Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Course - Pass the Exam!

0:00 hey this is anthony tavelos your cloud instructor at exam pro bringing you a complete study course for the google cloud associate cloud engineer made available to you here on free code camp and so this course is designed to help you pass and achieve google issued certification the way we're going to do that is to go through lots of lecture content follow alongs and using my cheat sheets on the day of the exam so you pass and you can take that certification and put it on your resume or linkedin so you can get that cloud job or promotion that you've been looking for and so a bit about me is that i have 18

0:45 years industry experience seven of it specializing in cloud and four years of that as a cloud trainer i previously been a cloud and devops engineer and i've also published multiple cloud courses and i'm a huge fan of the cartoon looney tunes as well as a coffee connoisseur and so i wanted to take a moment to thank viewers like you because you make these free courses possible and so if you're looking for more ways of supporting more free courses just like this one the best way is to buy the extra study material at co example.com in particular for this certification you can find it at gcp

1:31 hyphen ace there you can get study notes flash cards quizlets downloadable lectures which are the slides to all the lecture videos downloadable cheat sheets which by the way are free if you just go sign up practice exams and you can also ask questions and get learning support and if you want to keep up to date with new courses i'm working on the best way is to follow me on twitter at antony's cloud and i'd love to hear from you if you passed your exam and also i'd love to hear on what you'd like to see next [Music] welcome back

2:16 in this lesson i wanted to quickly go over how to access the course resources now the resources in this course are designed to accompany the lessons and help you understand not just the theory but to help with the demo lessons that really drive home the component of hands-on learning these will include study notes lesson files scripts as well as resources that are used in the demo lessons these files can be found in a github repository that i will be including below that are always kept up-to-date and it is through these files that you will be able to follow along and complete the demos on your own to really cement the knowledge learned

3:01 it's a fairly simple process but varies through the different operating systems i'll be going through this demo to show you how to obtain access through the three major operating systems being windows mac os and ubuntu linux so i'm first going to begin with windows and the first step would be to open up the web browser and browse to this url which i will include in the notes below and this is the course github repository which will house all the course files that i have mentioned before keeping the course up to date will mean that files may need to be changed and so as i update them they will always be reflected and uploaded here in the repo

3:49 so getting back to it there are two ways to access this repository so the easiest way to obtain a copy of these files will be to click on the clone or download button and click on download zip once the file has been downloaded you can then open it up by clicking on it here and here are the files here in downloads and this will give you a snapshot of all the files and folders as you see them from this repository now although this may seem like the simple way to go this is not the recommended method to download as if any files have changed you will not be up to date with the latest files and will only be current from the date at which you've

4:34 downloaded them now the way that is recommended is using a source control system called git and so the easiest way to install it would be to go to this url https colon forward slash forward slash git dash scm.com and this will bring you to the git website where you can download the necessary software for windows or any other supported operating system and so i'm going to download it here and this should download the latest version of git for windows and it took a few seconds there but it is done and no need to worry about whether or not you've got the proper version usually when you click that download

5:21 button it will download the latest version for your operating system so i'm going to go over here and open this up you'll get a prompt where you would just say yes and we're going to go ahead and accept all the defaults here this is where it's going to install it let's hit next these are all the components that they're going to be installed let's click on next and again we're going to go through everything with all the defaults and once we've reached installing all the defaults it's gonna take a couple minutes to install and again it took a minute or so we're going to just click on next

6:07 and it's going to ask if you want to view the release notes and we don't really need those so we can click on ok and simply close that and we're just going to go over and see if git is installed we're going to run the command prompt and i'm going to just zoom in here so we can see a little better and there we go and we are just going to type in git and as you can see it's been installed and so now that we've installed git we want to be able to pull down all the folders and the files within them from the repository to our local system and so i'm just going to clear the screen here and we're going to do a cd to make sure

6:53 that i'm in my home directory and then we're going to make a directory called repos and in order to do that we're going to do mkdir space repos and then we're going to move into that directory so cd space repos and so again here we want to clone those files that are in the repository to our local system so in order to do that we're going to use the command git clone so get space clone and then we're going to need our location of the git repository so let's go back to the browser and we're going to go over here to clone or download and here you will see clone with https so make sure that this says https and

7:40 you can simply click on this button which will copy this to the clipboard and then we'll move back to our command prompt and paste that in and once that's pasted just hit enter and it will clone your repository into the repos directory and so just to verify that we've cloned all the necessary files we're going to cd into the master directory that we had just cloned and we're going to do a dir and there you have it all of the files are cloned exactly as it is here in the repository now just as a note in order to keep these files up to date we need to run a

8:26 different command which would be a git pull and this can be run at any time in order to pull down any files or folders that have been updated since you did the first pull which in this case would be cloning of the repository again this will provide you with the latest and most up-to-date files at any given moment in time and in this case since nothing has changed i have been prompted with a message stating that i'm up to date if nothing is changed you will always be prompted with this message if there was it will pull your changes down to your synced local copy and the process for windows is completed and is similar in mac os and i'll move over to my mac os

