What’s the best path for Google Cloud Certification?

Which certification should I choose from all the options?

If I’m interested in machine learning, should I opt for Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certification?

These are just a few of the common questions IT professionals—both aspiring and experienced—ask. It can be daunting to map out a Google Cloud certification journey. Don’t worry! I’m here to help.

But first, let’s review all the certifications offered by Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Google Cloud Certification Summary

The GCP Cloud Digital Leader certification is intended for professionals with no prior IT experience who would like to learn and demonstrate knowledge of cloud fundamentals.

The exam validates your knowledge and ability to:

• Devise a scalable infrastructure in Google Cloud
• Engineer solutions with data and Google Cloud
• Implement security in a cloud solution

You can refer to Google Cloud Official Documentation for Cloud Digital Leader and Google Cloud Official Guide for a better outlook on the topics covered by the exam.

To earn the GCP Associate Cloud Engineer certification, you’ll need at least six months of professional experience work in Google Cloud.

The exam tests your ability to plan, configure, deploy and implement a cloud solution with a strong emphasis on security.

You will be evaluated on:

• Setting up a highly available, scalable and durable cloud solution environment
• Planning and configuring a cloud solution using services such as Google Cloud Engine, Google App Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine
• Proficiency in storage options
• Configuring security through Identity and Access Management (IAM)

You can refer to Google Cloud Official Documentation for Associate Cloud Engineer and Google Cloud Official Guide for more details on the topics covered by the exam.

Cloud computing is the new normal and organizations that don’t understand how to properly design, deploy and manage cloud infrastructure—whether it's a public or private cloud—are at a disadvantage.

If you're in the business of IT recruitment for staffing firms or in-house, it's essential to validate your job candidates' cloud skills so your clients and stakeholders can hire IT talent with the skills needed to leverage the benefits of cloud and keep their business moving forward.

When you accurately validate an IT candidate’s cloud skills, you will:

Reduce Churn and Improve Retention

Churn is a significant issue in the IT industry, and it can profoundly impact an organization’s bottom line. If you take the time to validate mission-critical skills, candidates will be more successful on the job and the likelihood they or your client will look for opportunities elsewhere is reduced.

Increase “Quality Hire” Rates

By administering assessments during the hiring process, you can weed out applicants with great resumes who don't actually have the skills you require—a problem that’s more common than you might expect. This can help you avoid costly mistakes down the road and increase your chances of making a quality hire.

Differentiate Your Hiring Firm in a Saturated Market

If you consistently deliver pools of high-performing cloud experts to your clients and stakeholders, they’re more likely to come to your firm first. A good quality hire rate gives you a significant leg up against the competition and could be the deciding factor when a client chooses between firms.

When you’re looking for the right person to fill an IT role at your company, it can be extremely challenging to find candidates who legitimately have all the skills needed. For example, you might get applications from people who say they’re proficient in Kubernetes, but they may only have a basic understanding and be unable to manage a complex deployment.

So how do you accurately narrow down your applicant pool of IT professionals to legitimately qualified professionals to avoid wasting the time of job candidates and yourself?

With a solid pre-screening process you can create a short list of exceptional potential hires.

Benefits of a Strong Candidate Screening Process

Before your hiring team sits down with IT job candidates, send out a prescreening questionnaire to determine whether a person is right for the role.

When crafted strategically, a candidate screening process can lead to decreased recruitment costs, a selection of better-qualified candidates, and a faster hiring process. While you may experience a decrease in the volume of potential hires, the quality of your candidates will increase exponentially.

It’s no secret employee retention is correlated with employee satisfaction. More than ever, organizations are putting greater emphasis on retention efforts to curb staggering turnover rates through this era of the Great Resignation. In 2021, nearly 4 million people quit their jobs every month, which is the highest average on record.

The cost of employee turnover is high and even more prevalent in the tech industry, according to SHRM. A 2019 study indicated that tech is one of the top five industries experiencing turnover, and replacement costs can go as far as doubling the amount of an employee’s salary.

So, what can you do to keep employees? Here are four employee retention ideas to help you retain IT talent.

4 IT Employee Retention Techniques

Desirable benefits and compensation are table stakes to stay competitive and retain employees. Beyond pay, a comprehensive employee engagement strategy can help your IT pros feel valued and stay motivated.

The following techniques can improve employee satisfaction and reduce the risk of burnout and turnover.

Create Employee Engagement Opportunities

When you proactively foster positive working relationships among co-workers, you’ll see increased productivity and retention.

For many IT professionals, the thought of asking their boss to pay for training and certification is daunting. After all, you don't want to seem like you're not already competent in your role. But the truth is—IT training and cloud certification can deliver a positive return on investment (ROI) not only for you, but also for your company.

Many employers are willing to invest in their employees' professional development, but they may not know the benefits of IT training and certification. That's where you come in. By making a solid case for why IT training and certification are beneficial for both you and your employer, you're more likely to get your boss on board to cover the costs.

