Greetings, welcome to Cloud Academy's course on managing Google Cloud Kubernetes and App Engine Resources. I'm delighted to have you join me in what is bound to be an educational and exciting adventure into the world of Google Cloud development.

First, I'll let you know a bit about myself, before I get into the course outline. My name is Jonathan. I'm one of the course developers with Cloud Academy. I'm a former high school teacher turned technical consultant specializing in DevOps and data engineering. It's a pleasure to get back into the world of teaching, only now talking about technology.

This course is designed to be very practical. It is meant for technology professionals, developers, data architects, CTOs, etc. With the goal of helping them get a solid understanding of how to build infrastructure using Google Cloud services. This course will also help you to prepare for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer Certification exam.

So you may be wondering what the prerequisites are for a course like this. What do you need to already know to be successful in this class? Well a few things. For one, you should have some familiarity with Google Cloud Platform. This course assumes you know basically what GKE and App Engine and Compute Engine are. You should also be comfortable working with command line tools and in a web console. You don't need to be an expert programmer you don't need years of experience working with GCP or AWS or something similar, however, general knowledge of what cloud providers do is helpful as this course will not cover rudimentary concepts such as, "What is a VM?"

So now let's talk learning objectives. In this course, there are two main takeaways related to Google Cloud Platform. Number one, the student will learn how to manage and configure GCP Kubernetes Engine resources. And number two, the student will learn how to manage and configure GCP App Engine resources.

In short, this course covers GCP compute services related to Kubernetes and serverless architectures, specifically GKE, and App Engine. This might seem familiar if you took an earlier course, Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution, which also covers these topics but the difference here is that the learning objectives in that earlier course was just deploying and configuring, whereas the material was more of an overview because of that.

In this course, we're going to go deeper. If you have zero familiarity with GCP we definitely recommend taking the Planning and Configuring course first. That will more gently introduce you to these compute services. This course, by contrast, will assume that you have a basic understanding of the different services and will instead serve as a deep dive on how to actually manage these systems. By the end of this course, you should be truly ready to be responsible for a GCP environment, specifically App Engine and Kubernetes Engine. You're not just clicking through a wizard and hoping for the best.

So, one last thing before we start, I want to encourage everyone to leave feedback. Email support@cloudacademy.com if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, concerns. We always appreciate people taking the time. And so now without further ado, let's get started.