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, Elastic Beanstalk on AWS, and Azure App Services, among others.

However, there are still plenty of times where you’ll need to setup your own infrastructure. And so cloud vendors offer IaaS (infrastructure as a service) options. Google offers Compute Engine which allows you to create virtual machines, custom virtual machine images, disk snapshots, networks, auto-scalers and load balancers.

If you’re going to create and implement an application on the Google Cloud Platform, then understanding these services will help you 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, then this may be the learning path for you.

What's Covered in Qualified Systems Operations Professional learning path?

Google Cloud Platform: Fundamentals

Google Cloud Platform: Fundamentals - Review Quiz

Google Cloud Platform: Systems Operations

Google Cloud Platform: Systems Operations - Review Quiz

If you have questions or want to share your own experience, our cloud experts will help you in our community forums.

So if you’re looking to learn about the Google Cloud Platform and Systems Operations Professional, click on the first course and get started!