Want to Code for the Cloud? Get Started with the Native App Development Track
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Earlier this year, we launched the Google Cloud skills challenge, which provides 30 days of free access to training to build your cloud knowledge and an opportunity to earn skill badges that showcase your Google Cloud competencies. Today, we’re adding a Native App Development track to the skills challenge, joining the Getting Started, Data Analytics, Kubernetes, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tracks.
The Native App Development track is designed for cloud developers who want to learn to build serverless web apps and Google Assistant applications on Google Cloud using Cloud Run and Firebase. Specifically, you’ll have an opportunity to earn three skill badges in the Native App Dev track: Serverless Firebase Development, Serverless Cloud Run Development, and Build Interactive Apps with Google Assistant. To earn a skill badge, you complete a series of hands-on labs and take a final assessment challenge lab to test your skills.
Here’s an overview of each badge.
Serverless Firebase Development
To earn this skill badge, you’ll learn how to build serverless web apps, import data into a serverless database, and build Google Assistant applications using Firebase, Google’s backend-as-service platform for creating mobile and web applications.
Serverless Cloud Run Development
For this badge, you’ll discover how to use Cloud Run, a fully managed serverless platform, to connect and leverage data stored in Cloud Storage. You’ll learn how to use Cloud Run to build a resilient, asynchronous system with Pub/Sub, build a REST API gateway as well as build and expose services.
Build Interactive Apps with Google Assistant
To earn the final skills badge, you’ll build Google Assistant applications by creating a project in the Actions console, integrating Dialogflow, testing your action in the Actions simulator, and adding Cloud Translation API to your assistant application.
Ready to jump into the skills challenge? Sign up here.
You can also check out this quick video below to learn how to join the skills challenge.
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The Inside Story of How Home Depot Migrated to Google BigQuery From an On-prem DW Solution
In the media, you will often hear story of how born-in-the-cloud companies manage with massive infrastructure.
But it is one thing is to be a startup, and build infrastructure with bespoke requirements. And quite another to have a complex, multinational organization with online, with mobile, with brick-and-mortar presence, and hundreds of thousands of SKUs and professional services, and many, many years of technology, innovation, and really smart engineers.
This is the second story. The story of how The Home Depot, the number-one home improvement retailer in the US pulled of that feat.
The Home Depot has over 2,200 stores, over 4 lakh associates, and 2017 revenues of over a $100 billion.
In this video, Rick Ramaker, technology director, data analytics at The Home Depot, and Kevin Scholz, distinguished engineer, The Home Depot, talk about how the company transformed and modernised its data warehousing, the challenges they faced and the benefits they accrued from the project.
It’s a fascinating watch!
Google Introduces Cloud Career Jump Start Certification for the U.S. Underrepresented Communities
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It’s no question that the cloud computing industry is booming and cloud experts are in high demand. In 2020, 67 percent of organizations surveyed in the IDG Cloud Computing Report added new cloud roles and functions (source).
So there are plenty of cloud jobs out there, but if you don’t have years of experience, you might find it difficult to get one. This is especially true for members of underrepresented communities, who face other kinds of systemic barriers in education and employment.
To help meet this demand and democratize opportunity, Google Cloud is introducing its first virtual Certification Journey Learning program for underrepresented communities across the United States—Cloud Career Jump Start. The program is free of charge for participants, and includes technical and professional skill development and resources with an aim to provide a readiness path to certification via the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Exam.
Google Cloud’s Certification Journey Learning Program
The program offers free access to the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer training, which provides support preparations for the Certification Exam. This industry-recognized certification helps job applicants validate their cloud expertise, elevate their career, and transform businesses with Google Cloud technology. Learn more about the exam by watching the Certification Prep: Associate Cloud Engineer webinar.
Designed specifically for Computer Science or Information Systems-related majors (or relevant experience), the 12-week program offers:
- Exclusive free access to Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer-related training to support preparations for the Certification Exam.
- Guided progress through the certification prep training on Qwiklabs.
- Office hours hosted by Google Cloud technical experts.
