P4 (Helix Core) User Basic
This 4-hour course introduces you to P4 version control and prepares you to use it with confidence. You’ll learn general concepts and practical skills, with opportunities to practice concepts and techniques in a lab environment.
In this course, you will follow accelerated instruction to best understand the fundamental aspects of P4, including process support via changelists, labels, and jobs, and to discover reporting techniques using P4 metadata.
Course Agenda
- P4 system overview and user interfaces
- Overview of P4 Visual Client preferences
- Basic user operations:
- Creating workspaces
- Working with files and changelists
- Submitting changelists
- Keeping workspaces in sync with the depot
- File reporting and diffing
- Basic parallel development and process support:
- Working with streams
- Merging files
- Resolving file conflicts
- Copying up
- Jobs and defect tracking
- Time-lapse view
- Revision graph
- Introduction to shelving
P4 (Helix Core) User Advanced
This 8-hour course includes everything in the P4 User Basic course. It also includes training on classic branching and workspaces.
Course Agenda
Everything in the P4 User Basic course, plus:
- Managing streams
- Planning directory structure
- Working with components
- Workflow automation and integrations
- Labels
- Introduction to code reviews (P4 Code Review)
- Brief command line overview
P4 (Helix Core) Admin
This 8-hour course teaches you how to establish best practices for better long-term success. You will gain a mastery of P4 so that you are less likely to encounter scaling, performance, and project problems that impact productivity. This course covers topics essential to administering P4, including basic deployment architecture, backup and recovery, and more.
Course Agenda
- Installation
- Setup
- LDAP / AD (Intro)
- Backup and Recovery
- Protections
- Depots
- P4 server Jobspec
- Maintenance
- Monitoring
- Trigger Capabilities Overview
What You'll Learn
- Develop a firm understanding of administering Helix
- Backup and recovery procedures to protect data against losses and how to recover in the event of an emergency
- Day-to-day care and feeding of the server installation, rotating logs, routine maintenance
- Protections and access controls
- Integrating P4 jobs with external defect trackers
- Monitoring the server
- Overview of trigger capabilities for policy enforcement, systems integrations, etc.
- SDP (Server Deployment Package) overview
Prerequisites
- P4 User Basic + Advanced, or have comparable hands-on experience
P4 (Helix Core) Admin Enterprise
Enterprise environments and product development projects are growing more complex. In this course, you will gain a deeper understanding of P4 administration with instruction that covers topics essential to administering P4, including basic deployment architecture, backup and recovery, and more—while diving deeper into comprehensive tactics for administering P4 in large and geographically distributed enterprise environments.
Course Agenda
Everything in the P4 Admin course, plus:
- Replication – Introduction
- Fully Distributed – Edge Servers
- Advanced Maintenance
- Offline Checkpoints
- Broker
- Security
- Advanced Tools
- Scripting
- LDAP / AD (Advanced, includes Group Sync)
What You'll Learn
Everything in the P4 Admin course, plus:
- P4 Broker, P4 Proxy, and replication for scaling to global deployments
- Advanced topics in security and Active Directory/LDAP integration
- Advanced administration of large numbers of users, branches, and locations
- Tools available from Perforce to ease administration
- Introduction to scripting automation with Helix
Prerequisites
- P4User Basic and Advanced plus Helix Core Admin, or comparable hands-on experience
Battle School: Interactive Problem Solving + Debugging
The P4 Knowledge Base and documentation contain the information needed to implement backup and recovery procedures, troubleshoot replication issues, and execute failover. But do you have the confidence in your ability to apply that knowledge when disaster strikes at 2:00 AM?
Course Objectives
- Learn to plan a P4 deployment architecture that meets typical enterprise requirements.
- Learn the critical thinking and problem-solving skills in a variety of simulated failure scenarios.
Prerequisites
- Prior hands-on experience administering P4.
- Hands-on labs are run on Linux, so basic familiarity with Linux OS is required. The underlying principles of P4 can be applied to all other supported operating systems such as Windows and UNIX.
- P4 User Basic and Advanced, P4 Admin, and P4 Admin Enterprise, or comparable hands-on experience
Course Agenda
Part 1: Deployment Architecture Planning
We'll explore the following topics related to planning an enterprise deployment architecture:
- High availability and how to limit downtime and data loss in common failure scenarios
- Disaster recovery and how to provide for business continuity in the event of a site-wide disaster
- Failover terminology and common failover options, such as local failover (same machine), high-availability failover, and disaster recovery failover
- Globally distributed development and how to take advantage of proxies and replicas to support multiple development sites and remote users
- Capacity planning and how to support a large number of demanding users
- Comprehensive digital asset management, including version control for much more than source code
Part 2: Battle School Labs
The Battle School Labs will test how much knowledge administrators can quickly apply when disaster strikes. In a virtual lab environment, we simulate nasty things happening to P4 servers. Then help you learn the skills and knowledge to repair and recover from the damage in a variety of failure scenarios. We will help you determine what problems you are facing in each scenario and examine the critical thinking required of an admin in a firefight.