The challenge continues This is part 2 of a series of posts about GCP certification challenge. You can find part 1 here. In my previous post, I had done one quest at Qwiklabs and started on the second quest. These quests were part of the first month of the challenge. The proposed schedule looked like this: Month 1 GCP Essentials Quest @ Qwiklabs (required) Cloud Architecture Quest @ Qwiklabs (required) Book certification exam (required) Month 2 Architecting on GCP Coursera specialization (recommended) Take practice exam (recommended) Month 3 Take the certification exam Current progress Both quests from month 1 were completed.

What I do and why I currently work for a company who is focused on providing services to customers who want to develop solutions in the cloud and/or migrate their existing solutions to the cloud. In my employer’s case, the cloud is AWS, since we are focusing on that cloud provider. The cloud providers, be it AWS, Google Cloud (GCP), Azure, IBM Cloud etc - they all promise that things will be easier, safer in the cloud and there are practically boundless opportunities for companies to innovate when they run solutions in the cloud.

Rethinking software development and operations in the cloud - Dark language Recently I listened to an episode of the Software Engineering Daily podcast which featured the two founders behind Dark, which is a company developing Dark the programming language. Or rather, Dark is not just a programming language, but a new way of thinking about software development. One of the founders, Paul Biggar, may be known to people as one of the founders of CircleCI, a well-known CI/CD pipeline product.

Cloud sustainability To what extent does running your IT solutions in the cloud affect the environment and climate change? As the trend continues that more and more businesses either move IT solutions to the cloud or increase usage of cloud solutions, the impact that a handful of cloud provider has in terms of their energy consumption and handling of resources will become more significant. Paul D Johnston has written some good blog posts on the topic and I can recommend reading his blog post What do Climate Change, Data Centres and Cloud have to do with each other?