Google Cloud Digital Leader Certification

I passed the Google Cloud Digital Leader Certification Exam! I found the no cost Learning Path for the exam on Google Cloud Skills Boost very useful, especially the material on business transformation strategy. 

It has 4 very well-written modules delivered via videos with transcripts:

1. Introduction to Digital Transformation with Google Cloud

2. Innovating with Data and Google Cloud

3. Infrastructure and Application Modernization with Google Cloud

4. Understanding Google Cloud Security and Operations

For a summary of the important Google Cloud services, I reviewed the illustrations in GCP Sketch Notes which are now also a part of the book Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects

Some highlights from the Google Cloud Skills Boost modules that also come with great illustrations -

The Digital Transformation module introduces Google's six core tenets for transforming culture:

1. Talent 
2. Environment
3. Structure
4. Strategy
5. Empowerment
6. Innovation

Google follows three rules to foster and scale a culture of innovation:

• Focus on the user or the customer
• Think 10x or generate big ideas
• Launch and iterate or continuous learning

Innovation is about doing something in a surprisingly new way, or discovering something entirely new that adds value.

10X thinking is about generating big ideas. It’s about transformation over improvement and using technology to achieve that transformation. 

One great example of a 10x thinker was Henry Ford, an early innovator who brought the automobile to mass market in America. He said, "If you would ask people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.'' Imagine how long it would have taken for the world to experience motor vehicles if everyone thought to only improve what they already had.  

When people feel psychological safety and begin applying the launch and iterate rule into their day-to-day work the result is the prototyping effect. The more ideas you try, the more you learn, and the more you eventually succeed. 

In July 2017, Google launched the new enterprise edition of Google Glass. The initial plan to create and mass market digital glasses did not succeed, but teams learned from each iteration evolving and adapting at each stage and responding to customer user feedback, which led to new successes. 

Eliminating ads for some searches and using sponsored links instead turned out to be very profitable for Google.

Virtual machines recreate a full representation of the hardware. 

Containers only recreate, or virtualize, the operating systems 

ML is a way to use standard algorithms or standard models to analyze data in order to derive predictive insights and make repeated decisions at scale.

In order to leverage tooling and automation, SREs focus on toil automation. In software engineering, toil is the type of work that is tied to running a production service. Toil automation therefore reduces the amount of manual repetitive work.

An error budget is the amount of error that a service provider can accumulate over a certain period of time before end users start feeling unhappy. You can think of this as the pain tolerance for end users, but apply to a certain dimension of a service such as availability, latency, and so forth. The error budget is typically the space between the SLA and the SLO.