Greetings. Welcome to Cloud Academy's course on configuring a Google Cloud Platform solution. I'm delighted you've decided to join me on what is bound to be an educational and exciting adventure into the world of Google Cloud. First, let me begin by introducing myself. My name is Jonathan, I'm one of the course developers with Cloud Academy. I worked professionally as a technical consultant specializing in DevOps data engineering and security. Now, long ago in another life, I was actually a public school teacher so I love education and teaching and I am thrilled to be teaching again, only now teaching technology.

This course is designed to be very practical. It's meant for technology professionals, developers data architects, CTOs, that kind of thing, and the goal is really to help 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.

Now, to earn this certificate you need a good general knowledge of GCP Google Cloud Platform: the different solutions, how to configure them. You'll also need to be able to use both the GCP web console and the command line.

Now, this course will focus mainly on the console since it's more of an introductory course but we will also do some work with the command line tools in the video demonstrations. I want to stress, though, that this course will not cover everything that you need for the Associate Cloud Engineer exam. There are five core areas of study in that exam and as you can see from the exam guide, this course is meant to focus on area 2: Planning and Configuring a Google Cloud Solution.

So then, you're probably wondering what are the prerequisites for a course like this. What do you need to already know to be successful in this class? Well, the answer is not that much. You should have some general knowledge of computers and the concept of the cloud, you know, you should know what a data center is, what is a virtual machine, and understand just the basic concept of hosting, you know, hosting infrastructure as a service. You don't need to be a programmer but it definitely will help if you have some knowledge of software development. You know, this will help you to appreciate what each of the GCP products actually does. I also recommend having some basic networking knowledge, things like HTTP and SSL. Knowing what those are will help you to understand the GCP networking products better. So basically, if you've been working around technology for a while, you're probably fine. If you're a moderately tech-savvy adult, you should be fine.

So let's get more specific. What are the actual learning objectives for this course? So in this course, there are three main takeaways related to GCP. One: the student will learn to deploy and configure Google Cloud compute resources and understand the differences between each service. Two: the student will learn to deploy and configure Google Cloud storage resources and understand the differences between each service, and then, three: the student will learn to deploy and configure Google Cloud network resources and understand the differences between each service. And you notice a pattern there obviously. In this course, we're focusing on three things— compute, storage, network—all in the context of Google Cloud. The lesson content is therefore divided into three sections corresponding to these topics. Now, if you master these three fields deeply, computing, storage, and networking, then you will have all the tools you need to be, you know, comfortable as an infrastructure developer on GCP.

One last thing though 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 to do that. Now, without further ado, let's get started.