Google acquires Qwiklabs, to help expand developers' cloud-skills

Google announced the acquisition of Quicklabs, a learning platform that helps developers and IT professionals get hands-on experience on working with leading cloud platforms and infrastructure software vendors. Founded in 2012, Qwiklabs offers step-by-step instructions to learn a popular cloud service, test different use cases and train teams to become cloud experts.

“Our mission has been to transform technology learning from a passive watching experience to a hands-on doing experience. We’ve had to solve some gnarly technology problems along the way, but we eventually figured out how to deliver real-world lab learning environments in a reliable and operationally efficient way,” said Enis Konuk, Founder and CEO, Qwiklabs and a former Sun and VMware executive, in a blog post.

Google’s idea behind the acquisition is to offer the most comprehensive, efficient, and fun way to train and onboard people across all products on Google Cloud, including Google Cloud Platform and G Suite, the company claims.

“With Qwiklabs, we’re closing the IP skills gap in the cloud. More than half a million users have collectively spent over 5 million hours learning how to successfully deploy and manage multiple cloud technologies through the Qwiklabs platform.” said Jason Martin, Director Professional Services, Google.

Google also said that it aims at helping businesses get the most out of their cloud investment, with Qwiklabs, users can learn and expand their cloud skills to deliver more innovation, more features and more efficiency for their customers. Qwiklabs says it will continue to offer lab learning credits and subscriptions on its site and it looks like the existing AWS labs will continue to function.

“I’m not sure we’ll see all that many new AWS courses in the future, though, but that remains unclear.” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch.

He further added that as far as Qwiklabs’s Google Cloud courses is concerned, the company doesn’t have any specifics to announce as to when those will go live.