I’ve just finished prematurely the Sprint after 9 days of struggling with Google Cloud solutions. During this time, I managed to complete one course and earn a badge available for viewing on my public profile. After that I tried several times to complete the challenge in the path “Create and Manage Cloud Resources” but all my attempts failed. Then I decided to stop the Sprint and switch to learning other technologies.
What I learnt:
- How to create and manage virtual machines in Google Cloud
- How to use both Cloud Shell and gcloud to perform different operations
- What is Google Kubernetes Engine and how to create a Kubernetes cluster
- How to configure network and HTTP load balancers
What are the reasons of my failure:
- The courses in Google Cloud Skills Boost initiative are based on examples, sometimes without thorough explanation of the commands.
- The commands (e.g. gcloud) are really comprehensive and thus complicated. It is really hard to troubleshoot encountered problems when you don’t have a strong knowledge of the system.
- Last time I worked on Linux machines was more than 10 years ago. To be able to successfully configure and use Google Cloud resources, I should have a much better understanding of Linux.
Now I want to focus on SQL and Python, as I think (after my first experiences with cloud technologies) that they will be more adequate to a tester’s job.
What to change for future sprints:
- Focus more on one technology selected as a Sprint Goal.
- Select technologies to learn based on current job advertisements and available tester’s checklists.