A Cloud Guru Platform Upgrades
Hey Cloud Gurus — We’ve just released a new version of our platform, which is a complete refactor of our code base from the ground up. As with most hard work in IT, a lot of this work is not visible to our end-users — but rest assured, this new code-base sets us up to rapidly innovate on the platform moving forward — so we’re everyone at A Cloud Guru is very excited about this release.
We have, of course, made quite a number of exciting improvements that you’ll see right away. From now on, we’ll be rapidly innovating on the platform, releasing new features every few days.
Here’s some of the changes that you can enjoy right now.
Videos at cloud speed. All course content, including video, is now distributed via the AWS CloudFront CDN — meaning that videos will be served by the edge location closest to you. This improves latency and throughput, and should make video streaming much smoother and more enjoyable.
Video controls allowing you to jump back/forward 10 seconds (these are overlaid over the video, just move your mouse over the left or right portions of the video to activate)
Much better mobile support. We’ve spent a lot of time enhancing our platform on mobile devices, including both iOS and Android.
Internet Explorer support. That’s right, it has been a little too long coming but we now properly support IE.
Here’s our little A Cloud Guru BB8 brushing up on his AWS Platform knowledge in IE11.
Love that little guy :-)
Large performance boosts. We’ve been boosting our quantum thrusters (…or perhaps performance profiling our AngularJS code) and we’ve made a lot of significant performance improvements.You’ll find the whole interface a lot snappier, and more enjoyable to use. There’s even more performance improvements coming shortly!
Rich text editor in the forums.
We’ve added a lovely medium-style rich text editor in our forums — no more having to remember markdown syntax! Simply highlight some text to bring up the editor overlay.
Simple topic search across forums. You can now easily filter discussions by topic and course using a convenient dropdown menu. This is a nice stop-gap… Over the next couple of weeks we’re going to be overhauling search, and bringing full-text search to the site.
Resume course from anywhere.
It’s now super easy to pickup where you left off. Whether you are on our courses page, or viewing discussions within a course itself, there’s always a convenient blue button handy to jump you straight back into the course where you were last.
A redesigned course page for courses you don’t have yet. A simple and clear “one-pager” giving you a detailed summary of the course.
As well, we’ve enhanced the navigation experience, so if you already own a course you won’t see this page — opening a course will jump you straight into the course where you were last.
We also fixed a bunch of annoying issues that you reported to us, such as:
- Fixed issue where play-speed was not remembered between videos.
- Fixed issue where course progress was sometimes being lost.
- Better handing of authentication timeouts.
There’s a lot more to come over the next month and we’re working like mad — we’ll report updates here regularly, so watch this space.
Sam Kroonenburg
P.S. My company, A Cloud Guru, offers AWS Certification Courses that have helped over 30,000 professionals level up.
