Pass Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam in First Attempt Easily

Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Certification - Getting Started

1. Step 01 - Introduction - Google Cloud Platform - GCP - Associate Cloud Engineer

Welcome back. Welcome to this course to help you become a Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer. I am Ranga Karanam, and I'm excited to be your instructor for this course. Let's get a 10,000-foot overview of the certification and understand how you can make the best use of this course. GCP, or the Google Cloud Platform, has over 200 services. A little later in the course, we'll be signing into the Google Cloud Platform Web console. It is also called Just the Console, and you'd see that there are a wide variety of services under different categories that are offered by the Google Cloud Platform. A few years back, when I was first starting with the Google Cloud Platform, there were half the number of services that you are seeing here. So this is an ever-growing list of services. And this exam expects you to know 40 or more services from these services. This exam expects you to have in-depth knowledge about these services. Not only that, this exam also tests your decision making abilities. Which service do you want to use in a specific situation? What is the right computation for a specific scenario? What is the right database to be using in a specific scenario? And that's the reason why we designed this course: to help you make these tough choices. You will not only learn in depth about these services but also understand the various scenarios where you might want to use a specific service. Our goal is not only to help you get certified, but also equip you with real-world skills. We want you to be able to take the knowledge you have gained in this course and apply it to your projects. And how can you make the best use of this course? How can you put your best foot forward? Remember that this is a challenging certification. It expects you to understand and remember a number of services. You are human. I'm human. And as humans, we tend to forget things over a period of time. If I learned something new today, I'd forget most of it by the end of the week. So how do you improve your chances of remembering things for a long time? Here are a couple of recommendations from my experience. Number one: active learning. Think and make notes. Whenever you see something interesting, write it down. Number two, review the presentation once in a while. Every couple of days or every week, take a step back. Review the presentation and videos and think about what you have learned. The more actively involved you are in your learning and the more you review, the more likely it is that you will remember a lot of things. And what is our approach to building a great course to help you remember things for a long time? We have taken a three-pronged approach. Number one is presentations. We have a number of videos where we introduce these GCP services and help you understand the different concepts related to them. Number two is demos. We have a number of videos where we play with these services and try to implement the concepts that we learned. And the third item is two types of quizzes. We have text quizzes, the traditional ones, where you have a question, a set of choices, and you pick the right one. In addition to them, we also have video quizzes. During these video quizzes, we pick up on a few scenarios. We try to understand the solution to that and also discuss the alternatives in depth. By using this three-pronged approach, we think you'll be able to remember these things for a long time, and you'll be able to do really well at your job as well as your certification exam. Now, before we move into the next step, I have a couple of recommendations for you. Number one, take your time. This is not a race, so do not hesitate to replay the videos and try and understand the concepts in depth. Number two, have fun. Certification courses can get boring, and that's the reason why we invested a lot of time to try and make this course really interactive, really hands-on, and make sure that you have a lot of fun while you learn. I'm really excited to help you get GCP certified, and I'll see you in the next step.

