#100DaysOfDevOps

DevOps and Cloud continue to be one of the most demanded skills in the IT market. I can see a lot of trending DevOps learning topics in Google Trends/YouTube and other platforms. At the same time amount of available educational resources is a bit overwhelming: online courses, books and special e-learning platforms.

As I decided to renew and deepen my knowledge in DevOps and surrounding topics I started a #100DaysOfDevOps challenge where I will learn, read and pass courses about the required technologies every day. I will share my opinion about the learning resources I encounter and hopefully ease the process of picking your next course if you are also interested in this topic.

As I already have some experience with clouds and programming languages I decided to start with more practice-oriented Qwiklabs tutorials. I passed the introductory course about Google Cloud Platform (called “Google Cloud Essentials”) and will definitely pass a couple more quests (as courses are called inside the Qwiklabs) in the next days.

Pros and cons for Qwiklabs:

• Very practice-oriented. You are working with the real GCP console from the first lab.
• Technology. For passing the labs you are not using your personal account. Every time new credentials are provisioned so there is no risk in burning cash if you’d be using your personal card.
• Cookbooks. If you are saving the commands from the labs, in the end, you could have a really nice series of quick starts (for example for Kubernetes cluster provisioning or load balancer deployment).
• A lot of things are left unexplained. If you don’t know the theory behind cloud technologies (even experience with other providers like AWS), it could be really hard to understand what’s going on and commands would look like magic in this case.

In the end, I would recommend it to experienced IT professionals who would like to learn more about GCP. I will update my review on Qwiklabs in the future when more quests are completed.

Bonus

This month Google Cloud offers special discounts on Google Cloud training available on Qwiklabs, Pluralsight, and Coursera (until the 31st of May). Simply fill out the form on the page below and enrol in training.