9:14 virtual machine and log in and once you've logged in just going to go over here to the terminal and i'm just going to cd to make sure i'm in my home directory then i'm going to do exactly what we did in windows so i'm going to run the command mk dir space repos and create the repos directory and i'm going to move in to the repos directory and then i'm going to run git now for those of you who do not have get installed you will be prompted with this message to install it and you can go ahead and just install you'll be prompted with this license agreement you can just hit agree and depending on your internet connection this will take a few minutes

9:59 to download and install so as this is going to take a few minutes i'm going to pause the video here and come back when it's finished installing okay and the software was successfully installed so just to do a double check i'm going to run git and as you can see it's been installed so now that we have git installed we want to clone all the directories and the files from the github repository to our local repos folder so i'm going to open up my browser and i'm going to paste my github repository url right here and you'll see the clone button over here so we're going to click on this button and here we can download zip but like i said we're not going to be doing that

10:45 we're going to go over here and copy this url for the github repository again make sure it says https and we're going to copy this to our clipboard and we're going to go back to our terminal and we are going to run the command git space clone and we're going to paste in our url and as you can see here i've cloned the repository and all the files and folders within it and so as is my best practice i always like to verify that the files have been properly cloned and so i'm going to run the command ls just to make sure and go into the master directory

11:32 and do a double check and as you can see the clone was successful as all the files and folders are here and again to download any updates to any files or directories we can simply run the command git space poll and because we've already cloned it it's already up to date and so the process is going to be extremely similar on linux so i'm going to simply move over to my linux machine and log in i'm going to open up a terminal and i'm going to make my terminal a little bit bigger for better viewing and so like the other operating systems i want to clone all the files and directories from the github repository to my machine and so i'm going to cd here to make sure i'm in my home directory and like we did before we want

12:18 to create a directory called repos so i'm going to run the command mkdir space repos and we're going to create the repos directory we're now going to move into the repos directory and here we're going to run the git command and because git is not installed on my machine i've been prompted with the command in order to install it so i'm going to run that now so the command is sudo space apt space install space get and i'm going to enter in my password and install it

13:04 and just to verify i'm going to run the command git and i can see here it's been installed so now i'm going to go over here to my browser and i'm going to paste in the url to my repository and over here we'll have the same clone button and when i click on it i can get the url for the github repository in order to clone it again make sure before you clone that this says https if it doesn't say https you'll have the option of clicking on a button that will allow you to do so once it says https then you can simply copy this url to your clipboard by clicking on the button and then move over back to the terminal and we are going to clone this repository by typing in the get space clone command

13:50 along with the url of the repository and when we hit enter it'll clone it right down to our directory so i'm just going to move into the master directory just to verify that the files are there and again they're all here so again if you're looking to update your repository with any new updated changes you can simply run the get space pull command to update those files and so that's the linux setup so you have a local copy of the lesson files now there's just one more thing that i highly recommend you do and to demonstrate it i'm going to move back over to my windows virtual machine now i'm going to open up the web browser again

14:35 open up a new tab and i'm going to browse to this url https colon forward slash forward slash code.visualstudio.com [Music] and i'll make sure that the url is in the text below there is a version of this code editor available for windows mac os and linux you can simply click on this drop down and you'll find the link to download it for your operating system but in most cases it should automatically show the correct version so just go ahead and click on download and it should start downloading automatically and you should be able to run it right away

15:27 now the reason behind me asking you to install this utility is for editing code of different sorts whether you're adjusting yaml or python documents for deployment manager or even managing scripts a code editor will give you the ease of use when it comes to managing editing and even syntactical highlighting of code as shown here below it will highlight the code to make it easier to understand now if you have your own editor that you would prefer to use go ahead and use that but for those that don't my recommendation will be to use visual studio code so to install visual studio code we're just going to accept this license agreement and then we're going to click on next and we're just going to follow all the

16:13 defaults to install it it's going to take a minute or two and for those running windows you want to make sure that this box is checked off so that you can launch it right away let's hit finish another recommendation would be to go over here to the task bar so you can pin it in place so that it's easier to find and so now you have access to all the resources that's needed for this course but with that that's everything that i wanted to cover for this lesson so you can now mark this lesson as complete and let's move on to the next one [Music]

16:59 welcome back and in this lesson i wanted to discuss the various certifications available for google cloud as this number keeps on growing and i am looking to keep this lesson as up to date as possible so with that being said let's dive in now google cloud has released a slew of certifications in many different areas of expertise as well as different experience levels now there are two levels of difficulty when it comes to the google cloud certifications starting off with the associate level we see that there is only the one certification which is the cloud engineer the associate level certification is focused on the fundamental skills of deploying monitoring and maintaining projects on

17:46 google cloud this is a great starting point for those completely new to cloud and google recommends the associate cloud engineer as the starting point to undergoing your certification journey this was google cloud's very first certification and to me was the entry point of wanting to learn more as an engineer in cloud in my personal opinion no matter your role this certification will cover the general knowledge that is needed to know about starting on google cloud and the services within it which is why i labeled it here as the foundational level course i also consider this the stepping stone into any other professional level certifications which also happens to be

18:33 a recommended path by google with a great course and some dedication i truly believe that anyone with even a basic skill level in it should be able to achieve this associate level certification now it is recommended from google themselves that prior to taking this exam that you should have over six months experience building on google cloud for those of you with more of an advanced background in google cloud or even other public clouds this certification should be an easy pass as it covers the basics that you should be familiar with adding a google twist to it at the time of this lesson this exam is two hours long and the cost is 125 us dollars the exam is a total of 50