2. Step 02 - Introduction to Cloud and GCP - Google Cloud Platform

Welcome back. In this step, let's understand what is cloud and why do we need the cloud? Let's consider a couple of example use cases. Let's start with an online shopping application. What is the challenge that an online shopping application faces? Online shopping applications typically have peak usage during holidays and weekends. For example, during the Christmas and New Year periods, you'd have a lot of load on the application, and the rest of the time, you'd have low loads on the application. Now, what was the solution before the cloud? The solution before the cloud was to do peak load provisioning. What is peak load provisioning? It is to buy infrastructure or procure infrastructure for the peak load. So if this is the peak load you expect, you'd buy infrastructure to support that kind of load. Now think about this. What would that infrastructure be doing in periods of low load? It would just be sitting idle. Let's consider another example. Take a startup. What is the challenge that it faces? The challenge is also kind of good news. The startup suddenly becomes popular, but what you need is more infrastructure to support the load. How do you handle the sudden increase in the load? What was the solution before the cloud? Again, it was to procure infrastructure, assuming that you'd be successful. And what if you're not really successful? All the infrastructure that you bought is wasted. So the typical challenges before the emergence of cloud were the high cost of procuring infrastructure. If you want to buy infrastructure ahead of time, it is very expensive and also needs ahead-of-time planning. Can you really guess the future? Can you accurately estimate the peak load? The other challenge is low infrastructure utilization. You can do peak load provisioning and buy infrastructure for peak load, but the infrastructure is unused the rest of the time. You have low infrastructure utilization, and you need a dedicated infrastructure maintenance team to maintain this infrastructure. Think about a startup. Can they afford a dedicated infrastructure maintenance team? And because of these challenges, we started moving towards the cloud. Whenever we use the cloud, we are talking about a simple question: How about provisioning or renting resources when we want them and releasing them back to the cloud when you do not need them? This is also called on-demand resource provisioning. If you have a high load on your application and a huge number of users using it, you'll provision and rent a lot of resources from the cloud. And once the load goes down—once the number of users on your application goes down—you'll release the resources back to the cloud. You can see that the number of resources you use increases with the number of users who are using the application. And that's why this is also called elasticity. Now, what are the advantages of this approach? You're trading capital expenses for variable expenses instead of investing money ahead of time. You are paying rent; you can benefit from the massive economies of scale. Each of the popular cloud providers has millions of servers, and therefore they can get the best deals from the hardware providers. And because the cloud market is very competitive, the cloud providers pass on that advantage to their customers. That's us. The other advantage is that you don't really need to increase capacity anymore. If the number of users increases, you can provision more servers. If the number of users goes down, you can release them back to the cloud. So you don't really need to guess capacity anymore, and you don't really need to spend any money running and maintaining your data centers. The other big advantage is that you can go global in minutes. Imagine a startup in India. They can easily deploy an application to multiple regions around the world with a click of a button. And that's what the cloud enables. We have not looked at some of the important advantages of the cloud. Where does Google Cloud Platform fit in? GCP is one of the top three cloud service providers. The other two are AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Azure. Microsoft Azure. GCP provides 200 plus services, and over the last few years, GCP has proved to be reliable, secure, and highly performant. It is important to remember that this is the same infrastructure that powers eight services with over 1 billion users. Some of the most popular Google services like Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube make use of the same infrastructure that GCP provides to us. And one thing I really love about the Google Cloud Platform is that it is the cleanest cloud as of today. It is a net carbon-neutral cloud. The electricity that is used to run the cloud is matched 100% with renewable energy. We will learn a lot more about the Google Cloud Platform, or the GCP, as we go further with the course. Now we go to the cloud because of on-demand resource provisioning, and GCP is one of the top three cloud service providers. And our goal with this course is to help you learn GCP. Is there a best path for learning GCP? Whenever we talk about cloud applications, they make use of a number of cloud services. There is no single path to learn these services independently. However, what we have done is do a lot of research and work out a very simple path for introducing all these services to you step by step. And that's what we would be doing. Starting the Next Step In the next step, let's get started with setting up our Google Cloud Platform account. I'm really excited. Help you learn Google Cloud, and I'll see you in the next step.

