The Cloud is a warzone

get headed to your BEAST

The Cloud is a dangerous place, especially if you’re parachuting in without any idea of where your LZ is. Although chances of you getting trapped in barbed wire or even getting shot are slim, there are quite some aspects that could potentially have a big impact.

One of the biggest advantages of the Cloud is global scale, spinning up an immense load of compute power in only a few seconds and only paying for the load you’re using.

The downside of that is that if you’re not familiar with Kubernetes, you might end up spinning up a massive amounts of pods for your Hello World, let alone leave them running for a week. Your CFO will not appreciate it. Although mistakes do happen, a decently prepared soldier would have enabled Billing Alerts.

Now imagine your client is a bank which has the requirement of keeping its data in a specific geographic location. You better know the differences between Global, Regional and Zonal resources, or you’re going to have a bad time when audits are coming up.

Google Cloud has the best global network

By now you should be convinced that proper training is not optional. And what better way to do it right, than having Google verifying your knowledge. Recently, Google has launched 2 new certification programs to get certified on GCP, just have a look:

Google Certified Professional – Cloud Architect (Just came out of Beta!)
Google Certified Professional – Data Engineer (in Beta at time of writing)

While getting your hands dirty with the tutorials, exploring GitHub projects and watching some YouTube videos is a good start, there is also a broad range of trainings available.

Fourcast was one of the first Google Cloud Partners to have its engineers certified

At Fourcast, being a Google Cloud Partner, we focus on bringing our GCP expertise to our customers all over Europe. People should enjoy the Cloud, preferably Google Cloud, and having all of our people trained and certified will definitely add to the reliability and security of our solutions. That’s why we were among the first to successfully complete the Cloud Architect exam during it’s beta phase (still waiting on the Data Engineer results!). Although I had my brain picked with almost 100 questions in 4 hours, and came out of the examination center totally stupefied, I’m happy to have been able to contribute to this complete new program of Google Cloud Certification.

getting certified means cool stickers

Eager to start? During Next 17 (March 8-10th, San Francisco), Google made some major announcements. To learn more, join us on March 28th at Google Brussels for the Infrastructure event of the year.

Written by Niels Buekers

This post belongs to a series of blogs in response to Google’s yearly conference in San Francisco, March 8-10th. Stay tuned for more.