What is Google Cloud Skills Boost?
Google (and widely speaking Alphabet Inc.) is a well-known worldwide company. One of it’s many delivered services is cloud infrastructure. GCloud (as well as competitors Amazon AWS/Microsoft Azure) has it’s own quirks and specific features. Google Cloud Skill Boost is a platform for engineers to introduce and consolidate ecosystem knowledge by usage of:
- written guidelines
- video lectures
- online laboratories
At the end of a specific course or ‘quest’ you receive a badge that can be shared with your network of contacts. Of course it is rather confirmation of possession of basic knowledge than certification but surely it is a good first step for that.
Everyone can cyclically participate in organized challenges which allow 30 days of free trial access to the platform. Depending on the amount of acquired badges it is possible to receive some kind of additional material prized (bags, mugs, speakers, t-shirts etc).
What did I learn during this challenge?
Concerning my hobbies I have chosen Dev Ops Route with a few additions.
List of courses:
- Google Cloud Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure
- Reliable Google Cloud Infrastructure: Design and Process
- Perform Foundational Infrastructure Tasks in Google Cloud
- Create and Manage Cloud Resources
- Set Up and Configure a Cloud Environment in Google Cloud
- Deploy and Manage Cloud Environments with Google Cloud
- Implement DevOps in Google Cloud
- Deploy to Kubernetes in Google Cloud
Broadly speaking challenge introduced me to multiple GCloud’s solutions for hosting applications/servers/containers, handling storage and monitoring. Most of the classes and labs have quite low entry point - everyone can learn even if is not familiar with docker/Kubernetes/databases/networking (only very basic cli knowledge is required).
The results and detailed description can be found on my >personal public gcloud profile<
Marek Pawlak