Review: Coursera "Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure"

I completed the Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure course on Coursera which offers a broad introduction to GCP.  The course is aimed Systems Operations professionals and Cloud Architects using Google Cloud Platform to design, create, or migrate application environments and infrastructure and is taught by Google Cloud Training. It covered the following topics:

Module 1: Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Module 2: Getting Started with Google Cloud Platform
Module 3: Google App Engine and Google Cloud Datastore
Module 4: Google Cloud Platform Storage Options
Module 5: Google Container Engine
Module 6: Google Compute Engine and Networking
Module 7: Big Data and Machine Learning

I loved the well designed course material. I'll keep referring to the very informative slides & video transcripts that came with it.

A sampling of the notes -

Container separates operating system from application code and dependencies. Virtualization at the operating system layer

There are different implementations of containers systems. Docker is the most widely known, and is supported by both Google Container Engine and the Google App Engine Flexible Environment. Google App Engine standard environment also uses containers, but those are Google created containers, not Docker.

Kubernetes is an open source container cluster orchestration system. It automates deployment, scaling, and operations for container clusters. It is built for a multi-cloud world: Public, private, hybrid

Kubernetes, combined with Google Container Engine, allow a more declarative, programmatic way of allocating resources, rather than specifying IP addresses and health checks and the like