1. Personal Experience

  • Background in Software Development

  • At ease with the command-line or "shell"

  • Java/Spring experience is optional

2. Pivotal Cloud Foundry Environment

You will need a Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment to execute the labs. You may use a Pivotal Cloud Foundry instance or Pivotal Web Services.

If taking the course via e-learning, Pivotal Web Services is recommended, unless you have access to another Pivotal Cloud Foundry instance (typically already provisioned by your company). It is not recommended that you provision a personal Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment to complete the labs. The setup and installation of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is beyond the scope of this course.

If taking the course via instructor led training your instructor will provide guidance on the environment to use.

Throughout the labs you will see specific directions for Pivotal Cloud Foundry or Pivotal Web Services. Make sure follow the directions for the applicable environment.

2.1. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Pivotal Cloud Foundry may be used to complete these labs. The following dependencies are required:

  • PCF Elastic Runtime version 1.7 or higher, with the following "tiles" added:

    • MySQL for PCF

    • PCF Metrics

    • Redis for PCF

      If using self-signed certificates, under the Elastic Runtime Tile → Settings → Networking page make sure the following options have been checked: Disable SSL certificate verification for this environment, Ignore SSL certificate verification on route services.

2.2. Pivotal Web Services

Pivotal Web Services may be used to complete these labs. Simply sign up for an account.

2.3. A Note About the Service Broker Lab

The Service Broker lab requires access to a MongoDB instance. Please review that lab for alternatives on how to meet that requirement. Options include using the AWS MongoDB AMI.

3. Local Machine

You will need the ability to install software on your local machine.

  • 4GB Memory

  • Network access to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment and internet

  • Java (required by Apache JMeter, which is used in the Auto Scaler lab)

  • A programmer-friendly text editor. Atom or Notepad++ are some options.

3.1. Optional

  • JSON Formatter for Chrome

  • curl or httpie

  • Windows users may desire a better terminal experience than the cmd.exe. Check out ConEmu. It provides multiple tabs and search which is helpful during these labs.

  • A Java IDE such as the Spring Tool Suite can be useful for reading the implementation of the service broker and route service that we work with in those respective labs

  • The Continuous Delivery Lab provides the option to use a pre-provisioned Jenkins instance or to install everything locally. If a student chooses the latter option, then they’ll also need git and Maven

4. Windows VM

An alternative to installing and configuring the software on your local machine is to use the Windows VM.

If using the Windows VM see these requirements.