3. Step 03 - Creating GCP - Google Cloud Platform – Account

Welcome back. Are you excited to get started with playing with the Google Cloud Platform? The exciting thing is that Google Cloud provides you with a free trial account. It provides you with $300 in free credit so that you can play with the Google Cloud Platform. What I would recommend you do is log in to your Google account and then go to cloud.google.com, and once you are here, you can go and click Get Started for free. On the next page, you can choose your country. You can read and, if you are okay, agree to the terms of service. As you can see here, Google Cloud Platform provides you with $300 in credit for free. And the amazing thing is that there will be no auto-charge after the free trial ends. That's cool. Now you can go ahead and click Continue on the screen. And on the next screen, you need to enter a lot of information about yourself. Typically, you choose the account type "individual," and you can also provide the tax information if you are interested in that too. You'll also be asked for your address details, and you can choose how you want to pay for the services. On the screen, you can enter your payment method. Depending on the country, you must enter your credit card information. Google Cloud has different verification approaches. So Google Cloud would verify your card, and in some countries, they might even do a small transaction to your credit card. Once you have verified your card, you can go ahead and click "Start my free trial." If everything goes fine, then you should see a screen like this. You are now all set to continue playing with the Google Cloud Platform. One of the important things I'll remind you of is to ensure that you make the best use of the free trial. Make sure that you learn as much as possible using the free trial account. I'm really excited to get you started with Google Cloud Platform, and I'll see you on the next step. Bye.

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Google Cloud Regions and Zones

1. Step 01 - Why do we need Regions and Zones?

In this step, let's understand why we need regions and zones. What are regions and zones and why do we need them? Let's consider a simple scenario. Imagine that your application is deployed in a data centre in the London region. What would be the challenges with such an architecture? The first challenge is slow access to users from other parts of the world. If you have users in Mumbai, New York, or Sydney, they would get slow access. This is also called high latency. Number two. What if the data centre crashes? Your application goes down, so you have low availability. Now, how can we improve this further? What we would do is add another data centre in London. So you got a new data center, and you deployed the application there. So now we have two data centers. Now, what would be the challenges with this kind of architecture? One challenge remains. Users from other parts of the world will still have slow access. However, challenge two is solved. Even if one of the datacenters crashes, what will happen? My application would be served from the other data center. So your application is still available at the other data center. Now let's add in a new challenge. What if the entire region of London is unavailable? What would happen? Your application goes down. Now how do we improve this? What we do is have the same architecture set up in two regions. So we are adding a new region called Mumbai. What would be enough of a challenge is enough? Challenge one, slow access to users from other parts of the world, is partly solved. Access from Mumbai would be fast, but access from other regions of the world, for example, New York or Sydney, would still remain slow. And you can solve this by adding deployments for your applications in other regions. The second challenge had already been completed. Even if one of the data centres crashes, we can serve it from the other data center. Now the third challenge is: what if the entire region of London is unavailable? What would happen? Now your application will be served from Mumbai. Now we understand the reason why we need regions and zones. We would want to deploy our application across multiple regions because we want high availability and low latency for our users. Now think about this. You want to set up data centres in multiple regions around the world. Is that easy? The answer, obviously, is no. And that's where the providers help us. Let's see how GCP helps us resolve this problem in the next step.