19:20 questions which consists of both multiple choice and multiple answer questions each of the questions contain three to four line questions with single line answers that by the time you finish this course you should have the confidence to identify the incorrect answers and be able to select the right answers without a hitch moving into the professional level certifications there are seven certifications that cover a variety of areas of specialty depending on your role you might want to take one or maybe several of these certifications to help you gain more knowledge in google cloud or if you love educating yourself and you're really loving your journey in gcp you will probably want to

20:05 consider pursuing them all in my personal opinion the best entry point into the professional level would be the cloud architect it is a natural step up from the associate cloud engineer and it builds on top of what is learned through that certification with a more detailed and more thorough understanding of cloud architecture that is needed for any other certification there is some overlap from the cloud engineer which is why in my opinion doing this certification right after makes sense it also brings with it the ability to design develop and manage secure scalable and highly available dynamic solutions it is a much harder exam and

20:50 goes into great depth on services available the professional cloud architect is a great primer for any other professional level certification and can be really helpful to solidify the learning that is needed in any other technical role i find it the most common path that many take who look to learn google cloud which is why i personally recommend it to them and at the time of this lesson it also holds the highest return on investment due to the highest average wage over any other current cloud certification in the market google recommends over three years of industry experience including one year on google cloud before attempting these exams with regards to

21:36 the exams in the professional tier they are much harder than the associate level and at the time of this course is two hours long and the cost is 200 us dollars these exams are a total of 50 questions which consists of both multiple choice and multiple answer questions it's the same amount of questions with the same amount of time but it does feel much harder each of the questions contain four to five line questions with one to three line answers it's definitely not a walk in the park and will take some good concentration and detailed knowledge on google cloud to solidify a pass after completing the cloud architect certification depending on your role my suggestion would be to

22:22 pursue the areas that interest you the most to make your journey more enjoyable for me at the time i took the security engineer out as i am a big fan of security and i knew that i would really enjoy the learning and make it more fun for me this is also a great certification for those who are looking to excel their cloud security knowledge on top of any other security certifications such as the security plus or cissp now others may be huge fans of networking or hold other networking certifications such as the ccna and so obtaining the network engineer certification might be more up your alley and give you a better understanding in cloud networking now if you're in the data space you might want

23:09 to move into the data engineer exam as well as taking on the machine learning engineer exam to really get some deeper knowledge in the areas of big data machine learning and artificial intelligence on google cloud now i know that there are many that love devops me being one of them and really want to dig deeper and understand sre and so they end up tackling the cloud developer and cloud devops engineer certifications so the bottom line is whatever brings you joy in the area of your choosing start with that and move on to do the rest all the professional certifications are valuable but do remember that they are hard and need preparation for study last but not least is the collaboration

23:56 engineer certification and this certification focuses on google's core cloud-based collaboration tools that are available in g suite or what is now known as google workspaces such as gmail drive hangouts docs and sheets now the professional level collaboration engineers certification dives into more advanced areas of g suite such as mail routing identity management and automation of it all using tools scripting and apis this certification is great for those looking to build their skill set as an administrator of these tools but gives very little knowledge of google cloud itself so before i move on there is one more certification that i wanted to

24:42 cover that doesn't fall under the associate or professional certification levels and this is the google cloud certified fellow program now this is by far one of the hardest certifications to obtain as there are very few certified fellows at the time of recording this lesson it is even harder than the professional level certifications and this is due to the sheer level of competency with hybrid multi-cloud architectures using google cloud anthos google's recommended experience is over 10 years with a year of designing enterprise solutions with anthos then a four-step process begins first step is to receive a certified fellow invitation from google and once

25:27 you've received that invitation then you need to submit an application with some work samples that you've done showing google your competency in hybrid multi-cloud once that is done the third step is a series of technical hands-on labs that must be completed and is a qualifying assessment that must be passed in order to continue and after all that the last step is a panel interview done with google experts in order to assess your competency of designing hybrid and multi-cloud solutions with anthos so as you can see here this is a very difficult and highly involved certification process to achieve the title of certified fellow this is definitely not for the faint of heart but can distinguish yourself as a

26:15 technical leader in anthos and a hybrid multi-cloud expert in your industry now i get asked many times whether or not certifications hold any value are they easy to get are they worth more than the paperwork that they're printed on and does it show that people really know how to use google cloud and my answer is always yes as the certifications hold benefits beyond just the certification itself and here's why targeting yourself for a certification gives you a milestone for learning something new with this new milestone it allows you to put together a study plan in order to achieve the necessary knowledge needed to not only pass the exam but the skills needed to progress in your everyday technical role this new knowledge helps

27:02 keep your skills up to date therefore making you current instead of becoming a relic now having these up-to-date skills will also help advance your career throughout my career in cloud i have always managed to get my foot in the door with various interviews due to my certifications it gave me the opportunity to shine in front of the interviewer while being able to confidently display my skills in cloud it also allowed me to land the jobs that i sought after as well as carve out the career path that i truly wanted on top of landing the jobs that i wanted i was able to achieve a higher salary due to the certifications i had i have doubled and tripled my salary since i first

