Learning Google Cloud Platform on Qwiklabs: Learning Map, Assistive Tool and Tips (2020)
Table of Contents
- What is Qwiklabs
- Visual Map of Qwiklabs GCP Quests
- Custom Tool for Labelling Completed Labs and Quests
- Tips for Preparing a Lab
- See Also 📚
What is Qwiklabs
Qwiklabs is a great online self-paced learning platform for getting hands-on experience of the Google Cloud Platform. It has over 400 hands-on labs and quests to learn and practice. If you are not familiar with Qwiklabs, I suggest you watch this video made by Google Cloud Team to get a rough idea about using Qwiklabs for Hands-on Practice with Google Cloud.
This browser does not support the YouTube video player. Watch on YouTube
After you logged in to Qwiklabs, you can see there are five training categories, i.e.
- Infrastructure & DevOps
- Websites & App Dev
- Big Data
- Machine Learning
- Security, Backup & Recovery
You can start your training based on your goal and purpose, or find the quests for GCP using the filter function available on the Catalog page. Qwiklabs grouped different kinds of labs into 56 quests for learning GCP, and divided them to 4 levels: Introductory, Fundamental, Advanced, and Expert. You may also look for the resources by search, but the results are sorted by relevance rather than an appropriate order for study or learning. As a result, I tried to organise the Qwiklabs quests to be a learning map to trace the connections among them.
Visual Map of Qwiklabs GCP Quests
I spent about three months to take all the Qwiklabs quests for Google Cloud Platform. In the end, I think that there is a need to create a visual map to indicate and understand the relationships between the quests, thereby an easier way for any beginner to seek their desired learning paths. I illustrated the following map by connecting the blocks based on the quest descriptions. You can navigate in the map and click on the boxes to open the corresponding quest webpages.
Learning map for Qwiklabs GCP Quests (keep update)
Custom Tool for Labelling Completed Labs and Quests
As a Qwiklabs user, I found it is messy and damp to lookup unenrolled quests or incompleted labs from the Qwiklabs Catalog page or Search Results (www.qwiklabs.com/catalog). I desired to make a straight-forward way to identify the catalog, by adding a green check-circle next to those completed. So, I tried to develop a solution named “Qwiklabs Lab Completion Tracker”.
The prototyped tool can help you visually identify the completed catalogue items with a green check-circle () showing at the end of a lab or quest title. A demo screenshot is shown below.
For more information, you can read the post “Userscript for Labelling Completed Qwiklabs“.
Tips for Preparing a Lab
Sometimes, you can find examples and tutorials from the Qwiklabs’ blog on Medium (@qwiklabs). Also, you may search for introductive videos from YouTube, such as the Qwiklabs and the Google Cloud Platform channels. The playlist below includes parts of the videos,
This browser does not support the YouTube video player. Watch on YouTube
See Also 📚
Resources:
The Cookbooks of Challenge Quest Series:
- ☁ Google Cloud Essential Skills: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Deploy a Compute Instance with a Remote Startup Script | logbook
- ☁ Configure a Firewall and a Startup Script with Deployment Manager | logbook
- ☁ Configure Secure RDP using a Windows Bastion Host with Terraform | logbook
- ☁ Build and Deploy a Docker Image to a Kubernetes Cluster | logbook
- ☁ Scale Out and Update a Containerized Application on a Kubernetes Cluster | logbook
- ☁ Migrate a MySQL Database to Google Cloud SQL | logbook
The Hints for Challenge Labs 2020:
- ☁ Create and Manage Cloud Resources: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Deploy and Manage Cloud Environments with Google Cloud: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Perform Foundational Infrastructure Tasks in Google Cloud: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Deploy to Kubernetes in Google Cloud: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Build a Website on Google Cloud: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Automate Interactions with Contact Center AI: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Set up and Configure a Cloud Environment in Google Cloud: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Build and Secure Networks in Google Cloud: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Insights from Data with BigQuery: Challenge Lab (COVID-19 Open Data) | logbook
- ☁ Perform Foundational Data, ML, and AI Tasks in Google Cloud: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Build and Manage APIs with Apigee: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Engineer Data in Google Cloud: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Explore Machine Learning Models with Explainable AI: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Integrate with Machine Learning APIs: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Implement DevOps in Google Cloud: Challenge Lab” | logbook
- ☁ Build and Optimize Data Warehouses with BigQuery: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Ensure Access & Identity in Google Cloud: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Optimize Costs for Google Kubernetes Engine: Challenge Lab | logbook
- ☁ Serverless Firebase Development: Challenge Lab | logbook
Quizzes Answers:
