GCP Essentials — Staying in touch!

Published in

Google Cloud - Community

4 min readOct 7, 2019

Having the right sources of information and using the right communication channels can be the difference between a regular and a highly-productive Google Cloud Platform user. This post and the above video walk you through some prominent resources but also some less obvious ones that may work well for you.

Language landing pages

Since many developers identify themselves by their language of choice, we have landing pages for the most popular languages supported by GCP (in no particular order!) :

Check those out for getting started content, tutorials, and idiomatic APIs and libraries.

Blogs

The main Google Cloud Blog typically has multiple posts a day and covers products and features, but also partner and customer stories. Other Google and Open Source blogs include:

Medium.com

You are probably also interested in content that is not exclusively written by Google. The GCP Medium Publication is a list of articles curated by practitioners for practitioners. If you’d like to share your experience with the community, this is a great place to be noticed.

Podcasts

If you’re into podcasts both of the following feature news of the week and interviews with Google engineers, partners, customers, and community members : The GCP Podcast | The Kubernetes Podcast

YouTube Channels

For video content, there’s obviously the GCP YouTube Channel with content published there on a regular basis, and most of it grouped into playlists around topics, products, and events. There are also several other related YouTube channels : Firebase | Tensorflow | Google Developers | G Suite | Apigee

Social Media

If you’re hanging out on Twitter, you should definitely follow Google Cloud Platform, and consider also following one of these active accounts :

Firebase | G Suite Developers | Google Maps Platform | Google Open Source | Apigee

Community Tutorials

Community tutorials are community-contributed how-to’s with an open publishing process hosted on GitHub. There are close to 200 tutorials to date and if you cannot find what you are looking for, you should request it or maybe even write something yourself and submit it!

GCP IRL — User Groups & Events

User groups and GCP meetups are great places where like-minded people meet to share their experiences, their best practices, and maybe even to find a job. There are active meetup groups around the world and there should be one nearby. If not, then create one!

You can also attend conferences, small, medium, or large ones. Some are organized by Google such as our yearly Cloud Next events, or our Summits or Onboard events in dozens of cities around the world. You will also find GCP content in many industry events such as OSCon, Kubecon, Devoxx in Europe, and of course in the more than 600 community-led DevFest events. In all these events you will be able to learn from technical sessions, meet with Google Cloud engineers, and ask questions.

Stack Overflow

But did you know that Google engineers maintain and monitor a number of GCP-related tags on Stackoverflow? This is part of GCP community support and details are documented on this page. Of course this is not a proper alternative to a formal support contract with Google.

Icons and diagrams

With a picture being worth a thousand words, imagine the value to your peers of a visual representation of your GCP architecture if you were to use these great-looking icons and diagrams !

THE Cheatsheet

The Google Cloud 4-words-or-less Cheat Sheet comes in many different formats, including several print-friendly formats and is maintained on GitHub. It’s a very popular resource and you should definitely Check it out!

As you can see when it comes to staying up to speed with Google Cloud, there are many options for you to consider. Pick the ones that work best for you !

GCP Essentials — Staying in touch!

Written by Alexis MP