4 Steps to Build a Case for Employer-Sponsored Cloud Training

#1 Align Your Request With the Company's Goals

When asking your boss to invest in your professional development, it's essential to align your request with the company's goals. For example, if your company is looking to containerize more applications, you could request training and certification for Kubernetes and other container development and management training. By doing so, you're not only furthering your own professional development but also helping the company reach its goals.

Also, explain that technology is advancing so quickly that you need training to keep your skills fresh so you can do your best work. Often, employers are willing to invest in employees who they see as being future leaders within the organization.

It’s no secret the IT industry is facing a skills shortage—especially cloud skills. As companies scrambled to move to the cloud in the pandemic, many realized they didn’t have enough employees with the right skills to make the transition.

As a result, some organizations have resorted to increasing their spending on training and development programs, especially self-paced out of the box training. However, as the statistics below show, this approach, while practical, is not the best way to acquire and retain new skills.

The Most Effective Methods to Build Employees' Cloud Skills

To ensure that employees can retain and apply new cloud knowledge, leaders and managers must prioritize training methods that support deep learning and retention.

Discussions and hands-on practice allow employees to explore new concepts in depth and apply them in a real-world context. This type of learning is more effective than traditional lectures or reading material, and it is more likely to lead to long-term retention of new information.

By investing in learning methods that prioritize deep understanding, IT leaders can give their employees the tools they need to be successful as cloud evolves.

In the hierarchy of learning skills, lecturing is the least effective, and teaching skills to others is the best way to learn and retain new skills.

Between those two extremes are various learning methods that can help your team learn and retain IT cloud skills. The key is to find the learning methods that work best for your team, given each individual’s learning styles.

Topics covered in this post:

• Virtual Private Cloud
• VPC Order of Operations
• Public vs Private Subnets
• How Internet Gateways and Route tables work within a VPC

In the previous post in this series, we looked at foundations of AWS infrastructure. In this post, we start to focus on the AWS services you use as a customer. I highly recommend you have foundational knowledge of IPv4 networks and OSI model before proceeding with this section.

AWS Foundational Services Overview

There are four foundational services offered by AWS:

• Network
• Compute
• Storage
• Database

These services follow the general building block services which we discussed in this post. These foundational services tend be the first services that AWS customers adopt when beginning to use AWS. In fact, most certification exams focus on the four foundational areas of Network, Compute, Storage and Database.

This post will cover networking, and we'll cover other higher order services like integration in the future.

AWS uses all custom network hardware that it designed and manufactures for its own use. For the more network-savvy readers, in a typical AWS environment, there are tens of thousands of customers deploying servers that use overlapping network ranges with each other. Traditional network hardware simply cannot scale up the number of Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN) to meet this kind of demand. So AWS came up with their own Network Hardware implementation to to scale that kind of cloud implementation.

What Is A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)?

We start with VPC which is clearly an acronym. It stands for Virtual Private Cloud. VPC is a region-scoped, entirely virtualized private network that you can create and manage on your own. This includes picking your own Classless InterDomain Routing (CIDR) range, to defining your own subnets, route tables, and firewalls and so forth.

(Note: Anytime you hear that a service is region-scoped, it means it's not only highly available and fault-tolerant, it will also exhibit a high degree of self-healing where AWS manages all of that on your behalf.)

Most AWS customers will create VPC networks and deploy some AWS resources in them.

You may ask if you could use AWS and never have to create a VPC? Absolutely yes. There are a lot of serverless offerings you could use to deploy your infrastructure and you would never need to create a network, but those options are limited. In the end, most cloud scenarios will require creating and deploying VPCs.

With a VPC you have full control over the security. Not all the way down to the hardware of course, which AWS manages, but you're in charge of areas like data sovereignty and compliance. This matters when it comes to selecting which region is ultimately scoped or chosen for your particular VPC. Except for the hardware, the VPC you provision is yours to do as you wish.

Something else to consider when selecting the appropriate region for your VPC is that geography affects latency. So, the further the distance, the greater the latency. As a good practice, it is best to select the Region that is close to your business operations or users.

There are also a lot of connectivity options to consider with the VPC in order to get your network traffic in and out of the VPC network.

How to Create a VPC in AWS

How do you create your first VPC? It is actually quite simple:

1. Name your network
2. Select an appropriate CIDR Range which adheres to RFC 1918 approved private IP address ranges. CIDR is basically the notation of what IP addresses are available for your particular private network

Now we have an empty VPC and can't yet deploy a load-balancer, virtual application servers or databases, which is typical 3-tier on-premises architecture. We need VPCs to launch our virtual machines, but need a few more steps to make this VPC operational. Again, this is just a high-level overview. For more information, please check out our advanced AWS Networking training certification or this no-cost AWS Essentials course.

Think of VPC as matching your on-premises networking address scheme for your on-premise data center. We are just doing this in the AWS Cloud environment now.