Cloud computing is almost as hot as AI right now, with some of the world’s top tech companies competing fiercely in the space, especially in infrastructure-as-a-service and consumer-facing cloud storage. Right now, the dominant player in the space is Amazon, whose Amazon Web Services is the sole curriculum for Qwiklabs, a lab-based learning system meant to turn know-nothing hopefuls, students, and seasoned coders alike into cloud superstars. Qwiklabs’ client list is long and varied, with many a business hopping onto a cloud service for their backend using Qwiklabs to teach their employees how to use it, for just one example. With Amazon Web Services being one of the easiest cloud services to fall in with and learn thanks to Qwiklabs, a fairly obvious way for Google to score more clients and talent in one fell swoop would be to have Qwiklabs add Google Cloud Platform and G Suite, formerly Google apps for work, to their curriculum, and that’s exactly what Google has done in the Googliest way possible; by buying Qwiklabs.
Qwiklabs’ curriculum for Amazon Web Services will continue to be available, and for now, the service will continue to operate as normal. Reportedly, Qwiklabs will be integrating new curriculum in the near future that features Google Cloud Platform and G Suite, allowing anybody interested in learning more about how to use cloud services to choose Google’s products, whereas Qwiklabs reportedly only offered curriculum based on Amazon Web Services in the past. This meant that businesses and users who were completely new to the cloud essentially had Amazon Web Services as their sole choice for jumping gently into learning the cloud.
According to Google’s blog post on the matter, the transition may not take all that long; the post hints that attendees at the upcoming 2017 Google Cloud Platform Next conference, which will be taking place between March 8 and March 10 of 2017, can expect to hear something from Qwiklabs. The service has been around since 2012, and has provided more than 5 million hours of training to a user base of over half a million hopefuls. This transition will mark the first time that the service has offered any curriculum besides Amazon Web Services, which means that this move could usher in an entirely new expert user base for Google Cloud Platform.