1. What is Coursera and its Specializations

Coursera is a platform that offers lectures in short videos called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Specializations are a series of courses on a specific topic.

2. Architecting with Google Compute Engine

This specialization is provided by Google itself. It aims to train you on their cloud services: GCP.

The curriculum consists of 5 courses:

• Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure

  • very basics of GCP

  • 1 week and 6-10 hours/week expected

• Essential Google Cloud Infrastructure: Foundation

  • some hands-on, still quite basic

  • 2 weeks and 3-5h/week expected

• Essential Google Cloud Infrastructure: Core Services

  • similar to the previous one, a lot of information about IAM specially

  • 2 weeks and 3-5h/week expected

• Elastic Google Cloud Infrastructure: Scaling and Automation

  • quite a lot of content related to networking, I had a lot of trouble with this!

  • 2 weeks and 3-5h/week expected but took more for me

• Reliable Google Cloud Infrastructure: Design and Process

  • lots of interesting stuff here, really enjoyed but took even longer than the previous one for me

  • 2 weeks of study and 6-8 hours/week expected

3. Feedback

Overall I enjoyed it. It takes a lot of time and watching all the videos can sometimes be boring but the content is very good. It's usually easy to understand. But the best part is the Qwiklabs. Qwiklabs are practice exercises where they provide a GCP account and you can experience concrete examples. They can sometimes be a bit old but it's mostly a great experience.

4. Is it worth it

If you're planning to use GCP in the next few weeks/month and you want the certificate, I recommend it. However, if you want this knowledge to be useful, you have to practice. You can watch all the videos for free on Coursera but you will not have the certificate and more importantly, you will not have access to Qwiklabs, which is the most important part I think.

Another interesting point is that you can have official certification from Google and usually their specialization relates to some specific certificates. Those MOOCs are part of the Cloud Architect certificate.

That's it! The next article will be about the other specialization that I followed "Advanced Machine Learning with TensorFlow on Google Cloud Platform".