Before deployment, a project, application, fix, new utility, or function must be bundled into a deployable artifact. This practice is called "packaging" and is an essential part of the "DevOps toolchain."

In this course, you'll explore the concept of software packaging and recognize its core characteristics and benefits. You'll identify the components of an application package, and describe the standards, patterns, processes, tools, and best practices involved in application packaging. You'll then outline the tasks involved in each packaging stage of the DevOps lifecycle.

Next, you'll examine the architecture of continuous packaging and the container-based application package. You'll identify the benefits of delivering container-based and cloud-native application bundles and outline the different application package distribution approaches. Finally, you'll learn how to use standard tools for packaging open-source applications.

There are several cloud-based application packaging tools available. Knowing how to choose and use the best tool for a task will streamline the DevOps packaging life cycle.

In this course, you'll examine the features and benefits of AWS Systems Manager Distributor, the packaging structure used by AWS CodeArtifact, and the application package architecture, features, and benefits afforded by Azure Batch. You'll outline the strategy for packaging applications in hybrid and multi-cloud environments and identify the architecture and key components to packaging applications for Kubernetes.

Next, you'll create packages using AWS Systems Manager Distributor and create repositories with AWS CodeArtifact to store, publish, and share software packages. Finally, you'll manage application packages in an Azure Batch account, deploy container images of packaged applications to Cloud Run, and build packages with Maven artifacts using Google Cloud Storage.