Microsoft Professional Program for DevOps Part 2.

Alright, let's wrap up my review of the Microsoft Professional Program for DevOps in Q1 2019, several years since it conceptually launched.

Course 6, DevOps for Databases

I actually enjoyed this course partially because I come from DataLand and partially because it's a heavily neglected point of DevOps that I care for a lot more than testing. The argument for Database as Code remains even though we have less people running a little SQL Server for their site that requires a bunch of configuration anymore -especially with Greenfield deelopment.

It's still valuable, and the instructor explained the content well. I would imagine this is one course that would be truly valuable to classically trained Infrastructure folks as well as DBAs who are transitioning to DevOps or just trying to get out of GUIs and obtain some new skill sets.

Course 7, Application Monitoring and Feedback Loops

I hardly remembered this upon completion and had to review the course content when writing up this blurb. It begins with a section about the core principles of monitoring and feedback, including its purposes and how it is general handled. A large section was about Application Insights, which for Azure-focused individuals is an important concept. There is a section about log analytics and the Operations Management Suite that I suppose is pretty important but remarkably droll and not fully-explored in the lab section. I imagine this is due to the amount of time it takes to actually configure realistic scenarios.

The final section spends some time on New Relic, Loggly, and Nagios, which completes the topic but left me thinking that not enough was covered. I really am not sure how to summarize my feeling with that course better than describing its completion as one of the moments in life where I ask myself "That was it?".

Course 8, Architecting Distributed Cloud Applications

It is a good course for "architects" (quoted because everyone is one now) and all the information is valuable, but I would also say none of it is of such unique value that one could not find everything by simply reading some of the Azure documentation or working through a couple of tutorials that are readily available instead. If I were beginning to get into cloud development and wanted some specific details mixed in with lot of general cloud-first principles and how they particularity function in Azure, this would be a solid way to spend the weekend.

In fact, this is a great one-off course for a broad audience. It's a solid conceptual understanding of cloud platforms for developers, and the fuzzy technical things are not hard to grasp for less-technically inclined people who want to know enough to talk about it all.

Course 9, Microsoft Professional Capstone: DevOps

I thought that when attempting the final capstone course, which was updated enough to comment that VSTS was renamed Azure DevOps, things might really be ready for prime-time.

Working through their lab environment was a chore. I honestly opened another browser and created an extra repository in ADO to copy and paste credentials they supplied to prevent myself from having to manually type out massive unique identifiers. I understand why they run it the way they do, but it evokes a heavy "Yikes".

The actual directions need to be clearer, though, as I imagine the end pipeline would not work at all with a minor issue. Saying things like "your account name" in Azure DevOps is dishonest; my "account name" is my login. The information it needed in that instance was my project space, though I was able to determine that much after thinking about it. I bet some who take this weren't happy, though.

I say that because when the dust settled, the computer graded me and gave me 92%, claiming I did not deploy to development correctly while saying Staging and Production were just dandy. This is funny, because it should not have worked if that were the case. If you fail Dev, you're failing the others, as well.

I know why it didn't work: it wanted me to use the value "<default>" in a field that, per my usage, didn't make sense. I reluctantly stuck to the instructions and saw an error. I removed it, and yeah, it deployed beautifully. Go figure. To the script that validated my exam, though, I was dead wrong. It's all 0s and 1s after all and SaaS doesn't stay quite the same after several years. I do have to laugh that it only validated that information in Development, though, and did not read through the same configuration as it progressed along.

This is a small gripe, but it sums up my entire experience with the Microsoft Professional Program so, so well.

The Real Test

Am I content that I spent many hours over the past 3 months working on this and struggling through bizarre setups and deprecated tutorials that I had to modernize on the fly? I will say yes, but you might not. If Microsoft is serious about this being a new certification model (which by the look of things, they aren't), it needs some tender loving care.