Linux academy is an online platform that helps people learn about different areas of technology. They provide courses for the majority of cloud certifications including amazon web services(AWS), Azure and Google Cloud. In addition to that they provide courses on programming, security, DevOps and linux. For most of these courses they have a lab component where you can connect to an online server and get experience working in the environment you are studying, rather than just learning the theory. For example if you’re taking a course on AWS, you will be given account logins and be able to login to an AWS environment and practice creating EC2 instances, lambda functions and everything else you learn in the course. It’s one of the most well rounded learning environments I’ve used and it’s definitely worth looking into if you’re trying to learn more about any of these areas.
Certification Courses
The way I was introduced to linux academy was their certification courses. These courses cover all of the material required for popular certifications in the 9 domains shown below.
Within each section, you can find a course for every certification that linux academy supports within that domain. Take Cloud as an example, this is the main discipline taught on this platform and supports the largest amount of certifications. Here you can see how many courses they have for AWS certifications.
Each of these courses will not only cover the theory aspect, but many provide practice tests with grading and feedback as well as virtual labs that let you interact with the cloud platform you are studying and perform all of the actions that you learn about.
Learning Paths
Another good feature of linux academy is the learning paths system. The way this works is if you have a certain profession or technology in mind that you want to learn, you select that learning path from a catalog on the website. Then linux academy will give you a list of courses that you can follow to learn what is required to perform that job function. While this may seem like a money grab, many of these courses are included free on the website, especially the introduction courses. This makes it a very useful starting point, and it also gives you a more complete idea of what you will need to learn to accomplish your goal, rather than just helping you with one certification.
Linux Academy Playground
Linux academy offers a feature called the playground where subscribers can spin up their own personal servers in the cloud. You can have up to 5 at a time, choosing from several different operating systems. These servers are yours to control and it lets you learn several different types of operating systems, test code/applications and anything else you want to work with.
Recap
Overall, I found linux academy to be extremely helpful when I was studying AWS. It has a huge volume of courses to choose from, the practice exams were very close to what I experienced on the real exam and I like that they give you the chance to work on the platform you are studying instead of just having you read theory. The platform is partially free, many of the courses you will have access to using the community edition. However, to get the playground feature, practice exams and some advanced courses you will have to get a subscription, which at this moment is $49 per month or $379 per year.