Google has a series of resources for educators that want to use their cloud environment in classes. Typically, this includes:
- Per-student credits
- Automated training using QwikLabs
There is a “Google Cloud Faculty” googlegroup that includes a mailing list monitored by Google employees. You’ll typically be asked to join if you get educational credits.
Per-Student Credits
You can apply for course and students
credits.
You need to estimate the number of students in your class.
You’ll receive a link to which you can direct students – they then
login with their @colorado.edu account and receive $100 in credits.
These credits do not require a credit card and thus can be safer
for students who have less experience in using cloud resources than
e.g. Amazon’s student credits.
Automated Training
QwikLabs are a series of training lessons that prepare students and faculty to use Google Cloud resources.
There is an extensive catalog of lessons for Google Cloud products, including Hadoop, BigQuery, Spark, Kubernetes and various ML resources. Individual lessons are grouped into “quests” – for example the Baseline: Data, ML, AI quest combines lessons on using CloudML, Hadoop / Spark, Cloud NLP API’s and more.
Many of the individual lessons are free, but some of the lessons require “credits”. Faculty can apply for credits that can be distributed to their courses and individual students (and IT admins) can apply for credits independent of individual courses. The credits do not require credit card billing.
Up to May 2019, you had to separately apply for credits and training credits; those processes will be merged and you can apply for both using the “beta” program. This also includes access to 13 on-line Coursera courses that cover aspects of using Google infrastructure.