There 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