Sam's Cloud Blog

Google Cloud Skills Boost

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR

Google Cloud Skills Boost is Google Clouds online training platform. It’s come a long way from its humble (some may say rocky) beginnings. With a great library (700+) of courses and labs, some amazing free content and a brilliant new subscription program, it's worth taking a new look at it. But make sure you read to the end for the best bit, how to get upwards of $1,000 USD in Google Cloud credits!

Image courtesy of Google Cloud Skills Boost.

What is Google Cloud Skills Boost?

Google Cloud Skills Boost is an online training portal with a broad range of content across virtually all aspects of cloud infrastructure. The material is delivered through a number of mediums, from videos and articles through to interactive labs. Most content requires paid access for a minimal fee (discussed later in this article), but there is an amazing array of free content as well (some of it listed below).

The platform was originally called Qwiklabs and we purchased it from a competitor a number of years ago. It’s fair to say reviews were mixed when the platform originally launched. I think one of the things that Google does really well is listen to its customers and take feedback onboard, even if it means eating a slice of humble pie. I feel comfortable saying this has now been addressed.

Since then the platform has gone through a major overhaul and a significant uplift in the quality and volume of content available. In particular there are now a number of learning paths focused on Google Cloud Certifications and helping people build the skills for some of the most in demand technology roles. Think cyber security, data analytics and AI to name a few. While having tech skills help, there is beginner material that has been built for people who have minimal technology skills. So if you know someone outside the industry who is looking for a career change, Skills Boost is potentially a really great starting point.

To help keep the experience fun, there is an element of gamification whereby the content is structured around quests and learning paths. Quests are shorter learning paths that typically involve a series of labs to give you hands-on experience with a particular product or technology. Learning Paths are more significant. They are a complete course that takes you on a journey through several learning activities and may take a week or more to complete. These are designed to skill you up in a new area of technology and / or prepare you for certification.

The interactive labs are my favourite part. You are given instructions to follow (or just an objective for the more difficult ones) with a set of steps to guide you through the lab that is timed. When you click start, a real Google Cloud project is spun up just for you, giving you full access to the actual Google Cloud Console. No simulated experience with the usual short-commings. This is a real Google Cloud tenant and you need to take the necessary steps, just like you would in a production tenant. You also have full access to logs for when things don’t quite go according to plan. Depending on the lab you can click your way (clickops) through it, or use Cloud Shell and infrastructure as code if you’re more advanced. This allows you to gain real ‘hands on keyboard’ experience.

What can you learn?

There is content for everyone, regardless of experience level. For starters, there are three levels of difficulty: Beginner; Intermediate and Advanced. Each level builds on the last allowing you to grow as you progress through material. For the Beginner classes, you are provided with not just the step by step instructions for completing a lab, but also the foundational knowledge to understand the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ of a given technology. At the other end of the spectrum, Advanced labs are often scenario based and you decide the steps to meet the outcome. For example, you may be presented with a broken configuration (a VM that can’t reach another host) whereby you need to troubleshoot and resolve the configuration problem.

There are also a great range of options available for people who are well versed in similar technology from other vendors. For example there are accelerated learning paths around cloud architecture for AWS and Azure professionals, who are typically already well versed in the fundamentals of cloud, they just want to learn Google’s flavour and unique elements.

So what technologies can you learn? Really just about everything that you can do on Google Cloud. The great thing about the courses is they are focused on you learning an outcome and not simply a piece of Google Cloud technology. For example, the Build Apps & Websites with Firebase (one of my favourites) gives not only a good intro to Firebase as a technology, but shows you practically how to use it to host a website. This theme is continued across, foundational infrastructure (i.e IAAS, thinks VM’s etc), data analytics, AI / ML and application modernisation to name a few. There are also courses covering non-technology related matters, such as digital transformation and building Site Reliability Engineering practises.

Free Content

Another aspect that I really love is the free courses Google has made available on the Skills Boost platform. To address the shortage of tech skills and help people in general be employment resilient as digital transformation continues to accelerate, the following courses are freely available. You simply need a Gmail login to access them.

Free Courses

Learning Path

I’m sure you would agree, that is some impressive topics that have been made available free. Including an entire learning path on Gen AI (crypto… what?!), the hottest tech topic at the moment.

Accessing Paid Content

No surprise, with the exception of the free courses, the best content requires payment and there are a few options. Firstly there is the option of a monthly subscription. At $29 USD per month, this is a great option for people who are steady learners and are committed to ongoing investment in their Google Cloud knowledge.

Secondly you can purchase credits (with intro courses typically costing 1-5 credits through to advanced courses being 10 to even 30 credits). At $1 USD per credit, this isn’t a bad option if you have a short and specific training goal in mind.

