One of the key takeaways from what we learned about how enterprises are using Cloud Academy is that it is a multi-cloud world. We are seeing more and more large enterprises going multi-cloud, and our mission is to give them the right training to help their teams build solutions in the cloud, on several vendors. In this space, Microsoft Azure is definitely the second largest player in the market.

Today, I am excited to announce the general availability of our Microsoft Azure hands-on labs on Cloud Academy.

As with our hands-on labs for Amazon Web Services, we use an internal technology stack to power our labs. This is something that our product team develops internally. We are investing more and more in this technology and we have an extensive roadmap of new features planned for individuals and enterprise users for 2017. Content will be another huge surprise for all of our customers as we are planning to double down on the number of new labs that we will publish month to month.

How customers use hands-on labs at Cloud Academy

First of all, our lab technology provides our customers with a full and dedicated AWS or Azure environment. This means that you learn how to do things directly in a real AWS or Azure console. Cloud Academy creates a dedicated instance for you and makes sure that you can use our step-by-step guidance to learn through real use cases. Each hands-on lab has a time limit to complete it, which is usually a sufficient amount of time to complete all of the required tasks.

In 2016, the completion rate for our hands-on labs was more than 70%.

That’s an incredible statistic. Most of our customers use hands-on labs inside our learning paths in order to complete their knowledge of a topic with some practical, hands-on experience. We also have thousands of users who use labs without guidance. In 2017, we are planning to add new functionalities to our platform that will allow our customers to build even more using our hands-on labs. Microsoft Azure is the first platform that we are launching in addition to our Amazon Web Services labs, and we plan to release many labs over the coming months.

Explore our new Microsoft Azure hands-on labs on Cloud Academy!