The course is part of these learning paths
See 8 moreThere are a lot of different options, across a variety of cloud platforms that are well suited for running specific workloads, such as web applications. Things such as Google App Engine, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Services: Web Apps, among others.
However, there are still plenty of times where we need to set up our own infrastructure. And so cloud vendors offer IaaS (infrastructure as a service) options. Google provides us with Compute Engine which allows us to create virtual machines, custom images, snapshots, networks, auto-scalers and load balancers.
If we're going to create and implement an application on the Google Cloud Platform system operations, then understanding these services are going to help us to create highly available, highly scalable applications.
All the major cloud providers offer the ability to set up virtual machines, networks, auto-scalers, and load balancers. Where the Google Cloud is different is in the speed of creating and starting up virtual machine instances. As well as the massively scalable software-based, global load balancer; which doesn't require pre-warming. Google also offers per-minute billing for VM instances, after the first 10 minutes.
So Google has a lot to offer. And if you're looking to learn more about the Google Cloud systems operations, then this may be the course for you.
What exactly will we cover in this course?
Course Objectives: Google Cloud Platform system operations
By the end of this course, you'll know:
How to use Compute Engine to create virtual machines
How to create disk snapshots
How to create images
How to create instance templates and groups
How to create networks
How to use the auto-scaler and load balancer
Intended Audience
This is an intermediate level course because it assumes:
You have at least a basic understanding of the cloud
You’re at least familiar with general IT concepts
What You'll Learn
Summary A review of the course
| Lecture | What you'll learn |
|---|---|
| Intro | What will be covered in this course |
| Getting Started | An introduction to the Google Cloud Platform |
| Networking | How to create and secure Cloud Networks |
| Disks and Images | An overview of disk types and images |
| Authorization and IAM | How to authenticate and authorise users |
| Disk Snapshots | How to use snapshots for point-in-time backups |
| Cloud Storage Overview | A refresher on Cloud Storage |
| Instance Groups | How to manage instances with managed and unmanaged groups |
| Cloud SQL Overview | A quick primer on how to use Cloud SQL |
| Startup and Shutdown Scripts | Using startup scripts to provision machines at boot time |
| Autoscaling | How to automatically add and remove instances |
| Load Balancing | How to balance traffic across instances |
| Putting It All Together | A demo of how to use some of the services we've learned about |
Welcome to the Google Cloud Platform: Systems Operations course. I'm Ben Lambert and I'll be your instructor for this course. The goal of the course is to cover some of the services that are part of Google Cloud's infrastructure as a service options.
Here's what you'll get out of this course. By the end of the course, you should understand how to Compute Engine to create virtual machines, as well as how to create disk snapshots, how to create images, how to create instance templates and groups. And you'll learn how to create networks and how to use the auto scaler and load balancer.
Before you start, there are some assumptions that I've made about you. I assume you're familiar with general IT concepts. Maybe you're a systems administrator or operations engineer looking to expand your skill set to Cloud platforms. I assume you're familiar with the basics of cloud computing as well. If you're not, I recommend that you check out the What is Cloud Computing? course by Stuart Scott. Then follow it up with the Google Cloud Platform: Fundamentals course before continuing.
Okay, here's our agenda for this course. We'll start off with an overview of the platform. We'll move on to cover Compute Engine instances. We'll talk about networking, then we'll talk about disks and images. After that, we're going to cover authorization and IAM. Then, we're going to talk about snapshots. After that, we'll follow it up a review of cloud storage. Then we'll talk about instance groups. We'll cover a crash course on Cloud SQL. Then we'll go through metadata and startup and shutdown scripts. We'll follow that up by auto scaling and load balancing. Then our final lesson is going to put some of these components together into a single demo.
So if this course has piqued your interest, then let's get started with the first lesson.
Ben Lambert is a software engineer and was previously the lead author for DevOps and Microsoft Azure training content at Cloud Academy. His courses and learning paths covered Cloud Ecosystem technologies such as DC/OS, configuration management tools, and containers. As a software engineer, Ben’s experience includes building highly available web and mobile apps. When he’s not building software, he’s hiking, camping, or creating video games.