Hello and welcome to the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Exam Preparation Learning Path.  The focus of this learning path is to prepare you for taking the corresponding DevOps Exam.  However, the information presented will also be useful to anyone interested in implementing DevOps practices on Google Cloud Platform.

My name is Daniel Mease and I'll be taking you through this course.  I am a GCP instructor at Cloud Academy with over 5 years of cloud experience and 15 years of software development experience.

The Google Cloud DevOps exam tests your knowledge of five key areas:

1. Applying site reliability engineering principles to a service
2. Building and implementing CI/CD pipelines for a service
3. Implementing service monitoring strategies
4. Optimizing service performance
5. Managing service incidents

Before diving in, you need to be somewhat familiar with the main services on Google Cloud Platform.  You also should understand containers and have at least a little experience using Docker.  And of course, you should already be familiar with what “DevOps” is and understand the software development lifecycle.

For the first section, there are a few courses that will provide you with some needed background information.  You will learn about Site Reliability Engineering and how it can help you implement DevOps practices.  We also give you an introduction to Kubernetes, and present how to deploy applications.

For the second section, you will learn all about build and deploy pipelines.  Topics include: how to build them, how to secure them, along with deployment strategies and best practices.  You will also learn how to use infrastructure as code to easily manage your cloud resources.

The third section is about monitoring and responding to issues.  We cover how to enable logging and start collecting metrics.  We also demonstrate how to use that data to perform analysis, build dashboards, and create alerts.  And because your logs are constantly growing, we will also show you how to secure, maintain, and archive everything.

The fourth section is focused on optimization, and here we have courses that will help you maximize performance while simultaneously minimizing costs.  You will learn how to identify your current resource utilization to help eliminate waste.  You will also learn about the various options for price discounts, and when you should use them.  And then we cover how to identify bottlenecks in your systems and how to mitigate or eliminate them.

For the last section, we have a course that will cover how best to respond to any service incidents.

So, if you are ready, let's get started!

To get to the next course, click on the learning path pullout menu on the left side of the page.  And remember to rate this introduction before you go on to the next course.