GCP Essentials
In this introductory-level quest, you will get hands-on practice with the Google Cloud Platform’s fundamental tools and services. GCP Essentials is Qwiklabs’ most popular quest and for good reason—you will come in with little, or no prior cloud knowledge and come out with practical experience that you can apply to any GCP project. From writing Cloud Shell commands and deploying your first virtual machine, to running applications on Kubernetes Engine with load balancing, GCP Essentials is a prime introduction to the platform’s features. 1-minute videos walk you through key concepts for each lab.
Baseline: Infrastructure
If you are a novice cloud developer looking for hands-on practice with GCP’s core infrastructure services, do yourself a favor and enroll in this quest. As a student, you will get practical experience by taking labs that dive into Cloud Storage, computing engines like Kubernetes, and key application services like Stackdriver and Deployment Manager. By taking this quest, you will develop invaluable skills that apply to any GCP project. 1-minute videos walk you through key concepts for each lab.
Baseline: Data, ML, AI
Big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are today’s hot computing topics, but these fields are quite specialized and introductory material is hard to come by. Fortunately, GCP provides user-friendly services in these areas and Qwiklabs has you covered with this introductory-level quest, so you can take your first steps with tools like Big Query, Cloud Speech API, and Cloud ML Engine. Want extra help? 1-minute videos walk you through key concepts for each lab.
Baseline: Deploy & Develop
In this introductory-level quest, you will learn the fundamentals of developing and deploying applications on the Google Cloud Platform. You will get hands-on experience with the Google App Engine framework by launching applications written in languages like Python, Ruby, and Java (just to name a few). You will see first-hand how straightforward and powerful GCP application frameworks are, and how easily they integrate with GCP database, data-loss prevention, and security services.
Cloud Architecture
This fundamental-level quest is unique amongst the other Qwiklabs offerings. The labs have been curated to give IT professionals hands-on practice with topics and services that appear in the Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Certification. From IAM, to networking, to Kubernetes engine deployment, this quest is composed of specific labs that will put your GCP knowledge to the test. Be aware that while practice with these labs will increase your skills and abilities, we recommend that you also review the exam guide and other available preparation resources.
Challenge: GCP Architecture
This quest of "Challenge Labs" gives the student preparing for the Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect certification hands-on practice with common business/technology solutions using GCP architectures. Challenge Labs do not provide the "cookbook" steps, but require solutions to be built with minimal guidance, across many GCP technologies. All labs have activity tracking and in order to earn this badge you must score 100% in each lab. This quest is not easy and will put your GCP technology skills to the test. Be aware that while practice with these labs will increase your knowledge and abilities, we recommend additional study, experience, and background in cloud architecture to prepare for this certification.
Data Engineering
This advanced-level quest is unique amongst the other Qwiklabs offerings. The labs have been curated to give IT professionals hands-on practice with topics and services that appear in the Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer Certification. From Big Query, to Dataproc, to Tensorflow, this quest is composed of specific labs that will put your GCP data engineering knowledge to the test. Be aware that while practice with these labs will increase your skills and abilities, you will need other preparation too. The exam is quite challenging and external studying, experience, and/or background in cloud data engineering is recommended.
Exploring APIs
Google Cloud Application Programming Interfaces are the mechanism to interact with Google Cloud Services programmatically. This quest will give you hands-on practice with a variety of GCP APIs, which you will learn through working with Google’s APIs Explorer, a tool that allows you to browse APIs and run their methods interactively. By learning how to transfer data between Cloud Storage buckets, deploy Compute Engine instances, configure Dataproc clusters and much more, Exploring APIs will show you how powerful APIs are and why they are used almost exclusively by proficient GCP users. Enroll in this quest today.
Data Science on the Google Cloud Platform
This is the first of two Quests of hands-on labs is derived from the exercises from the book Data Science on Google Cloud Platform by Valliappa Lakshmanan, published by O'Reilly Media, Inc. In this first Quest, covering up through chapter 8, you are given the opportunity to practice all aspects of ingestion, preparation, processing, querying, exploring and visualizing data sets using Google Cloud Platform tools and services.
Data Science on Google Cloud Platform: Machine Learning
This is the second of two Quests of hands-on labs derived from the exercises from the book Data Science on Google Cloud Platform by Valliappa Lakshmanan, published by O'Reilly Media, Inc. In this second Quest, covering chapter 9 through the end of the book, you extend the skills practiced in the first Quest, and run full-fledged machine learning jobs with state-of-the-art tools and real-world data sets, all using Google Cloud Platform tools and services.