One of my courses I've been studying now says decommissioned. What does that even mean?
What decommissioned means
A course being decommissioned means you will still have access to it, but it will not be getting any updates moving forward.
Why a course is decommissioned
A course being decommissioned can happen for a number of reasons.
- The course is outdated and there is not a course replacing it. This can happen when a course becomes irrelevant and there is nothing to replace it.
- The relative Cloud platform provider (AWS, Azure, etc.) has had a major exam change/release which requires an entirely new course to be truly prepared. This means there will be a new course made to replace the previous one.
- Sometimes the general course just needs updates! We strive at A Cloud Guru to ensure the courses are relevant, fun and easy to follow. If we notice a course may not be structured in the best way, we change it for you.
What this means for you
Many times we will include reasons for the changes/release right in the course description. If you're in the middle of a decommissioned course, you can check for the reasons and see if you need to switch courses and make a decision that works best for you.
Example: You're halfway through the Certified Solutions Architect Associate course and a new course was just released. You notice in the description that the major changes are more focus on Serverless and Architecture but is also more streamlined and efficient so the new course is half the time as the old one. You can still pass the exam with the older course at this point since AWS has not changed the exam. However, since the new course is half the time it may be worth to switch to the new course since the same amount of time left on the older version.
Example: You are almost done with the Certified Solutions Architect Professional when the new course comes out. You see in the description that it is due to AWS releasing a new exam format. In this case, you would want to see when the current exam is removed from AWS. There is usually overlap between previous exams and new exams for this very reason. In this example, we released this new course in November, but students could still take the previous version of the AWS exam until February 3rd, 2019. So, you could stay with the older version of the course as long as you sat for the exam prior to it being removed from AWS.
Note: If you had previously purchased the course when individual course purchases could be made, you will automatically be granted access to the new versions that have been released after March 25th, 2019.
We understand it's not always black and white on making a decision for which course to continue with. If you still have questions after looking at the reasons for the release and seeing when exams may be removed from the Cloud provider, please contact Pluralsight Support (opens email form).
If you need help, please contact Pluralsight Support.