Last week I stumbled across a great opportunity that was announced within the Google Cloud Blog, which I am regularly scanning for latest GCP innovations.
They offered a 30 days free subscription for their new Google Cloud Skill Boost learning platform, which I immediately accepted.
Eager to deepen my existing knowledge on GCP cloud services, Google Cloud Skill Boost offers over 600 individual courses and quests to dive into each individual topic.
The courses span across many different fields, such as basic cloud infrastructure management over network and storage management towards data analytics and AI machine learning with TensorFlow and TPUs.
Within the first course I chose to refresh my knowledge on cloud resource management where I struggled most with the configuration of various load balancers and resource pools.
Each course guides you with step by step instructions that come with ready to use gcloud commands that can be used in the companion Google Cloud Consoles.
The convenient thing here is that you don’t even need to install any local tools, as the courses are interactively done within the Cloud Console only.
Each course task gives you a limited time access to full GCP cloud resources, reserved and provisioned for your course that are fully configurable and accessible through the cloud console.
That allows you to spin up a K8S cluster within a minute and to deploy services onto your cluster without even installing any local software at all. That’s a fantastic experience, especially as it dramatically reduced the entry barrier for students with low level local or policy restricted hardware.As a finishing bonus you receive badges for your achievements that are shown in your public profile, as it is shown below:
Today, my public learning profile is sparse in terms of achieved badges, but I am heading full steam towards the AI and analytics paths, once I finish my self-selected basic GCP training.
What I appreciate most are those individual learning paths you can choose from, while you are still free to choose any interesting side topic along the way, as it is shown within the course catalog below:
Individual courses can be selected, so that you can choose your own learning path that depends on your current demand:
Google Cloud Skill Boost represents a great offering for people like me who would like to incrementally update and refresh their knowledge about new cloud services.
