice application to IBM Cloud Private.

Course 3: IBM Cloud: Deploying Microservices with Kubernetes

In this course, you learn how to install the Kubernetes command-line interface (CLI), and create a Kubernetes cluster on which to run applications. Hands-on tutorials show you how to deploy microservices to a Kubernetes cluster. You also learn about securing and managing a Kubernetes cluster, and how to plan your Kubernetes cluster for deployment on IBM Cloud.

The ideal candidate for this course has a basic understanding of cloud computing, a working knowledge of developing microservices, and some experience working with IBM Cloud. Experience with using Docker, and familiarity with YAML is also a plus.

Course 4: IBM Cloud Private: Deploying Microservices with Kubernetes

IBM Cloud Private is an application platform for developing and managing on-premises, containerized applications. It includes the container orchestrator Kubernetes, a private image repository, a management console, and monitoring frameworks. In this course, you learn how to install and configure IBM Cloud Private components in your environment, and how to prepare microservices applications for deployment.

Time for Action!

Visit courser.org , sign up and explore the IBM Microservices Specialization and courses