Google Cloud Study Jams 2019, Hyderabad Week 2

After the massive opening week of Cloud Study Jam last week. We had a great week 2 with follow up sessions on Google Cloud SDK, Appengine, CloudSQL, CloudFunction, Cloud Datastore etc. I was the primary instructor in this session, so I have been looking forward to this day for a while. Like last time the attendance again beat out expectation. The retention rate was beyond our imagination. It shows not only that the 1st week was really successful but also people are genuinely interested to learn about the cloud.

From the quick survey, it turned out most of them already completed the week 1's quest - GCP essentials or at least completed the parts which are pre-requisite for this session or just to get started with Google Cloud Platform. After a brief recap we got into the quest "Baseline - Deploy and Develop" straight away. The content of this week was definitely what I am most familiar with because it is used in my day to day work. Tough only the fundamentals of appengine and datastore was part of the la exercise, I ended up explaining the interesting insights and concepts like AppEngine's multiple services, version, traffic splitting, minimum instances, billed instance hours etc.


Similarly, we ended up discussing things ranging from scalability and trade-offs of datastore, and CloudSQL to the choice of NoSQL vs RDBMS for various use cases. As participants showed more and more interest while doing their labs, it encouraged us discussing more advanced topics like IaaS vs PaaS vs Serverless and use cases of Cloud Endpoints. This was one of the most interesting discussions we had for this kind of gathering.


We deliberately choose the above labs first, so that one can get the minimum skill set to get started with building their own apps end to end. Attendees also were encouraged to finish the rest of the labs based on their interest so that they can complete the quest and get their badge of accomplishment.
ThoughtWorks again was a great host with their vast workplace floor and snacks. Thanks to Google for sponsoring the lunch as well. The lunch break gave attendees extra time to network and get to know each other and of course, get their questions regarding the qwiklabs answered.


Next week it's all about BigData and Machine Learning and its a full day event. We have a great crew from GDG Hyderabad showing up every week helping the participants.

If you are a participant, keep in mind to
  • Check out the event in the meetup.
  • Complete the pre-requisite GCP Essential quest.
  • Join the Slack Channel for continued conversation.
See you there.