Saturday Special: Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals (for iOS developers)

If you've followed this meetup for very long, you know that one of our favorite topics is cloud solutions for app developers. We've all seen that the most valuable apps are apps that connect people to services and to other people, and we've found that simple ways to build backend services are critical for app developers who want to move quickly (and affordably!).

This is also an area with plenty (http://stackmob.com/) of pitfalls (http://blog.parse.com/announcements/moving-on/). While it's helpful to have an easy-to-work-with friend on your side, it's important to have a friend that's viable enough to stick around and that isn't pushing you into proprietary dependencies that could leave you stuck.

For these reasons, I've become a big fan of Google Cloud Platform (https://cloud.google.com/), and last month I joined the Google Cloud Platform team to work on cloud solutions for app developers. I'm still learning the full range of things that Google has to offer, and as part of my self-education, I've arranged for this one day class to share with you.

CP100A (https://cloud.google.com/training/courses/cp100a), aka Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals is a daylong class on Google's cloud offerings, including:

• Google App Engine (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/), a super-simple "application in the cloud" platform.

• Google Compute Engine (https://cloud.google.com/compute/), managed virtual machines for as little as $4.49/month.

• Google Container Engine (https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/), clusters of Docker (https://www.docker.com/) containers managed by the open source Kubernetes (http://kubernetes.io/) cluster manager.

• Google Cloud Datastore (https://cloud.google.com/datastore/), a BigTable-based API for NoSQL data storage.

• Google Cloud Storage (https://cloud.google.com/storage/), a planetary-scale file system that's great for storing and sharing large files.

• Google Cloud SQL (https://cloud.google.com/sql/), fully-managed MySQL databases.

• Google BigQuery (https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/), an analytics platform for running large-scale analytics on data that you own and control.

Our instructors will be Francesc Campoy (https://twitter.com/francesc) and Sara Robinson (https://twitter.com/SRobTweets), both developer advocates at Google. Like me, Francesc is a big fan of Google's Go (https://golang.org/) language, which I think provides a solid, practical glue to hold everything together. The course will orient us to the Google Cloud Platform Console and each of the services above, and code samples will be in a mixture of Java, Python, and Go (Francesc doesn't have much experience with iOS, but Sara and I do, and we'll be looking at everything with the perspective of iOS app developers).

We've reserved space for 5̶0̶ 80 and will have a light breakfast, lunch, and snacks available.