Now I’ve left this best bit for last! For just about everyone else (whether you want to do more than one course, do extensive learning or even complete a certification) there is an awesome option called the Innovators Plus program. This is a bundle that gives incredible value, besides giving you access to the entire Skills Boost catalogue of courseware, you also get the following benefits:

Access to over 700 hands-on labs, skill badges, and courses
$500 Google Cloud credits
A Google Cloud certification voucher
Bonus $500 credits after the first certification earned each year
Live learning events led by Google Cloud experts
Quarterly technical briefings hosted by Google Cloud executives
1:1 consultations with Google Cloud experts

And how much does this program cost? Just $299 USD a year. That’s right, the program costs just $299 USD, you are immediately given $500 USD Google Cloud credits and when you pass any certification in that 1 year subscription period, you’re given another $500 USD credit. This is not limited to your first year, so every year for $300 USD, you can get up to $1,000 USD in consumption credits back. Consider the extra value (the exam voucher alone is worth $250~ USD) and it's amazing value. Just missing steak knives! (showing my age there) Also you may be thinking the cloud credits are limited to private accounts, but no, they can be used with any Google Cloud billing account ID.

So where do you go to get this amazing deal? Head to the sign up page and purchase a subscription, you won’t look back. Best yet, do it before June 30 and make it a deduction on this year's tax return. Want your employer to chip in (they are going to benefit after all) but having trouble convincing them, download a ready to go business case you can edit and submit to your manager.

About the Author

I’m Sam Currie and I’m a Customer Engineer with Google Cloud. I own and maintain this site in my free time. All opinions are expressly mine and not my employers. When I’m not helping customers transform their business using Cloud, I’m kept busy by my wife and two young children. In my spare time I ride bikes (a lot!), run and cook.

About Google Cloud

Now the 5th largest enterprise software company, Google Cloud was born out of the planet scale infrastructure that Google runs to operate our many products (e.g. Search, Maps, Gmail, Chrome etc) with more than a billion users (some with 4+ billion users!). Customers partner with us to leverage this learned experience to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. But it’s more than just infrastructure and technology. Google knows better than most its people and culture that bring great products to market and that’s where the real value is, we love sharing that knowledge with our customers. Whether its AI, achieving high levels of availability (SRE) or adopting the best developer practices (DORA). To learn more about Google Cloud see here or sign up for a free $300 USD trial account.

Google Cloud Free Tier

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 11:14:16 GMT

TL;DR

Google Cloud offers the best (no 12 month limit) and most generous free tier of any public cloud. Whether you’re an engineer studying for your next cert, trying to bootstrap a startup or simply exploring cloud, you can do a lot with Google Cloud and not ever get a bill! Read on to find out more and how to sign up.

Welcome to my first article for this site that is dedicated to unearthing the gems of Google Cloud. Since my time at Google Cloud (I’m a Customer Engineer), I continue to be amazed by the value Google Cloud provides its customers. Whether that’s making the most of the free tier (this article), exploring little known (& often free) services or best practices for operating an optimised environment. With that being said, let's dive in and explore the free tier in more detail.

Compared to its competitors, Google Cloud offers one of the best free tiers available (along with $300 USD credit to get you started). Firstly, with the exception of a few, all products have a monthly free tier available. If you’re keen to explore our compute options (from VM’s to serverless and functions) or our extensive data analytics and AI/ML offerings, you’ll find generous free tier allowances that allow you to really sink your teeth in and build extensive solutions.

Secondly, no 12 month trial limits! That’s right, unlike our competitors, our free tier is not limited to 12 months. So whether you’re simply doing an extended trial, providing infrastructure for a home project or trying to bootstrap your startup and keep it very lean, you won’t lose access.

Lastly, even products that don’t have a free tier, tend to have a low cost option to use the service. For example Security Command Center, our security and risk management platform, has a free standard edition and its premium feature set can be enabled on a per project basis allowing very granular control of costs and a low barrier to entry for protecting your most critical workloads. This will be covered in more detail in a future post.

I know there will be some readers concerned about building on a platform today and wondering about their commitment tomorrow. What if they need to get their data out? What if their consumption grows significantly beyond their expectations. Google Cloud is committed to operating one of the most open clouds. We are a large contributor (#1 for Kubernetes) and proponent of open source and open standards. But we also operate one of the lowest cost clouds available.