2. Step 02 - Understanding Regions and Zones in GCP - Google Cloud Platform

Welcome back. In the previous step, we talked about the fact that setting up data centres in different regions around the world is not easy. And that's where all the cloud providers—including Google—provide us with regions around the world. Google provides a list of 20 plus regions around the world, which is an ever-expanding list. There are new regions added every year. A region is nothing but a specific geographical location to host your resources. So you can decide that I would want to host my applications in the Mumbai region, or I can say I would want to host my applications in the London region or the Sydney region. By having multiple regions around the world, Google Cloud makes it very easy for you to deploy applications to these regions. The important advantage of having multiple regions around the world is high availability. If you deploy your application to multiple regions around the world, even if one of these regions is down, you can serve the application from the other regions with low latency. You can serve users from the region closest to them, giving them a low latency global footprint. A startup in India might be able to easily apply deeper applications to multiple parts of the world, and therefore it can create global applications. The last advantage is adherence to government regulations. Different countries will have different regulations. For example, let's say the US wants all the data related to all its citizens to reside within the US only in those kinds of situations. I can create a region in the US and store data related to US customers only in that specific region. So regions help us achieve high availability, a low global latency footprint, and adhere to government regulations. What is the need for zones? How do you achieve high availability in the same region? So I would want to deploy my application just in the Mumbai region. Maybe there is a garden regulation because of which I would want to limit my application to the Mumbai region. But even with that restriction, I would want high availability. How can I get that? That's where, within each region, there are multiple zones. In Google Cloud, each region has at least three zones. The advantage of having multiple zones is increased availability and fault tolerance within the same region. I can deploy my application to each of these zones, so that even if one of these zones crashes, my application can be served from the other zone. In Google's language, each of these zones has one or more discrete clusters. In simple language, each of these zones has at least one or more data centers. An important thing to remember is that these zones are connected with low-latency links. So even if you deploy an application to Zone One and the database to Zone Two, you'd get really good performance. So Google Cloud Platform provides multiple regions around the world, and each of these regions has at least three zones. Let's see a few examples of that right now. Example region is the United States. West one. This is on the continent of North America, in a place called Dallas, or Dallas, as it's pronounced. And inside this, there are three zones. And the zones are named for us. west one A, west one B, and west one C. Let's consider another example. Europe's North is the region. This is in Hamari, Finland. And you can see that even that region has three zones—north Zone A, north Zone B, and north Zone C. Another example is Asia-South, which is closer to me, which is Mumbai, India. And you can see that it also has three availability zones, Asia South Zone A, Asia South Zone B, and Asia South Zone C. In this chapter, we got introduced to the concept of regions and zones in the Google Cloud Platform. I'll see you in the next one.

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Google Compute Engine for Associate Cloud Engineer

1. Step 01 - Getting started with Google Compute Engine – GCE

Welcome back on the scene. Let's get started with a very, very important Google Cloud service called the Compute Engine. Whenever you want to deploy applications, you need servers. And when you want to deploy applications in the cloud, you will need virtual servers. And that is what Compute Engine allows you to do in Google Cloud. Let's get started with Compute Engine. In this specific step in corporate datacenters, applications are deployed to physical servers. Where do you deploy applications? in the cloud? In the cloud, we would rent virtual servers, and virtual machines are the virtual servers in GCP. And how do you provision virtual machines? The service you would use is Google Compute Engine. So Google Compute Engine is the Google Cloud Platform service for provisioning and managing virtual machines. What are the features that it offers? It helps you to create and manage the lifecycle of virtual machine instances. You can create a virtual instance machine. You can actually start, stop, restart, or terminate a virtual machine instance. You can also implement load balancing and auto-scaling for multiple VM instances. If your application is deployed to multiple VM instances, you'd want to have a load balancer to distribute the load between them. And also, you'd want to be able to do auto scaling. You'd want to be able to increase the number of instances based on the load. If you have a lot of users using the application, then you want to increase the number of instances. Otherwise, you'd want to decrease the number of instances. Compute Engine also allows you to attach storage to your virtual machine instances. You want to run your operating system on a hard disc and connect it to your virtual machine. Compute Engine also allows you to manage the network connectivity and configurations for your VM instances. You want to assign an IP address for your VMinstance, and you want to be able to use the IP address to talk to your virtual machine or to send a request to your virtual machine. So Google Compute Engine enables you to manage the lifecycle of your virtual machine instances. It provides a number of additional features like attaching storage, load balancing, auto scaling, and managing the network connectivity of your VM instances. Now, I'm sure you are getting bored with all the theories that we are talking about. What we'll do in the next few steps is set up a set of VM instances as a web server or HTTP server, and you'll want to distribute load between them using load balancers. In this quick step, we were introduced to: What is a Compute Engine? Google Compute Engine is a service that enables you to create virtual machines in GCP and provides you with a number of features. Let's start playing with Google's compute engine. starting the next steps.

