{"id":342,"date":"2020-09-23T13:28:43","date_gmt":"2020-09-23T13:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/clusters\/technical-services\/?p=342"},"modified":"2021-09-02T08:54:44","modified_gmt":"2021-09-02T08:54:44","slug":"aceing-google-cloud-with-coursera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/blog\/2020\/09\/aceing-google-cloud-with-coursera\/","title":{"rendered":"ACEing Google Cloud with Coursera"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In the spring of 2020, Google offered EMBL-EBI some temporary licenses for the online training platform, Coursera<\/a>, as part of the growing collaboration between EMBL-EBI and Google Cloud. Ten licenses were made available for a period of 3 months, providing access to a selection of courses curated by Google. We offered them to the attendees of the in-house 2019 ResOps training course<\/a> (run by the TSC Cloud Consultants), since they had implicitly expressed an interest in increasing their knowledge of building and deploying cloud native applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

There was such a demand that we decided to share them, for 3 or 4 weeks at a time, among the 30+ staff members who expressed an interest. This gave everyone a chance to pick up some skills, but was not enough time for anyone to really master any skills in depth. Feedback was very positive<\/a>, nonetheless. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Recently, Coursera offered to renew those licenses for us for a further 3 months, but this time limited to named individuals. We decided to make a virtue of this restriction by finding ten people who wanted to take the Google Associate Cloud Engineer<\/a> (ACE) professional certification specialisation, including taking the exam that goes with it. For that to work, their Group Team Leader would have to allow them to dedicate time to their study, and agree to pay the exam fee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, we had 30 applicants, and somehow had to choose who to accept, and who to decline. We wanted to maximise the impact for EMBL-EBI, so we prioritised candidates working in a team with concrete ambitions to move into the cloud in the near future. We looked for people who can spread the knowledge they gain within their teams, and who had some basic knowledge of the cloud to give them a head start. We also tried to make sure that a wide range of groups were represented, to help grow the knowledge across the Institute. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI’m willing to boost the services and research within the ChEMBL group with the flexibility a hybrid cloud approach can bring us.\u201d<\/em> <\/p>

Eloy Felix – ChEMBL Team Technical Lead at EMBL-EBI <\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The ACE certification specialisation on Coursera consists of 5 individual courses, for a total of about 50 hours of study. Then there are the practice sessions, and simply taking the time to learn the material. Google suggests taking 6 months for this certification, but we only have the licenses for 3 months, so we’re on a tight schedule. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To give us a fair chance of success we’re using a number of resources, all of which are optional for the class. We have our own Slack channel and mailing list for discussions, and we are holding remote drop-in sessions every week, in which we can discuss, show demos, debug problems together, and so on. We don\u2019t expect everyone to attend every drop-in session – or indeed any of them – so we\u2019re summarising the questions and answers from them in an FAQ. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI want to know what the users can do before they do it, so we can provide EBI access to them from as close to day one as possible\u201d<\/em> <\/p>

Marc Riera – SW Dev Project Leader at EMBL-EBI<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Not only is the timeline short, but the timing is a little tricky too. The licenses expire one week before Christmas, so making maximal use of them before taking the exam means the exam will either be taken in the middle of the Christmas rush, or a couple of weeks after the courses finish, with the risk that we\u2019ll forget everything we\u2019ve learned! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite that, we\u2019re optimistic. Our Google contacts assure us it\u2019s possible to get the certification in this time frame, providing we stay focused on the goal. Our line managers have agreed to give us the time, so our chances are good. In fact, we\u2019re so optimistic that many of us are eyeing the Google Professional Cloud Architect<\/a> certification too. That\u2019s only a short step up from the ACE certificate, another 20 hours of videos, so we may try to go for that as well. Watch this space! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe plan to scale up our pipeline using the Google Cloud Platform to tackle the ever-increasing volume of microbiome data, and keep leading the field\u201d <\/em><\/p>

Martin Beracochea – Full Stack Software Developer at EMBL-EBI <\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If indeed this first group of people do turn out to be ‘certifiable’, we hope to be able to do this again in the future. We’ll have to buy our own licenses, of course, but will form study groups to accelerate getting people through the certification so they can start making use of their new skills as soon as possible. We will also look into the possibility of similar group study for Amazon Web Services<\/a>, our other main cloud platform. Our intent is to establish a culture of cloud-native, cloud-friendly design, which will help us not only move into the cloud, but also to make efficient use of in-house computing resources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Created by Tony Wildish, Cloud Bioinformatics Lead Architect<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the spring of 2020, Google offered EMBL-EBI some temporary licenses for the online training platform, Coursera, as part of the growing collaboration between EMBL-EBI and Google Cloud. Ten licenses were made available for a period of 3 months, providing access to a selection of courses curated by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[374],"tags":[252,2058,2068,2067],"embl_taxonomy":[],"class_list":["post-342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud","tag-cloud","tag-cloud-computing","tag-coursera","tag-google"],"acf":[],"embl_taxonomy_terms":[],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-includes\/images\/media\/default.svg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions\/348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"embl_taxonomy","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ebi.ac.uk\/about\/teams\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/embl_taxonomy?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}