27:47 started in cloud all due to my certifications and i've known others that have obtained up to five times their salary because of their certifications now this was not just from achieving the certification to put on my resume and up on social media but from the knowledge gained through the process and of course i personally feel that having your skills constantly up to date advancing your career and getting the salary that you want keeps you motivated to not only get more certifications but continue the learning process i am and always have been a huge proponent of lifelong learning and as i always say when you continue learning you continue to grow so in short google cloud

28:34 certifications are a great way to grow and so that about covers everything that i wanted to discuss in this lesson so you can now mark this lesson as complete and i'll see you in the next one [Music] welcome back and in this lesson i'm going to be talking about the fictitious organization called bow tie inc that i will be using throughout the course now while going through the architectures and demos in this course together i wanted to tie them to a real world situation so that the theory and practical examples are easy to understand tying it to a scenario is an easy way to do this as well it makes things a lot

29:19 more fun so the scenario again that i will be using is based on bow tie ink so before we get started with the course i'd like to quickly run through the scenario and don't worry it's going to be very high level and i will keep it brief so bow tie ink is a bow tie manufacturing company that designs and manufactures bow ties within their own factories they also hold a few retail locations where they sell their bow ties as well as wholesale to other thai and men's fashion boutiques and department stores across the globe being in the fashion business they mainly deal with commerce security and big data sets

30:06 bow tie inc is a global company and they are headquartered in montreal canada they employ about 300 people globally with a hundred of them being in sales alone to support both the brick and mortar stores and wholesale branches there are many different departments to the company that make it work such as in-store staff i.t marketing for both in-store and online sales manufacturing finance and more the types of employees that work in bow tie inc vary greatly due to the various departments and consists of many people such as sales for both in-store and wholesale managers that run the stores

30:52 and sewers that work in the manufacturing plant and many more that work in these various departments the business has both offices and brick and mortar stores in montreal london and los angeles now due to the thrifty mindset of management concentrating all their efforts on commerce and almost none in technical infrastructure has caused years of technical debt and is now a complete disaster within the brick and mortar location there contains two racks with a few servers and some networking equipment the global inventory of bow ties are updated upon sales in both stores and wholesale as well as new stock that

31:40 has been manufactured from the factory there are point-of-sale systems in each store or office location these systems are all connected to each other over a vpn connection in order to keep updates of the inventory fresh all office and store infrastructure are connected to each other and the montreal headquarters and the point of sale systems and kiosk systems are backed up to tape in the montreal headquarters as well and like i said before management is extremely thrifty but they have finally come to the realization that they need to start spending money on the technical infrastructure in order to scale so diving into a quick overview

32:25 of exactly what the architecture looks like the head office is located in montreal canada it has its main database for the crm and point-of-sale systems as well as holding the responsibility of housing the equipment for the tape backups the tapes are then taken off site within montreal by a third-party company for storage the company has two major offices one in london covering the eu and the other in the west coast us in los angeles these major offices are also retail locations that consume i.t services from the headquarters in montreal again being in the fashion business bowtie inc employs a large

33:11 amount of sales people and the managers that support them these employees operate the point-of-sale systems so we're constantly looking to have the website sales and the inventory updated at all times each salesperson has access to email and files for updated forecasts on various new bowtie designs most sales people communicate over a voice over ip phone and chat programs through their mobile phone the managers also manually look at inventory on what's been sold versus what's in stock to predict the sales for stores in upcoming weeks this will give manufacturing a head start to making more bow ties for future

33:57 sales now whatever implementations that we discuss throughout this course we'll need to support the day-to-day operations of the sales people and the managers and because of the different time zones in play the back-end infrastructure needs to be available 24 hours a day seven days a week any downtime will impact updated inventory for both online sales as well as store sales at any given time now let's talk about the current problems that the business is facing most locations hold on premise hardware that is out of date and also out of warranty the business looked at extending this warranty but became very costly as well

34:45 management is on the fence about whether to buy new on-premise hardware or just move to the cloud they were told that google cloud is the way to go when it comes to the retail space and so are open to suggestions yet still very weary now when it comes to performance there seems to be a major lag from the vpn connecting from store to store as well as the head office that's responsible for proper inventory thus slowing down the point of sale systems and to top it all off backups taking an exorbitant amount of time is consuming a lot of bandwidth with the current vpn connection now bowtie inc has always struggled with the lack of

35:31 highly available systems and scalability due to cost of new hardware this is causing extreme stress for online e-commerce whenever a new marketing campaign is launched as the systems are unable to keep up with the demand looking at the forecast for the next two quarters the business is looking to open up more stores in the eu as well as in the us and with the current database in place providing very inefficient high availability or scalability there is a major threat of the main database going down now when it comes to assessing the backups the tape backups have become very slow especially backing up from london and the off-site storage costs

36:18 continuously go up every year the backups are consuming a lot of bandwidth and are starting to become the major pain point for connection issues between locations on top of all these issues the small it staff that is employed have outdated i.t skills and so there is a lot of manual intervention that needs to be done to top it all off all the running around that is necessary to keep the outdated infrastructure alive management is also now pushing to open new stores to supply bow ties globally given the ever-growing demand as well as being able to supply the demand of bow ties online through their e-commerce store now these are some realistic yet common

