My quick lab parctice for a couple of weeks

3 min readOct 31, 2020

Qwiklabs is an online platform that gives users temporary credentials, so they can learn the cloud ,from 30-minute individual labs to multi-day courses.

The last few weeks I have been practicing my cloud skills using this platform

This platform basically focuses on Google’s cloud platform, but there are some labs related to other cloud providers as far as I’ve seen.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of public cloud computing services offered by Google. The platform includes a wide range of hosted services for compute, storage and application development like IA ,machine learning and Big Data that run on Google hardware. Google Cloud Platform services can be accessed by software developers, cloud administrators and other enterprise IT professionals over the public internet or through a dedicated network connection.

During my journey with GCP and Quicklabs, here are a few things I just focused on

Google Compute Engine

Compute Engine is the service that let users uses multiple VM types offered by Google (E2, N1, N2, N2D) .

The intersting part is that those VM offers a good balance between price and performance.

The choice of the type of machine is not arbitrary and each type is dedicated to a specific task

Google cloud Storage

I did a lot of data Science and an AI driven Labs ,so I needed a place where I can store data in the cloud .

This service i used is called google clooud storage, a service that allows you to store object of any size and amount of data that you can easily recove

Google BigQuery

Well Google define BigQuery as a highly scalable and cost-effective serverless multicloud data warehouse designed to optimize business agility

For me BigQuery was an intuitive and easy to use service, what is interesting is that I learend a new way to create machine learning models with BigQuery using the SQl language.

An exmple like that

CREATE OR REPLACE MODEL `ecommerce.classification_model` 
OPTIONS 
( 
model_type=’logistic_reg’, labels = [‘will_buy_on_return_visit’]
 ) 
AS 
#standardSQL 
SELECT 
  * EXCEPT(fullVisitorId) 
FROM 
# features 
(SELECT fullVisitorId, IFNULL(totals.bounces, 0) 
AS bounces, IFNULL(totals.timeOnSite, 0) 
AS time_on_site FROM `data-to-insights.ecommerce.web_analytics` WHERE totals.newVisits = 1 AND date BETWEEN ‘20160801’ AND ‘20170430’) 
# train on first 9 months JOIN (SELECT fullvisitorid, IF(COUNTIF(totals.transactions > 0 
AND totals.newVisits IS NULL) > 0, 1, 0) 
AS will_buy_on_return_visit
 FROM `data-to-insights.ecommerce.web_analytics` 
GROUP BY fullvisitorid) 
USING (fullVisitorId) ;

A very SQL LIKE approach to load data and create a model that i find it original and good

Conclusion

If you are new to the Cloud or want to deepen and develop new skills in a practicalway quicklabs is the best platform I have known with an easy and effective learning by doing approach!

My Public Profile

https://www.qwiklabs.com/public_profiles/64192fa4-6e02-46c1-b08b-d8816ff95536