I can hear the obvious question, why does Google do this? Well (and this is my opinion) firstly it’s a significant differentiator to our competitors. Secondly, and this I feel is the major reason, most techies love working on tech just as much at home as the office and when they begin using our cloud and discover how much easier it is to use and the great functionality, they have the tendency to become our biggest advocates back in the office of their employer. Also, those lean bootstrapped startups, sometimes (and we hope more do) become very successful. Now the more pessimistic among you may think we’re selling your data or targeting ads, not true. In fact your data is exactly that with Google Cloud, your data. At Google Cloud we commit that:

You control your data
We never use your data for ads targeting
We are transparent about data collection and use
We never sell customer data or service data
Security and privacy are primary design criteria for all of our products

You can find out more about these commitments and the various global standards we maintain in our Privacy Resource Centre and our Trust Center.

What products are available? Well just about every product is available, but here is a partial list of highlight products available and their limits:

Cloud Run - A managed compute platform that enables you to run containers that are invocable via requests or events. Cloud Run is serverless: it abstracts away all infrastructure management, so you can focus on what matters most - building great applications.
- 2 million requests per month
- 360,000 GB-seconds of memory, 180,000 vCPU-seconds of compute time
- 1 GB network egress from North America per month
BigQuery - Fully managed, petabyte-scale, and cost-effective analytics data warehouse that lets you run analytics over vast amounts of data in near real time. With BigQuery, there's no infrastructure to set up or manage, letting you focus on finding meaningful insights.
- 1 TB of querying per month
- 10 GB of storage each month
Cloud Build - A service that executes your builds on Google Cloud infrastructure. Cloud Build can import source code from Cloud Storage, Cloud Source Repositories, GitHub, or Bitbucket, execute a build to your specifications, and produce artifacts such as Docker containers or Java archives.
- 120 build-minutes per day
Cloud Functions - A lightweight compute solution for developers to create single-purpose, stand-alone functions that respond to Cloud events without the need to manage a server or runtime environment.
- 2 million invocations per month (includes both background and HTTP invocations)
- 400,000 GB-seconds, 200,000 GHz-seconds of compute time
- 5 GB network egress per month
Cloud Logging & Monitor - Exactly what you think it is, an extensive observability and monitoring suite to keep an eye on your cloud (& on-prem resources)
- Free monthly logging allotment
- Free monthly metrics allotment
Cloud Source Repositories - Fully featured, private Git repositories hosted on Google Cloud.
- Up to 5 users
- 50 GB of storage
- 50 GB egress
Cloud Storage - Object based storage all running on Google Cloud’s infrastructure.
- 5 GB-months of regional storage (US regions only) per month
- 5,000 Class A Operations per month
- 50,000 Class B Operations per month
- 100 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month

So what can you do with these cool technologies and generous allowances, I hear you ask. Well besides the previously mentioned projects (cert. study, startup bootstrapping etc), here is a few ideas of projects you can run on Google Cloud:

Host a website (like this one 😉). Enjoy the benefits of Google’s CDN and manage the deployment with Cloud Build. You can even find a great lab to help you build this out using Google Cloud Skills Boost, our training platform.
Data Analytics. With the generous initial allowance for BigQuery and our wide range of data lifecycle management tools, upload your dataset for analysis or even feed it into AutoML.
Host your favourite home server app (eg. Pi-hole) and shutdown that old rackmount server you bought cheap on eBay but is actually costing you a lot in electricity.

Image courtesy of Google Cloud Skills Boost.

Here are some tips for getting the most out of the GCP free tier:

Plan your usage: Before you start using the GCP free tier, take some time to plan your usage. This will help you to avoid exceeding the limits and being charged for services.
Turn services off when not in use. It’s ironic that one of the greatest value points of cloud computing is consumption billing (i.e. only pay for what you use), yet people spin up a VM and leave it turned on after they’re finished using it. It can be frustrating losing your free tier on something you simply forgot to turn off.
Use the right services and in the right region: Not all of the services in the GCP free tier are created equal. Some services are more expensive than others. Make sure that you are using the right services for your needs. Quite a few free tiers have region restrictions (often limited to US-CENTRAL1).
Monitor your usage: It's important to monitor your usage so that you don't exceed the limits and be charged for services. You can use the GCP Console to monitor your usage.
No one likes ‘bill shock’. Set up billing alerts so you are notified early of any unexpected consumption so you can take action to prevent an unexpected bill. My colleague, Allan Alfonso, has a great article on this.
Ideally Terraform everything. By using Infrastructure as Code, you can automate the creating and teardown of resources, saving your precious free tier. In fact if you are new to cloud, I highly recommend your first foray into cloud should be to explore this. It is such a foundational cloud skill set and will save you time and money as you progress deeper into cloud technologies.

Whether you’re new to Google Cloud or have been using it for a while, I hope this blog has inspired you to explore it further. Please feel free to like, comment (I love feedback) and share with your friends and colleagues.

About the Author

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