37:04 scenarios that come up in reality for a lot of businesses that are not using cloud computing and throughout the course we will dive into how google cloud can help ease the pain of these current ongoing issues now at a high level with what the business wants to achieve and what the favorable results are they are all interrelated issues so bowtie inc requires a reliable and stable connection between all the locations of the stores and offices so that sales inventory and point-of-sale systems are quick and up-to-date at all times this will also allow all staff in these locations to work a lot more efficiently

37:50 with a stable and reliable connection in place backups should be able to run smoothly and also eliminate the cost of off-site backup not to mention the manpower and infrastructure involved to get the job done while scaling up offices and stores due to increase in demand the business should be able to deploy stores in new regions using pay as you go billing while also meeting the requirements and regulations when it comes to gpdr and pci this would also give the business flexibility of having a disaster recovery strategy in place in case there was a failure of the main database in montreal now as mentioned before the business is extremely thrifty

38:38 especially when it comes to spend on it infrastructure and so the goal is to have the costs as low as possible yet having the flexibility of scaling up when needed especially when new marketing campaigns are launched during high demand sales periods this would also give bowtie inc the flexibility of analyzing sales ahead of time using real-time analytics and catering to exactly what the customer is demanding thus making inventory a lot more accurate and reducing costs in manufacturing items that end up going on sale and costing the company money in the end finally when it comes to people supporting infrastructure automation is

39:25 key removing manual steps and a lot of the processes can reduce the amount of manpower needed to keep the infrastructure alive and especially will reduce downtime when disaster arises putting automation in place will also reduce the amount of tedious tasks that all departments have on their plate so that they can focus on more important business needs now that's the scenario at a high level i wanted to really emphasize that this is a typical type of scenario that you will face as a cloud engineer and a cloud architect the key to this scenario is the fact that there are areas that are lacking in detail and areas that are fully comprehensible

40:10 and this will trigger knowing when and where to ask relevant questions especially in your day-to-day role as an engineer it will allow you to fill the gaps so that you're able to figure out what services you will need and what type of architecture to use this is also extremely helpful when it comes to the exam as in the exam you will be faced with questions that pertain to real life scenarios that will test you in a similar manner knowing what services and architecture to use based on the information given will always give you the keys to the door with the right answer and lastly when it comes to the demos this scenario used throughout the course

40:55 will help put things in perspective as we will come to resolve a lot of these common issues real world scenarios can give you a better perspective on learning as it is tied to something that makes it easy to comprehend and again bow tie inc is the scenario that i will be using throughout the course to help you grasp these concepts so that's all i have to cover this scenario so you can now mark this lesson as complete and let's move on to the next one [Music] hey this is anthony cevallos and what i wanted to show you here is where you can access the practice exam on the exam pro platform so once you've signed up for your

41:41 account you can head on over to the course and you can scroll down to the bottom of the curriculum list and you will see the practice exams here at the bottom now just as a quick note you should generally not attempt the practice exam unless you have completed all the lecture content including the follow alongs as once you start to see those questions you will get an urge to start remembering these questions and so i always recommend to use the practice exam as a serious attempt and not just a way to get to the final exam at a faster pace taking your time with the course will allow you to really prevail through these practice exams and allow you for a

42:29 way better pass rate on the final exam looking here we can see two practice exams with 50 questions each and so i wanted to take a moment here and dive into the practice exam and show you what some of these questions will look like and so clicking into one of these exams we can get right into it and so as you can see i've already started on practice exam one and so i'm going to click into that right now and as you can see the exam is always timed and in this case will be 120 minutes for this specific exam there are 50 questions for this practice exam and you will see the breakdown in the very beginning of the types of questions you will be

43:14 asked now for the google cloud exams at the associate level they are usually structured in a common format they generally start with one or two lines of sentences which will typically represent a scenario followed by the question itself this question tends to be brief and to the point immediately following that you will be presented with a number of answers usually four or five in nature and can sometimes be very very technical as they are designed for engineers like asking about which gcloud commands to use to execute in a given scenario as well as theoretical questions that can deal with let's say best practices or questions

44:02 about the specific services themselves now these answers will come in two different styles either multi-choice or multi-select the multi-choice is usually about identifying the correct answer from a group of incorrect or less correct answers whereas the multi-select will be about choosing multiple correct solutions to identify the answer as well for this associate exam the overall structure is pretty simple in nature and typically will be either right or wrong now sometimes these questions can get tricky where there are multiple possible answers and you will have to select the most

44:47 suitable ones now although most of these types of questions usually show up in the professional exam they can sometimes peek their heads into the associate and so a great tactic that i always like to use is to immediately identify what matters in the question itself and then to start ruling out any of the answers that are wrong and this will allow you to answer the question a lot more quickly and efficiently as it will bring the more correct answer to the surface as well as making the answer a lot more obvious and making the entire question less complex so for instance with this question here you are immediately asked

45:34 about google's recommended practices when it comes to using cloud storage as backup for disaster recovery and this would be for a specific storage type and so quickly looking at the answers you can see that standard storage and near line storage will not be part of the answer and so that will leave cold line storage or archive storage as the two possible choices for the answer of this question and so these are the typical techniques that i always like to use for these exams and so provided that you've gone through all the course content you will be able to answer these technical questions with ease and following the techniques i've just given

