GoogleCloudReady Facilitator Program

10 min readApr 1, 2021

What is GoogleCloudReady Facilitator program?
The GoogleCloudReady Facilitator program will provide you an opportunity to become a mentor (“Facilitator”) for your peers so that they can explore cloud computing as a career and thus become #GoogleCloudReady.

The GoogleCloudReady Facilitator program will provide you an opportunity to kickstart your career in cloud and get hands on practice on Google Cloud — the tool that powers apps like Google Search, Gmail and YouTube.

Along the way, you will learn & practice concepts like computing, application development, big data & machine learning using cloud & if you get stuck, you will have your “Facilitators” who are specially trained on Google Cloud to help.

First we need to fill the interest form for the GoogleCloudReady Facilitator program.

What is the eligibility criteria for enrolling in the program?

You need to meet these requirements if you want enroll in the program:

You need to have access to a working internet connection & a laptop with latest chrome browser.
You need to be above 18 years of age and enrolled in an higher education institution in India.
You need to be a student in the institutions selected by Google or must have been referred by any of the “Facilitators” that are part of the program.

Why should I enroll in the program?

There are a lot of things in store for you. We want to make sure that by the end of this program:

1. You can showcase what you’ve learned here to your professional network using Google Cloud-hosted quest & skill badges (see below) that you can add to your resume and professional profiles like LinkedIn. 🏆

2. And on top of these amazing badges, get a chance to win some really cool Google Cloud goodies. 💪

Program’s Syllabus

The program will introduce you to Computing, Application Development, Big Data & Machine Learning using Google Cloud’s training platform called Qwiklabs where you will learn each of these topic using self-paced labs that provides you temporary credentials to Google Cloud Platform, so you can learn the cloud using the real thing — no simulations.

For convenience, we have divided the topics above into 3 different tracks — starting from the most basic.

Let us get into the details,

As, we all know that Cloud is a booming technology these days and the IT companies across the globe are shifting their traditional infrastructure to the cloud. So, that shift is generating a higher demand for the cloud engineers. Now, using the resources which will be provided to you, you can learn about GCP services and become eligible for such positions.

As you guys are currently in your university phase which means that you have a strong theoretical knowledge. But in order to launch your careers you need to have certain industry skills.

To get those industry skills, you can begin your journey with the #GoogleCloudReady Facilitator program. Let me tell you how your program journey would look like.

You will start first start with the Google Cloud Study Jams where we will conduct your training. In Cloud Study Jams, we will give you an introduction to some basics of Google Cloud and will also provide you with an headstart to each of the 3 tracks that you are supposed to do in the program. In each session, we will cover some hand-on practice labs and during the end we will set you on the path where you can earn your Qwiklabs quest badges for the each track in the #GoogleCloudReady Facilitator program.

After completing all the 3 tracks, you can then go and onboard your peers in your institution so that you can help them start their journey to cloud. You will help them deep dive into what you have already learned and get them to complete their quests on Qwiklabs, just like you did.

Upon successful completion of the program, you would have learned the necessary technical & soft skills that any company/organisation is looking for like leadership, program management, problem solving, team building & much more.

Also, depending upon the milestones that you achieved, you will be awarded with a “Certificate of Appreciation” directly from Google that you can add to your resume as well as some really amazing Google Cloud goodies! Your peers, who participate in the program, will also get goodies for certain milestones that they achieve in the program.

Let us see the contents of the program

Let’s go over each track one by one.

First track that we in the program is the “Cloud Infrastructure” track. By completing the quests under the cloud infrastructure track, you will learn and demonstrate proficiency in key infrastructure topics to prepare for careers in cloud IT and DevOps. We have a total of 10 quests & 8 skill badges under this track and you will be doing the first one today i.e. Google Cloud Essentials.

Also alongside the quest badges that you will earn after completing them from each track, you have a chance of earning something extra i.e. Google Cloud Skill Badges. Skill badges are used to show that you have actually applied your new learned skills using a challenge lab at the end where you have to take your new learned skills for a test drive.

After you acquire them, do remember to add them on your resume and professional profiles and share it with your network to prove that you have the in-demand skills.

Here are all the skill badges that are part of the program and that you can earn in different tracks. We have a total of 8 skills badges!

Once you complete all the quests & the skill badges, this is what you profile would look like. You would have earned all of these amazing badges issued by Google Cloud which you can share with your network and add to your resume and professional profiles and showcase that you have the necessary skills and hands on practice on Google Cloud.

What is the difference between a Qwiklabs Quest & a Google Cloud Skill Badge?

A Qwikalbs quest is basically a group of labs using which you can learn and practice the concepts of Google Cloud on GCP. Whereas a Skill Badge for that quest, will help you test the skills that you have learned through a challenge lab.

Let us discuss about the Study JAMs

So what exactly is a Cloud Study jam session?

In these sessions, we get an intro to the GoogleCloudReady Facilitator program. Then some of the fundamentals of the Google Cloud will be covered and we’ll also be introduced to few of the services on it. As, these are hands on learning/training events for us so we’ll also be implementing those services on the Google Cloud training platform called Qwiklabs.

The learning opportunities with Google Cloud are a great way to prepare for cloud careers. What’s possible with cloud? Let’s look at an example that we are all likely familiar with.

There are three main types of cloud-based services:

Infrastructure as a service:

Infrastructure includes raw resources such as a virtual machine, networking, storage and more. These resources are the fundamental building blocks of cloud computing.

When you consume infrastructure as a service (IaaS) you have greater control over the resources but also greater management overhead. For example, consider a virtual machine. You need to install, upgrade, and patch all the software required to run your application. You can configure your virtual machines to scale based on the load on your application.

Google Compute Engine, networking, and load balancers are examples of IaaS.

Platform as a service:

Platform as a service (PaaS) provides a platform with managed services where runtime environment and network settings are pre-configured. This makes it easier for you to develop and deploy your application.

Google App Engine is an example of PaaS. Google App Engine comes pre-configured with runtimes for Java, Python, Node.js, and more. Software upgrades and patches are automatically applied. Load balancing is also pre-configured. This enables the developer to focus on the application logic only instead of worrying about infrastructure setup.

Software as a service:

With Software as a service (SaaS), entire applications are managed and made available in cloud environment. Gmail is an example of a SaaS.

Consider the infrastructure needed for an online game. You can use Google Cloud services to store:

Object data such as image and video files
High-volume or semi-structured data such as streaming or game data
Relational data such as user id, name and so on

There are multiple options such as Kubernetes Engine for your application runtime environment. This is where your application code executes.

You can also build apps which use other services like Google Maps and YouTube.

With cloud-based services, you don’t have to set up and manage your own infrastructure. You can simply focus on developing your app and then use managed cloud services to make it available globally in just a few minutes!

Now it’s time to introduce you to our hands on learning platform, Qwiklabs.

Qwiklabs provides lab learning environments that help developers and IT professionals get hands-on experience working with leading cloud platforms and software. Qwiklabs labs are hands-on labs. A hands-on lab is an online learning environment along with a set of instructions to walk you through a live, real world, and scenario-based use case. In a lab you have access to the actual environment you want to learn about, not a simulation or demo environment. You can access the lab environment from anywhere on the Internet using a standard browser.

Most labs require credits to access, but there are a number of free introductory labs available as well.

Qwiklabs does not provide any official certificate regarding lab completion. However, you can earn badges by completing Qwiklabs Quests.

Incognito window makes it easier for you to understand the whole process from scratch.

If this is the first time you are hearing about Qwiklabs and don’t have an account yet, then click on “Join” and create one now. You can use your Google Account as well to sign up.