Microservices and Serverless

This course is a part of Full Stack Cloud Developer, a 9-course Professional Certificate series from edX.

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The emergence of cloud computing has brought about a lot of changes to modern software development. Rather than large annual releases on physical mediums like CDs, modern software is increasingly released on the cloud, provided cost reduction, decreased time to market, and increased agility. These changes allow organizations to keep pace with their competitors and bring new innovations to market in ways that previously would have been unthinkable.

Rather than building large applications, known as monoliths, that perform all the functionality, microservices break down larger applications into smaller pieces that are independently maintainable and scalable, providing a host of benefits. This architecture is used at the largest software organizations in the world, because it provides cost benefits, team autonomy, and so many other advantages.

By the end of this course, you will

Have a solid foundation for microservices and serverless

Deploy microservices on the cloud

Integrate microservices with serverless compute

This course will introduce you to 12-factor apps and microservices, concepts that emerged to help organizations work better and faster in a cloud-native manner. You’ll then learn about serverless computing—how it works, what value it brings, and what are specific serverless technologies. You’ll get hands-on with IBM Cloud Functions, a serverless platform on IBM Cloud that lets you develop serverless apps with ease. Finally, you will learn to build and deploy applications using container images on the code engine.

The course contains several hands-on labs which allow you to apply the content you learn.

The prerequisites for this course include basic computer and cloud literacy as well as an understanding of core cloud concepts. In addition, understanding of the command line and how to use shell commands will greatly benefit you during this course.

What you'll learn

• Identify the twelve factors and describe how they map to the software delivery lifecycle
• Create and test Swagger documentation for REST API endpoints
• Create and test a serverless function
• Build and deploy applications using container images on the code engine