46:20 and applying them to each question can really help you in not only this practice exam but for the final exam landing you a passing grade getting you certified [Music] welcome back and in this section i wanted to really hone in on the basics of cloud computing the characteristics that make it what it is the different types of computing and how they differ from each other as well as the types of service models now in this lesson i wanted to dive into the definition of cloud computing and the essential characteristics that define it now for some advanced folk watching this

47:06 this may be a review and for others this may fulfill a better understanding on what is cloud now cloud is a term that is thrown around a lot these days yet holds a different definition or understanding to each and every individual you could probably ask 10 people on their definition of cloud and chances are everyone would have their own take on it many see cloud as this abstract thing in the sky where files and emails are stored but it's so much more than that now the true definition of it can be put in very simple terms and can be applied to any public cloud

47:51 being google cloud aws and azure moving on to the definition cloud computing is the delivery of a shared pool of on-demand computing services over the public internet that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction these computing services consist of things like servers storage networking and databases they can be quickly provisioned and accessed from your local computer over an internet connection now coupled with this definition are five essential characteristics that define the cloud model that i would like to go over with

48:38 you and i believe that it would hold massive benefits to understanding when speaking to cloud this information can be found in the white paper published by the national institute of standards and technology i will include a link to this publication in the lesson notes for your review now these essential characteristics are as follows the first one is on-demand self-service and this can be defined as being able to provision resources automatically without requiring human interaction on the provider's end so in the end you will never need to call up or interact with the service provider in order to get resources provisioned for you

49:24 as well you have the flexibility of being able to provision and de-provision these resources whenever you need them and at any given time of the day the second characteristic is broad network access now this simply means that cloud computing resources are available over the network and can be accessed by many different customer platforms such as mobile phones tablets or computers in other words cloud services are available over a network moving into the third is resource pooling so the provider's computing resources are pooled together to support a multi-tenant model that allows multiple

50:10 customers to share the same applications or the same physical infrastructure while retaining privacy and security over their information this includes things like processing power memory storage and networking it's similar to people living in an apartment building sharing the same building infrastructure like power and water yet they still have their own apartments and privacy within that infrastructure this also creates a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but they may be able to specify location

50:55 at a higher level of abstraction so in the end the customer does not really have the option of choosing exactly which server server rack or data center for that matter of where the provided resources are coming from they will only be able to have the option to choose things like regions or sections within that region the fourth essential characteristic is rapid elasticity this to me is the key factor of what makes cloud computing so great and so agile capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released in some cases automatically to scale rapidly outwards and inwards in response

51:42 with demand to the consumer the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be provisioned in any quantity at any time and touching on the fifth and last characteristic cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource usage by leveraging a metering capability resource usage can be monitored controlled and reported providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the service now what this means is that cloud computing resource usage is metered and you can pay accordingly for what you've used resource utilization

52:27 can be optimized by leveraging pay-per-use capabilities and this means that cloud resource usage whether they are instances that are running cloud storage or bandwidth it all gets monitored measured and reported by the cloud service provider the cost model is based on pay for what you use and so the payment is based on the actual consumption by the customer so knowing these key characteristics of cloud computing along with their benefits i personally find can really give you a leg up on the exam as well as speaking to others in your day-to-day role as more and more companies start moving

53:12 to cloud i hope this lesson has explained to you on what is cloud computing and the benefits it provides so that's all i have for this lesson so you can now mark this lesson as complete and let's move on to the next one welcome back in this lesson i wanted to go over the four common cloud deployment models and distinguish the differences between public cloud multi-cloud private cloud and hybrid cloud deployment models this is a common subject that comes up a fair amount in the exam as well as a common theme in any organization moving to cloud knowing the distinctions between them can be critical to the types of architecture

54:00 and services that you would use for the specific scenario you are given as well as being able to speak to the different types of deployment models as an engineer in the field getting back to the deployment models let's start with the public cloud model which we touched on a bit in our last lesson now the public cloud is defined as computing services offered by third-party providers over the public internet making them available to anyone who wants to use or purchase them so this means that google cloud will fall under this category as a public cloud there are also other vendors that fall under this category such as aws and

54:47 azure so again public cloud is a cloud that is offered over the public internet now public clouds can also be connected and used together within a single environment for various use cases this cloud deployment model is called multi-cloud now a multi-cloud implementation can be extremely effective if architected in the right way one implementation that is an effective use of multi-cloud is when it is used for disaster recovery this is where your architecture would be replicated across the different public clouds in case one were to go down another could pick up the slack what

55:33 drives many cases of a multi-cloud deployment is to prevent vendor lock-in where you are locked into a particular cloud provider's infrastructure and unable to move due to the vendor-specific feature set the main downfall to this type of architecture is that the infrastructure of the public cloud that you're using cannot be fully utilized as each cloud vendor has their own proprietary resources that will only work in their specific infrastructure in other words in order to replicate the environment it needs to be the same within each cloud this removes each cloud's unique features which is what makes them so special and the resources so compelling

56:20 so sometimes finding the right strategy can be tricky depending on the scenario now the next deployment model i wanted to touch on is private cloud private cloud refers to your architecture that exists on premise and restricted to the business itself with no public access yet it still carries the same five characteristics that we discussed with regards to what defines cloud each of the major cloud providers shown here all have their own flavor of private cloud that can be implemented on site google cloud has anthos aws has aws outposts and azures is azure stack

