I'm never sure with these types of platforms because I am not interested in any certifications and such, so it is hard to tell whether they just teach the stuff needed for these certifications and nothing more...
ACG employee here so grain of salt, etc - but I paid for an ACG subscription long before I worked there.
My favorite piece of ACG actually isn't even the courses, but "Cloud Playground", which came over in the recent Linux Academy acquisition. [0] One-click AWS, Azure, or GCP sandbox environments. They're live for 4 hours on ACG's credit card and people sometimes assume they're just for doing course labs, but, like, you can use them for whatever. It's an end run around sandbox account procurement in a business context, or a safeguard against leaving an expensive resource running for personal experimentation.
Yep, I love that feature and they provide a grandfather / lock in policy for accounts.
It isn't a perfect platform but the breadth and centralization has been great and the communication following the acquisition has been good. It is well worth the cost of entry.
The demos are valuable as well since they start you with certain infrastructure and you can focus on the drill/demo.
I would love to see some of the Terraform/Cloudformation templates that go into these products...
Licensing and selling the 'don't cost us a million bucks in 4 hours' code monitoring (I hope!) that stuff on the backside would be welcomed by maaaaany large organizations :)
>I am not interested in any certifications and such
ACG is very focused specifically on helping you pass the certification exams. It can still be helpful even if you don't want a cert because naturally there is some overlap between passing a cert and knowing how to use AWS/GCP/Azure, and one great thing about ACG is access to the AWS playground environments where you can get hands-on experience. However, if your goal is to ignore the cert and really learn the material, you might look elsewhere.
That said, the ACG courses for the basic level AWS certs really don't take more than a couple weekends to go through, and at only $25/mo, it's not a bad investment to just pay for 1 month, get the foundational level knowledge, then move on to other ways of learning.
I used their course as part of training for one of the AWS Certs and found the videos/quizzes pretty informative and useful. Not too long-winded, and an easy enough to use interface.
I only did the one course, but from that, I'd recommend it.
ACG as a company nearly killed Jupiter Broadcasting. JB were able to escape but are facing many years financial hardship due to an overly burdensome litigious culture from ACG after the acquisition of Linux Academy from separating the two businesses.
This split came on the heels of a questionable HR policy implementation around the firing of Joe Ressington. Reverse sexism is apparently OK but casual swearing during a work trip to the pub, is not.
From an ethics perspective, avoid ACG. There's a lot more I could say on all this but I won't - it's hackernews not reddit.
Thank you but would you mind providing even more context/data here? Listening to different Jupiter Broadcast shows, their advertisements seem to have seamlessly transitioned from Linux Academy to ACG. So I can't say I have encountered that drama...
I'm never sure with these types of platforms because I am not interested in any certifications and such, so it is hard to tell whether they just teach the stuff needed for these certifications and nothing more...