Google Cloud Platform - Is there not some sort of trial included for the 12 month period?

JPritchard

Hi everyone,

I'm aware that GCP can be used for 90 days with a dollar limit on the resource usage. However, this is a 12-month package purchased and if the classes have been certified on a particular platform and the lab setup and guides tailored to that, would it not have been better to provide this as either part of the base price of the course, or as an add-on?

Thank you.

fcioanca

Hi @JPritchard, We understand your concern. You do have access for 12 months to the course content, but you are able to finish it in a lot less than that. While the lab exercises have been tested on GCP, you may be able to do them using VMs, keeping in mind that there may be small variances. We do not offer a lab environment for any of our courses, but we do provide instructions on how to set up the environment and also assistance through the forum if there are issues. This allows you to use an environment that you are more familiar with, or experiment with a new setup, tailoring your learning experience and learning by doing.

chrispokorni

Hi @JPritchard,

Thank you for your feedback.

I agree that it is unfortunate that GCP recently transitioned from the 12 months/$300 credit trial period to a limited 3 months with credit. However, it offers an always free tier for a specific size of GCE VM instance. This specific, and restricted in resources, VM instance is yet to be tested with the exercises of this course. While the expectation is that the performance may be adversely impacted by the reduced CPU and memory of the always free VM instance, other inconsistencies may be encountered as well.

The VM size tested with this course is one of the least expensive instance types, and if stopped between exercise sessions it will help reduce actual costs from the projected monthly resource costs associated with the VM's resource profile.

Regards,
-Chris

camiryu

Well agreed. By the way you can check out MatrixC blog for Google Cloud news and updates in a nutshell.