Course Review - Building Scalable Java Microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud

18 Jul 2020 [ course-review  java  spring  google-cloud  ]

Today, wanted to explore some GCP tools out of interest. As we use mostly AWS solutions at work, I never really had the chance to test out Google’s offerings. I found this random course in Coursera: Building Scalable Java Microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.

What’s nice about this course is that the laboratory exercises are prepared by Qwiklabs and that the student is actually presented with a real hands-on GCP environment to play around with. I managed to go through all the labs in one day, while watching Hamilton movie and waiting for the GCP resources to finish loading. I wanted to highlight the things I liked and disliked about the course in this post.

Pros

1. Covers a lot of ground for a short amount of time.
2. Laboratories are very effective in making you familiar of the GCP console.
3. Really easy to follow the laboratories. It’s practically copy-pasting stuff from guide to code.

Cons

1. Some topics were too shallow, and that no links to further readings or entries were given.
2. Kubernetes and Prometheus topics felt a bit rushed. Lacked discussions to drive points accross.
3. A lot of waiting to load all of the resources when starting up a lab. For example, the base code used for the labs are generated in g3 when you start the exercise. This takes 5-10 minutes while waiting for the bucket to be built. I feel that having it hosted in Github might have been better for time-sensitive students.

Overall, it was a positive experience. I learned a lot about GCP, and it gave me more confidence to be able to deploy stuff in that platform when the time comes. There’s also a bonus certificate!