57:06 they show the same characteristic and leverage similar technologies that can be found in the vendor's public cloud yet can be installed on your own on-premise infrastructure please be aware any organizations may have a vmware implementation which holds cloud-like features yet this is not considered a private cloud true private cloud will always meet the characteristics that make up cloud now it is possible to use private cloud with public cloud and this implementation is called hybrid cloud so hybrid cloud is when you are using public cloud in conjunction with private cloud as a single system a common

57:54 architecture used is due to compliance where one cloud could help organizations achieve specific governance risk management and compliance regulations while the other cloud could take over the rest now i'd really like to make an important distinction here if your on-premise infrastructure is connected to public cloud this is not considered hybrid cloud this is what's known as hybrid environment or a hybrid network as the on-premises infrastructure holds no private cloud characteristics true hybrid cloud allows you to use the exact same interface and tooling as what's available in the

58:40 public cloud so being aware of this can avoid a lot of confusion down the road so to sum up everything that we discussed when it comes to public cloud this is when one cloud provided by one vendor that is available over the public internet multi-cloud is two or more public clouds that are connected together to be used as a single system a private cloud is considered an on-premises cloud that follows the five characteristics of cloud and is restricted to the one organization with no accessibility to the public and finally hybrid cloud is private cloud connected to a public

59:25 cloud and being used as a single environment again as a note on-premises architecture connected to public cloud is considered a hybrid environment and not hybrid cloud the distinction between the two are very different and should be observed carefully as gotchas may come up in both the exam and in your role as an engineer so these are all the different cloud deployment models which will help you distinguish on what type of architecture you will be using in any scenario that you are given and so this is all i wanted to cover when it comes to cloud deployment models so you can now mark this lesson as complete and let's move on to the next one

1:00:15 welcome back so to finish up the nist definition of cloud computing i wanted to touch on cloud service models which is commonly referred to as zas now this model is usually called zas or xaas standing for anything as a service it includes all the services in a cloud that customers can consume and x can be changed to associate with the specific service so in order to describe the cloud service models i needed to touch on some concepts that you may or may not be familiar with this will make understanding the service models a little bit easier as i go through the course and describe the services

1:01:01 available and how they relate to the model this lesson will make so much sense by the end it'll make the services in cloud easier to both describe and define now when it comes to deploying an application they are deployed in an infrastructure stack like the one you see here now a stack is a collection of needed infrastructure that the application needs to run on it is layered and each layer builds on top of the one previous to it to create what it is that you see here now as you can see at the top this is a traditional on-premises infrastructure stack that was typically used pre-cloud now in this traditional model

1:01:46 all the components are managed by the customer the purchasing of the data center and all the network and storage involved the physical servers the virtualization the licensing for the operating systems the staff that's needed to put it all together including racking stacking cabling physical security was also something that needed to be taken into consideration in other words for the organization to put this together by themselves they were looking at huge costs now the advantages to this is that it allowed for major flexibility as the organization is able to tune this any way they want to satisfy the application compliance standards

1:02:32 basically anything that they wanted now when talking about the cloud service model concepts parts are always managed by you and parts are managed by the vendor now another concept i wanted to touch on is that unit of consumption is how the vendor prices what they are serving to their customer now just before cloud became big in the market there was a model where the data center was hosted for you so a vendor would come along and they would take care of everything with regards to the data center the racks the power to the racks the air conditioning the networking cables out of the building and even the physical security and so the unit of consumption here was the rack space within the data center so

1:03:18 the vendor would charge you for the rack space and in turn they would take care of all the necessities within the data center now this is less flexible than the traditional on-premises model but the data center is abstracted for you so throughout this lesson i wanted to introduce a concept that might make things easier to grasp which is the pizza as a service so now the traditional on-premises model is where you would buy everything and make the pizza at home now as we go on in the lesson less flexibility will be available because more layers will be abstracted so the next service model that i wanted to introduce is infrastructure as a service or i as for short this is where all the

1:04:06 layers from the data center up to virtualization is taken care of by the vendor this is the most basic model which is essentially your virtual machines in a cloud data center you set up configure and manage instances that run in the data center infrastructure and you put whatever you want on them on google cloud google compute engine would satisfy this model and so the unit of consumption here would be the operating system as you would manage all the operating system updates and everything that you decide to put on that instance but as you can see here you are still responsible for the container the run time the data and the application layers

1:04:51 now bringing up the pizza as a service model is would be you picking up the pizza and you cooking it at home moving on to platform as a service or paz for short this is a model that is geared more towards developers and with pass the cloud provider provides a computing platform typically including the operating system the programming language execution environment the database and the web server now typically with pass you never have to worry about the operating system updates or managing the runtime and middleware and so the unit of consumption here would be the runtime now the runtime layer would be the layer you would consume as you would be running your code in the supplied

1:05:38 runtime environment that the cloud vendor provides for you the provider manages the hardware and software infrastructure and you just use the service this is usually the layer on top of is and so all the layers between the data center and runtime is taken care of by the vendor a great example of this for google cloud is google app engine which we will be diving into a little bit later getting back to the pizza as a service model pass would fall under the pizza being delivered right to your door now with the past model explained i want to move into the last model which is sas which stands for software as a service now with sas all the layers are taken