- Technical workshops, including sessions with Googlers who earned cloud industry certifications and have built impactful careers in cloud tech, such as Google Cloud’s Kelsey Hightower (a Principal Developer Advocate) and Jewel Langevine (a Solution Engineer).
Earn your Associate Cloud Engineer Certification
Curious if you qualify to apply for the program? We’ve put together a guide below to help:
- What does an associate cloud engineer do? Associate Cloud Engineers deploy applications, monitor operations, and manage enterprise solutions. They also use the Google Cloud Console and the command-line interface to perform common platform-based tasks, to maintain one or more deployed solutions that leverage Google-managed or self-managed services on Google Cloud.
- Who’s eligible? We are encouraging applicants from groups that have been historically underrepresented in tech including Black, Latinx, Native American & Indigenous communities. Applicants should have six or more months of hands-on experience in a Computer Information Systems-related major, and/or relevant experience through online courses, boot camps, hackathons or internships. Although the ability to program is not required, familiarity with the following IT concepts is highly recommended: virtual machines, operating systems, storage and file systems, networking, databases, programming, and working with Linux at the command line.
How do you know if you are ready for the program?
To get an idea of what the program will cover:
- Watch the Certification Prep: Associate Cloud Engineer webinar
- Complete the Skill IQ Assessment via Pluralsight
- Review the Associate Cloud Engineer Certification Exam Guide
- Take the Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Exam
Jump start a career in cloud infrastructure and technology
Following the hands-on training, Google Cloud will offer an additional 9 months of career development resources and activities. This includes an online support community, mentoring with Googlers & partners including SADA, EPAM Systems Inc., and Slalom, resume and interviewing support from Google Recruiting & Staffing, and additional career workshops. We are also partnering with a number of Black-owned and -operated, nonprofit and cloud training organizations like Kura Labs.
Cloud certifications open doors
Want to hear more about this program from two Googlers who completed it? We asked Kelsey and Jewel to share more on how certifications helped them launch their careers in the cloud industry:
- “IT certifications introduced me to the game; opportunities and hard work helped me change it.” – Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate, Google Cloud Platform
- “Becoming certified as a cloud computing professional combined with prayer, networking, and practice has kept me moving on my purposeful and rewarding career path as an engineer.” – Jewel Langevine, Solution Engineer, Google Cloud Solutions Studio
Kelsey and Jewel’s wisdom doesn’t end there. They play a central role in the program, sharing more about how they navigated certifications and leveraged them for success.
Apply today to Cloud Career Jump Start
The program is now live in the United States, with plans to expand to other regions in the coming months. It is completely virtual, and all training is on-demand so that participants can access their coursework anytime, anywhere via the web or mobile device. To determine whether you (or someone you know) would be a great fit for the Cloud Career Jump Start, check out our guidelines and apply.
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Many organizations are looking to the public cloud to solve on-premises infrastructure challenges. These range from capacity constraints, aging hardware, or reliability issues; or alternatively, organizations may be looking to capitalize on the value that cloud infrastructure can bring – saving money through automatic scaling, or deriving business value from large scale, cloud-native approaches to data processing and analytics.
However, moving to the cloud can be a complex and time-consuming journey. An inefficient migration program can significantly reduce the benefits realized from the migration, and a pure lift-and-shift approach can leave you with similar challenges and costs in the cloud as you were trying to escape from on-premises.
In this whitepaper, we outline Google’s approach to building a Migration Factory – an organization structure and set of processes that enable a fast, efficient migration to the cloud. We don’t presume that this is a team of Googlers coming to deliver your migration. We recommend building a blended team of people with the right skills and understanding of your organization, with clearly defined goals that are closely measured through the life of the program.
Intel-Google Collaboration Brings Edge Computing on Factory Floors: Hannover Messe 2022
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The typical smart factory is said to produce around 5 petabytes of data per week. That’s equivalent to 5 million gigabytes, or roughly 20,000 smartphones.
