What’s the best way of learning? A practical approach, right! When you get a hands-on experience of what you’re learning. Here I’ll talk about one such learning platform, giving you the training of the “cloud”, Qwiklabs.
Cloud computing is on its rise nowadays. Cloud is more than online storage, it is our one-stop solution for our all types of computing works. May it be app development, data management, website hosting, machine learning and much more, all we need is an access to cloud (through GCP, AWS, Azure etc.) and we can start working with the all-in-one tools for our needs on the cloud. Our whole data is safe from any kind of undesirable loss and the best part, our native machine needs not to be very high-end hardware. As we have access to a powerful machine on cloud and we work remotely on a cloud-hosted server from our PC.
Qwiklabs is an online training platform, wherein you’ll get temporary credentials to access the cloud platform (GCP or AWS). So you’ll be learning on the real thing, no simulations. It has a rich catalogue filled with many courses on different topics like machine learning, database management, app development and deployment. You can choose where to start with, from beginner to advanced level, Qwiklabs provide you with the vastest and extensive training of cloud. What’s the icing on the cake? The labs you complete in a particular field, you’ll earn a badge, which shows your new skill and you can add your badge on the LinkedIn profile too.
The labs run under a fixed time, and you have to complete those labs within that time period only, but the timing is assigned in such a way that you can explore all possible aspects under that time limit. These labs operate on a pricing system. Usually, beginner level labs are of 1 credit with advanced ones ending up with 5–6 credits. And here 1 credit equals to 1 dollar.
In the above picture, you can see the Dashboard of GCP. At the dashboard, you have a summary of your activities in GCP like enabling APIs or status of your created Virtual machines or Storages. On the left-hand side, you can see the vast category of cloud tools, which you can use as per your requirements. The menu contains tools for App Development and Deployment, Creating and maintaining Virtual Machine Instances, Creating and managing cloud storage and many more.
The best part, as a member of DSC-CGC you will get a free monthly pass for Qwiklabs and you can take any number of labs in that month and learn new skills every day. After a month, that pass will usually extend for members, so in DSC-CGC your learning will never stop. We always come up with a plethora of new and innovative courses for our members, which provides them with endless opportunities to learn something new.
Recently, we came up with exciting GCP Crash Course for our members, wherein they were given a choice between one of the three tracks and each track comprised of five quests. Those tracks were Data Science, App Development and Machine Learning. Anyone who completed one of the three-track within a month was rewarded with Google Goodies (T-shirts, Schwags) and certification to embrace your newly earned skill.
To get started with Qwiklabs, it is recommended to start with GCP Essentials. This is an introductory level quest where you will get hands-on with Google Cloud Platform and it’s fundamental tools and services. This course assumes you with no prior knowledge in Cloud Computing. Only some experience of working with command line shells would be helpful. After completing this quest, you will get a basic idea about how things work on Cloud Platform and you can take more courses of higher levels to learn and polish your skills. You can become a Cloud Expert by taking courses at Qwiklabs including Infrastructure & DevOps, Big Data, Security Backup and Recovery, Websites and AppDev and Machine Learning.
So this was a quick guide on Qwiklabs and how to get started with it. Cloud computing is on its peak nowadays due to advancement in artificial intelligence, IoT and many other. Cloud gives developers the freedom to go beyond their machine and easily develop and deploy their programs all over the world through high-speed servers. As most of the people are not that familiar with Cloud .services that are beyond being just an online storage Google in collaboration with Qwiklabs, give us the opportunity to witness and be a part of the cloud revolution. As a member of DSC-CGC, you let endless opportunities to grow, and this is one of them.
Join DSC CGC Slack Channel here and learn together.
Happy learning!
