Welcome to Google Cloud Platform: Fundamentals. I'm Ben Lambert, and I'll be your instructor for this course. The goal of this course is to introduce you to the Google Cloud Platform and the services that it provides. 

By the end of the course, you're not gonna be an expert on Google Cloud. However, you will know why Cloud Platform is a great option for building and running modern software systems, as well as what services are available to you to help you build out your applications. The intent for this course is to give you enough of an overview so that when you take future, more focused courses on things such as certifications, or maybe deep dives into specific services, you'll already be familiar with the core concepts. 

Google Cloud Platform is a fantastic cloud platform offering a wide variety of options from infrastructure as a service to platform as a service. And all with a strong commitment to security and stability. For me personally, Google Cloud Platform has quickly become one of my personal favorite cloud platforms. 

Now, opinions are subjective, but I'm gonna share why I like it so much. I've worked as a developer for many years, and for much of that time, I was responsible for getting my own code into production environments and keeping it running. I worked on a lot of smaller teams where we didn't have operations engineers. So here's what I like about cloud platform. 

It allows me to think about the code and the features I need to develop without really worrying about the operations side of things because many of the service offerings are fully managed. That means things like App Engine, which we'll talk about later in this course, allow me to write my code, test it locally, and then run it through my continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline and then deploy it. And once it's deployed, for the most part that's it, unless I've introduced some sort of software bug, I really don't have to think about it from there. 

Google's engineers will keep it up and running. They're gonna keep it highly available, and so it's like you have Google as your operations team, which to me, is really cool. So another thing I like about it is the ease of using things such as BigQuery and their machine learning APIs. If you've ever worked with large datasets, you know that some queries just take forever to run. BigQuery can query massive datasets in just seconds, which allows me to get the data that I need quickly, so I can move on to more important things. And the machine learning APIs, they allow me to use a rest interface to interact with things like language translation, speech to text, and image recognition with ease. 

All this allows me to integrate into my applications, which give my end users a better user experience. So for me personally, I love that I can focus on building out applications and spend my time adding value to the end user. 

While this course is an introduction to the Google Cloud Platform, I do make the assumption that you're at least familiar with the basic cloud concepts. I'm also going to assume that you're familiar with at least building or deploying code into cloud environments. If you're not, you'll still gain some value from this course, though you may feel at times a little bit lost. 

During this course I'll introduce you to the Google Cloud Platform, followed by a lesson on how to get started. And then we'll dive into some of the different services. We'll talk about App Engine, Firestore, and Datastore. We're going to check out some of the different storage services that are available. Then we'll talk about Kubernetes Engine and Compute Engine. We'll talk about Big data, machine learning, and IoT services. And we'll cover an introduction to some of the security services. 

By the end of this course here's what you'll know. You'll be able to explain the purpose of the different services that we've covered. You'll be able to describe how to deploy applications to the different compute environments, such as App Engine, Compute Engine, and Kubernetes Engine. You'll be able to describe the different storage options. You'll be able to describe the functionality of the different Big data, machine learning, and IoT services, as well as being able to describe, at a high level, some of the different security services. 

Before we get started, I always like to mention in the settings below for the video player, you can adjust the speed, so if this video is too fast or too slow, go ahead and adjust that and find the right settings for you. All right if you're ready to learn more about the Google Cloud Platform then let's get started.