Cloud Playground comes to ACG for Business

The best way to skill up your team is by letting them get hands on. But giving people access to real environments and servers can be a pain. There’s the wait for IT to provision training environments, the worry of surprise bills from resources left running, and the potential risk of someone breaking something in production. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce Cloud Playground for ACG for Business. It gives teams risk-free, hands-on cloud learning tools designed to help people learn by doing.

You play with cloud, you’re going to get learned

Watching a thing alone won’t make you a pro at that thing. (Trust me. I’ve seen every Fast and Furious movie, and I can’t even parallel park.) Whether you're living life a quarter-mile at a time or trying to boost your team’s cloud abilities, doing is essential to learning. That’s where Cloud Playground comes in. With Cloud Playground, learners can get hands on to hone their cloud skills — following along with ACG courses, experimenting with new tech, and making mistakes in worry-free, safe environments. It pairs ACG’s awesome, engaging cloud skill development content with the perfect practice spaces — with no risks to your production environment, no hidden fees, and no hassles for admins or IT. This set of advanced training tools includes real AWS, Azure, and GCP practice environments and customizable training servers. The rollout of Cloud Playground to ACG for Business is one of the many enhancements to the ACG platform made possible by A Cloud Guru and Linux Academy joining forces.

Get your hands cloudy

Cloud Playground replaces ACG’s Sandbox Environments. But Cloud Playground is more than sandboxes. It’s a whole playground. (Thus the name!) Here are the trio of tools that make up Cloud Playground and what they let learners do.

• Cloud Sandboxes — These are real-world AWS, Azure, and GCP practice environments for your team to get their hands cloudy. There are no surprise fees from resources left running, no hassles around access or scaling for admins or IT, and no risks for your organization’s production environment.
• Cloud Servers — These customizable pre-configured, auto-provisioned servers running different distributions and tools are ideal for training. Learners can peruse our suite of configurations or try something new. Each user gets an allowance of credits to redeem for Cloud Servers, so they can spin up a bunch of tiny servers or blow it all on a RAM-heavy beast.
• Instant Terminal — This in-browser terminal lets your people access any instance on any provider, even behind a corporate firewall. There are no downloads, extensions, or the need to open SSH ports, which comes with security and compliance risks. (Your sysadmins thank you.)

Them's the breaks

With Cloud Playground, people are free to learn by doing, clouding along with our courses, test driving technologies, breaking things, and trying new things — even trying stupid things. Basically anything but intentionally bad things. We actively monitor Cloud Playground for abusive, prohibited, or otherwise un-awesome behavior. (Think: Bitcoin mining, uploading malware, or hacking servers.) Ready to get started? As Uncle Ben said, with great new features come great new terms. Before you can swing on into Cloud Playground, an admin in your organization must accept the new terms of use.

---

This will teach them

Your team can learn more by doing with Cloud Playground. Pair our awesome courses, labs, quizzes, and learning paths with Cloud Playground and get those hands cloudy as you build cloud fluency.

---