AWS on EdX vs. GCP on Coursera

I know I said I was going to sleep for a week after the AWS one, but I was also already enrolled in the equivalent of the AWS course on EdX (from now, just "A"), for Google Cloud in Coursera (just "G") and I was not able to resist.

So, in a dopamine rush (or learning high) sleeping slept away...

Anyway, some thoughts on this course and comparison with the AWS one:

• This one is longer (X-Series is 3, this is 6) but is covering more topics if compared with the same services and infrastructure modules of the AWS one. However, the modules are shorter and the last one is just a recap of what the exam is about.
• Labs are FREE and managed through Qwiklabs accounts (also in the Microsoft trainings for Azure you use student subscriptions), so you don't have to worry to accidentally spend money and clean up the environment at the end (in A you use your own account and you MUST worry about this).
• Labs simply work as expected in the walkthrough: PROs you know if it's you or it's the environment and you can clear all the labs. CONs since labs in A were outdated, I needed to "headbang" to make them work, which made the learning more effective by "trying harder" (cit.)
• The biggest waste of time is waiting for the reCaptcha (tons of them as you need to use incognito tabs or not logged browsers) and it seemed much slower than a real production environment.
• Almost all the walkthrough paths include many lines of command line, especially when working with kubectl, which is great since you need to work a bit on the command, at least to replace variables and set up the environment. That was a great boost. A labs were mostly based on clicking in the console.
• Having a short amount of time (I was mostly following the video lessons and the readings during lunch break, while cooking dinner and labs and quizzes after putting the kids in bet), I worked more than one lab per day, which may result in annoying session management issues that could log you out in the middle of the lab and required restarting. The positive fact is that having to do it all again, it may reinforce the learning.
• Ultra-positive feature of the labs: they have mid-lab automatic checkpoint to be sure you did everything correct (e.g. you run the proper commands to create a VM instance), so you don't get stuck after with the next part of the lab because you missed something (many headbangs in the A course). However, if they fail, they don't say what steps you forgot or did wrong (e.g. setting the wrong region or zone). To "trick" this, just use F12 and open the developer console and look at the network requests. The JSON answer from the lab contains the message about what you missed, at least as a hint (e.g. "Please create the VM with the proper image").
• A course was structured to be sequential, so there was no point in doing parallel content management. The G one is structured with much more independent perimeters of learning, so it was easier for me to enrol in multiple courses at the same time and manage better my schedule (e.g. if I had only 15 minutes free I could choose between more modules to pick).

Having said that, I would say that this course is slightly better in terms of structure and tools. The one from AWS on EdX has a much higher quality of the recording, the audio, and the infographics. The G ones looked a bit "old fashioned powerpoints". Labs are definitely better in this course.

My personal experience is that, having studied for many hours for Azure and AWS, approaching GCP, to which I only had a couple of months of contact in the past and some personal playing, was easier as many services are identical in terms of feature of what the other two offer, just with a different name. Of course, there are a lot of nuances and differences, which is what I think is going to be the focus of the next courses I will take before going for the exam.

I didn't track the total time, but it was something between 12 and 16 hours including labs and quizzes done at the end, following the 6 courses sometimes in parallel, to clear it, but considering that I already knew many of the concepts so I skipped some sections, readings and videos.

I am planning to use also the resources from Dan Sullivan, who wrote the official study guide, and some more readings from Google's articles.

I hope this could help others in choosing (or not) the resources to learn this platform.