2. Step 02 - Creating your first Virtual Machine in GCP

Welcome back. Let's start playing with Google's compute engine. In this specific step, what we do is create a few VM instances and play with them. In addition to that, we would check out the lifecycle of these instances. Basically, we try to start stopping, restarting, and trying a variety of operations that you can perform with them. And also, you would use SSH to connect to the virtual machine instances. We would SSH into the virtual machine instances and try to run a few commands. Let's start with creating a few Virtual Machine instances. And to be able to do that, let's go to the Google Cloud Web Console. You can go over and type in the URL cloud.google.com, and over here you can click Console, which is present in this area. So this is the Web Console, or it's just called the Console. This is kind of the web interface where you can play with all the resources that you provision as part of your Google Cloud Platform. If you're coming here for the first time and if you are still in the free trial, then you should see a message like this. What I would recommend you do is to click Dismiss. And now you should not see that message anymore. When you log into Google Cloud Console, you should see the Dashboard page, where you'll be able to see the project information. You'll be able to see the different resources that are part of this particular project and the different APIs and the requests related to them. Let's not worry about all this stuff. What we are really interested in at Furnace is creating a computer engine. So I can type in "Compute Engine" in here. So over here, you can go to Compute Engine. If this is the first time you are using Compute Engine, then this page will take a little while to load. It might take about five minutes before you are able to see the Create button here. So we're going to use the Compute Engine Service to create a VM instance. Let's go ahead and say "Create." There are a lot of details that you need to provide to create a VM instance. On the next screen, we can fill in the details. The first one is the name. So I'll give a name as my first VM. Whenever we create the sources on Google Cloud Platform, we can associate labels with them. Labels would be, let's say, the environment, for example. So consider this the Dev ennis for me. So I'll say I'll add a label called Environment Dev. You can also add labels for business units. So let's say the business unit that it is related to is sales. So you can add different labels to indicate more information about the VM. I'll go ahead and say save. In here, we have added in a couple of labels: environment day and business sales. Next we have to choose the region and the zone. I recommend you take the defaults the default which is suggested for me is your central one region and your central one A as the zone After choosing the zone and the region, what you need to choose is the hardware you would want to run your virtual machine on; that is called the machine configuration Google Cloud Platform provides you with a number of machine families that are optimised for different kinds of applications; you'd see general-purpose which are machine types for common workloads optimised for cost and flexibility If you go to compute optimize, you'll see high-performance machine types for compute-intensive applications There are also memory optimised machine types for memory intensive workloads, so you can choose the specific machine family that you want to use now based on the application that you are going to run. Let's choose general purpose and stick with the defaults which are suggested, and if you go further down, there is one more important choice: what operating system you want on your virtual machine. The way we choose that is by choosing the image If you click Change, you'd be able to see all the different images that are made available by Google Cloud, so you would see that there are images related to different operating systems that are provided, so you can see Debian. Red o you would You can see Ubuntu Windows Server, and a lot of other options for now. Let's choose the default, which is Debian. Let's stay with that and let's say cancel. If you scroll down, you'll also see something called a firewall configuration, as we discussed earlier. We want to run a HTTP server on the virtual machine, and we'd like to allow HTTP traffic so that someone from outside can access the application that's running on your virtual machine, and that's why you'd want to allow HTTP traffic, so in the firewall you can click Allow Http Traffic. We attached a few labels to it, and we chose the default hardware, which is nothing more than a machine family, and we chose the default software, which is nothing more than the image that is used to create your VM, and we enabled the firewall to allow HTTP traffic. You can also see the cost involved if you scroll a little bit to the right. You can see that running this for a month would cost me around $24, which is about zero point $34 per hour, and this would be One of the important things I would recommend you do is to play with it and immediately stop the instance that you create. Your free credit is very valuable, so don't waste it on keeping the instances running. So let's go ahead and create it for now, and as soon as our demo is done, let's go ahead and stop or terminate the instance. So let's go ahead and create the instance right now. So I've started creating the instance. The creation of the instance would take a little while. I'll see you in the next step with more about virtual machines.