1:06:24 care of by the vendor so users are provided access to application software and cloud providers manage the infrastructure and platforms that run the applications g suite and microsoft's office 365 are great examples of this model now sas doesn't offer much flexibility but the trade-off is that the vendor actually takes care of all these layers so again the unit of consumption here is the application itself and of course getting to the pizza as a service model sas is pretty much dining in the restaurant enjoying your pizza now to summarize when you have a data center on site you manage everything when it's infrastructure as a service

1:07:10 part of that stack is abstracted by the cloud vendor with platform as a service you're responsible for the application and data everything else is abstracted by the vendor with software as a service again using the pizza as a service analogy on premise you buy everything and you make the pizza at home infrastructure as a service you pick up the pizza and you cook it at home when it comes to platform as a service the pizza is delivered and of course software as a service is dining in the restaurant now there will be some other service models coming up in this course such as function as a service and containers as a service and don't worry i'll be getting into those

1:07:55 later but i just wanted to give you a heads up so now for some of you this may have been a lot of information to take in but trust me knowing these models will give you a better understanding of the services provided in google cloud as well as any other cloud vendor so that's all i wanted to cover in this lesson so you can now mark this lesson as complete and let's move on to the next one welcome back in this lesson i wanted to discuss google cloud global infrastructure how data centers are connected how traffic flows when a request is done along with the overall structure of how google cloud geographic locations are

1:08:41 divided for better availability durability and latency now google holds a highly provisioned low latency network where your traffic stays on google's private backbone for most of its journey ensuring high performance and a user experience that is always above the norm google cloud has been designed to serve users all around the world by designing their infrastructure with redundant cloud regions connected with high bandwidth fiber cables as well as subsea cables connecting different continents currently google has invested in 13 subsea cables connecting these continents at points of presence as you

1:09:28 see here in this diagram hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber cables have also been laid to connect points of presence for direct connectivity privacy and reduced latency just to give you an idea of what a subsea cable run might look like i have included a diagram of how dedicated google is to their customers as there is so much that goes into running these cables that connect continents as you can see here this is the north virginia region being connected to the belgium region from the u.s over to europe a cable is run from the north virginia data center as well as having a point of presence in place

1:10:14 going through a landing station before going deep into the sea on the other side the landing station on the french west coast picks up the other side of the cable and brings it over to the data center in the belgium region and this is a typical subsea cable run for google so continents are connected for maximum global connectivity now at the time of recording this video google cloud footprint spans 24 regions 73 zones and over 144 points of presence across more than 200 countries and territories worldwide and as you can see here the white dots on the map are regions that are

1:11:00 currently being built to expand their network for wider connectivity now to show you how a request is routed through google's network i thought i would demonstrate this by using tony bowtie now tony makes a request to his database in google cloud and google responds to tony's request from a pop or edge network location that will provide the lowest latency this point of presence is where isps can connect to google's network google's edge network receives tony's request and passes it to the nearest google data center over its private fiber network the data center generates a response that's optimized to provide the best

1:11:46 experience for tony at that given moment in time the app or browser that tony is using retrieves the requested content with a response back from various google locations including the google data centers edge pops and edge nodes whichever is providing the lowest latency this data path happens in a matter of seconds and due to google's global infrastructure it travels securely and with the least amount of latency possible no matter the geographic location that the request is coming from now i wanted to take a moment to break down how the geographic areas are broken out and organized in google cloud we start off with the geographic

1:12:33 location such as the united states of america and it's broken down into multi-region into regions and finally zones and so to start off with i wanted to talk about zones now a zone is a deployment area for google cloud resources within a region a zone is the smallest entity in google's global network you can think of it as a single failure domain within a region now as a best practice resources should always be deployed in zones that are closest to your users for optimal latency now next up we have a region and regions are independent geographic areas that are subdivided into zones so

1:13:18 you can think of a region as a collection of zones and having a region with multiple zones is designed for fault tolerance and high availability the intercommunication between zones within a region is under five milliseconds so rest assured that your data is always traveling at optimal speeds now moving on into a multi-region now multi-regions are large geographic areas that contain two or more regions and this allows google services to maximize redundancy and distribution within and across regions and this is for google redundancy or high availability having your data

1:14:04 spread across multiple regions always reassures that your data is constantly available and so that covers all the concepts that i wanted to go over when it comes to geography and regions within google cloud note that the geography and regions concepts are fundamental not only for the exam but for your day-to-day role in google cloud so just as a recap a zone is a deployment area for google cloud resources within a region a zone is the smallest entity of google's global infrastructure now a region is an independent geographic area that are subdivided into zones and finally when

1:14:51 it comes to multi-region multi-regions are large geographic areas that contains two or more regions again these are all fundamental concepts that you should know for the exam and for your day-to-day role in google cloud and so that's all i had for this lesson so you can now mark this lesson as complete and let's move on to the next one [Music] welcome back this lesson is going to be an overview of all the compute service options that are available in google cloud how they differ from each other and where they fall under the cloud service model again this lesson is just an overview of the compute options as we

1:15:39 will be diving deeper into each compute

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