Managing such vast amounts of data in one facility, let alone a global organization, would be challenging enough. Doing so on the factory floor, in near-real-time, to drive insights, enhancements, and particularly safety, is a big dream for leading manufacturers. And for many, it’s becoming a reality, thanks to the possibilities unlocked with edge computing.
Edge computing brings computation, connectivity, and data closer to where the information is generated, enabling better data control, faster insights, and actions. Taking advantage of edge computing requires the hardware and software to collect, process, and analyze data locally to enable better decisions and improve operations.
At Hannover Messe 2022, Intel and Google Cloud will demonstrate a new technology implementation that combines the latest generation of Intel processors with Google Cloud’s data and AI expertise to optimize production operations from edge to cloud. This proof-of-concept project is powered by the Edge Insights for Industrial platform (EII), an industry-specific platform from Intel; and a pair of Google Cloud solutions: Anthos, Google Cloud’s managed applications platform, and the newly-launched Manufacturing Data Engine.
Edge computing exploits the untapped gold mine of data sitting on-site and is expected to grow rapidly. The Linux Foundation’s “2021 State of the Edge” predicts that by 2025, edge-related devices will produce roughly 90 zettabytes of data. Edge computing can help provide greater data privacy and security, and can accomodate the reduced bandwidth needs between local storage and the cloud.
Imagine a world in which the power of big data and AI-driven data analytics is available at the point where the data is gathered to inform, make, and implement decisions in near real-time.
This could be anywhere on the factory floor, from a welding station to a painting operation or more. Data would be collected by monitoring robotic welders, for example, and analyzed by industrial PCs (IPCs) located at the factory edge. These edge IPCs would detect when the welders are starting to go off spec, predicting increased defect rates even before they appear, and adding preventive maintenance to correct the errors without any direct intervention. Real time, predictive analytics using AI could substantially prevent defects before they happen. Or the same IPCs could use digital cameras for visual inspection to monitor and identify defects in real-time, allowing them to be addressed quickly.
Edge computing has powerful potential applications in assisting with data gathering, processing, storage and analysis in many manufacturing sectors, including automotive, semiconductor and electronics manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods. Whether modeling and analysis is done and stored locally or in the cloud, or is predictive, simultaneous, or lagged, technology providers are aligning to meet these needs. This is the new world of edge computing.
The joint Intel and Google Cloud proof of concept aims to extend the Google Cloud capabilities and solutions to the edge. Intel’s full breadth of industrial solutions, hardware and software, are coming together in this edge-ready solution, encompassing Google Cloud industry-leading tools. The concept shortens the time to insights, streamlining data analytics and AI at the edge.
The Intel-Google Cloud proof of concept demonstrates how manufacturers can gather and analyze data from over 250 factory devices using Manufacturing Connect from Google Cloud, providing a powerful platform to run data ingestion and AI analytics at the edge.
In this demonstration in Hannover, Intel and Google Cloud show how manufacturers can capture time-series data from robotic welders to inspect welding quality and show how predictive analytics can benefit the factory operators. In addition, the video and image data is captured from a factory camera to show how visual inspection can highlight anomalies on plastic chips with model scoring. The demo also features zero-touch device onboarding using FIDO Device Onboard (FDO) to illustrate the ease with which additional computers could be added to the existing Anthos cluster.
By combining Google Cloud’s expertise in data, AI/ML and Intel’s Edge Insight’s for Industrial platform that was optimized to run on Google Anthos, manufacturers can run and manage their containerized applications at the edge, in on-premise data center, or in public clouds using an efficient and secure connection to the Manufacturing Data Engine from Google Cloud. It forges a complete edge-to-cloud solution.
Simplified device onboarding is available using Fido Device Onboard (FDO)—an open IoT protocol that brings fast, secure, and scalable zero-touch onboarding of new IoT devices to the edge. FDO allows factories to easily deploy automation and intelligence in their environment without introducing complexity into their OT infrastructure.