3. Step 03 - Understanding Machine Types and Images in Google Compute Engine – GCE

Welcome back. In the last step, we started creating our virtual machine. And while the creation of the virtual machine is in progress, let's discuss a few important things about the virtual machines that we created. There are a couple of important choices that we made when we created our virtual machines using the Google Compute Engine. Number one is, what is the hardware? Second, what operating system and software do you want on your specific virtual machine? Let's start with the first decision that we made. What is the hardware that we would want our virtual machine to run on? When we talk about the hardware of a virtual machine, there are two important things that you need to understand. One is the machine family, and two are the machine type. Different machine families are present for different types of workloads. The general purpose is the one that is recommended for most workloads. This provides the best price-performance ratio. So if you want to run a web application or a simple application server, or if you want to create a small or medium-sized database, or if you want to run your dev environment, in those kinds of situations you can go for a general-purpose family. If you have ultra-high memory workloads, you want a lot of RAM to run your applications. In those kinds of situations, you can go for memory-optimized families. Examples are when you want a large in-memory database or if you want to perform analytics in memory. The other type of use case is compute-intensive workloads, for which you would choose compute-optimized families. For example, if you have a gaming application that you want to run, you need a lot of CPU, and in those kinds of situations, you would go for computer-optimized families. So the first choice you are making is based on the type of application you want to run. You are determining the machine family. Once you choose the machine family, you need to choose the machine type. How much of an exact amount of CPU, memory, or disc do you want? For each of the machine families, there are a number of machine types. Earlier, we saw that E2 was a machine family, and for E2, there are a number of machine types. E two, standard two, e two, standard four, e two, standard 816, and 32. Let's take one of them. E, standard two. E-2 here represents the machine type family Standard indicates the type of workload that you would want to run, and two here indicate the number of CPUs. You can see that E to standard two has two vCPUs, E to standard four has four virtual CPUs, E to standard eight has eight, and so on and so forth. The other thing you can observe here is that the memory disc and networking capabilities increase along with the virtual CPUs. So if you go for a larger machine type, you have a higher amount of memory available to you. Furthermore, the discounted networking performance will be improved. Over here, you can see that the memory increases as the number of vCPUs increases. So that's the first choice. What is the hardware you'd want to run your virtual machine on? We would first choose the machine type family, and then we would choose a specific machine type. And the second question is, what is the operating system, and what is the software we would want on a virtual machine instance? That's what we decide by choosing the image. There are two types of images that are present in Google Cloud. One is the public image. Earlier, we chose Debian as the image to create our virtual machine. That's an example of the public image. These public images are maintained by Google or open-source communities or by third-party vendors. The other kind of image is a custom image. These are images created by you and customised by you for your specific projects. Important takeaways: until now, you chose your hardware by deciding your machine type. You choose your software by deciding on your image. Now let's go back to our virtual machine and see if it's ready. When I go to the VM instances, I can see that my virtual machine is up and running. That's cool. You can also see that it's created in a specific zone, the Central one A.And you can see that there is an internal IP and an external IP that are assigned. The external IP is the one that we can make use of to talk to this virtual machine from the Internet. You can also SSH into the virtual machine by using this button, which is present here. Other than that, if you click this specific thing, you can see the different operations that you can perform on the virtual machine instance. You can see that you can stop the virtual machine instance or you can suspend it. Suspend is similar to pausing. So you can pause it and resume it, or you can reset.

A reset is nothing but a restart. So the instance would be stopped and restarted immediately. You can also delete the instance. For now, what I would want to do is SSH into it and run a few commands. What I would do is click SSH. When I click SSH, I can see a notification that pop-up windows are blocked. SSH would actually open as a pop-up window. And that's the reason why I would need to enable pop ups. And once I enable pop-ups, I'll be able to connect to the VM instance. If you're having any problems with launching the virtual machine, I would recommend you also try with Google Chrome. Now I'm able to SSH into the virtual machine, and over here I can run a few commands. But the font size is very small. So what I can do is actually go in here and actually switch over. So I'll change the current colour theme to light, and I'd actually change the text size to the largest possible. You'd be able to see this much more clearly, I guess. And now I can go in here and type in a command. Who am I? You can see my username printed here.

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