The Intel-Google Cloud implementation can analyze that data using localized Intel or third-party AI and machine learning algorithms. Applications can be layered on the Intel hardware and Anthos ecosystem, allowing customized data monitoring and ingestion, data management and storage, modeling, and analytics. This joint PoC facilitates and support improved decision making and operations, whether automated or triggered by the engineers on the front lines.
Intel collaborates with a vibrant ecosystem of leading hardware partners to develop solutions for the industrial market by using the latest generation of Intel processors. These processors can run data intensive workloads at the edge with ease.
Putting data and AI directly into the hands of manufacturing engineers can improve quality inspection loops, customer satisfaction, and ultimately the bottom line.
The new manufacturing solutions will be demonstrated in person for the first time at Hannover Messe 2022, May 30–June 2, 2022. Visit us at Stand E68, Hall 004, or schedule a meeting for an onsite demonstration with our experts.
Google and NetApp Partnership Expansion to Ease Customers’ Cloud Migration
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As organizations continue to evolve to meet the needs of their stakeholders, they are increasingly looking to adopt the cloud and digitally transform their business. Since our partnership with NetApp began in 2018, we’ve been focused on delivering the infrastructure, tools, and services to help customers on their cloud migration journey and benefit from their data to better serve their customers.
“Customers are looking to adopt flexible and scalable solutions that meet the needs of their business,” said Ronen Schwartz, SVP & GM, Cloud Volumes, NetApp. “Our long-standing partnership with Google Cloud continues to deliver innovative solutions for customers as they look to migrate and run their business critical applications in the cloud while unlocking the power of their data with industry-leading cloud services.”
Innovative, industry-first solutions have become the standard for our partnership. From the general availability of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) for Google Cloud in 2019, to our collaboration on new architectures in 2020 with the release of the software-defined CVS powered by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), we continue to deliver first-of-its-kind enterprise file storage services together. In 2021, the pace of innovation has only increased—together, we delivered volume replication powered by SnapMirror, which efficiently copies volume data from one Google Cloud region to another for data consistency, development, testing, or disaster recovery.
We’ve also made our services available globally—you can now run Cloud Volumes ONTAP in all 28 Google Cloud regions, and CVS is now available in 19 regions, allowing you to access our services wherever you are around the globe. All of this is backed up by a 99.99% SLA for CVS, enabling high availability for your enterprise workloads.
Hundreds of customers including MailerLite, a leader in marketing automation, have benefitted from our joint services. MailerLite was looking to move millions of files to the cloud without disruption as they were facing availability, management, and maintenance challenges as their business scaled. By leveraging NetApp CVS on Google Cloud, MailerLite was able to migrate over 100 million files to Google Cloud in about an hour, removing their ongoing infrastructure overhead, saving developer hours, and eliminating the scalability limitations they previously experienced.
Expanding our partnership
Last week at Google Cloud Next ‘21, we announced we are expanding our strategic partnership in two ways to make it even easier for customers to migrate and run business critical applications on Google Cloud. First, NetApp will provide storage infrastructure for the newly announced Google Distributed Cloud Hosted, where data resides in customer-owned data centers and colocation facilities. This enables a safe and secure way to modernize an on-premises deployment while still meeting data security and privacy requirements.
Additionally, for customers looking to migrate their VMware workloads to Google Cloud, we announced preview access for NetApp Cloud Volumes as datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine. By providing customers with the choice to scale compute and storage independently, customers can now reduce costs and complexity when migrating and running storage-bound workloads. This also allows customers to address regional disaster recovery use cases, making it easier and more cost-effective to move on-premises workloads into Google Cloud. To get started, you can sign up for preview access using the Registration for Preview Access form.
Looking forward
We’re excited for what’s to come with our partnership and committed to delivering value to customers across industries. Google Cloud is a Gold sponsor at this week’s NetApp Insight, and we invite you to join our spotlight session featuring Google Cloud and NetApp leaders. Additionally, we are leading multiple breakout sessions where you will hear from our product team on how you can accelerate cloud adoption with Google Cloud and NetApp. You can also learn more and get started today by visiting our NetApp on Google Cloud website.
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