Google has today announced that it has acquired Qwiklabs, an end-to-end cloud platform which aims to provide hands-on lab learning and software testing environments to the developers. With this acquisition, the Mountain View-based tech giant is further adding to its arsenal of cloud services and the widely popular enterprise G Suite. The financial details of the transaction haven’t been disclosed.
Founded in 2012 by Enis Konuk, Jitesh Shetty, Qwiklabs has been primarily aimed at providing a natural and intuitive hands-on experience to developers willing to learn how to use modern cloud platforms, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS). The training courses prepared by the company offered step-by-step instructions to learn a popular cloud service, test different use cases, and train in-house teams.
Over the past four years, the company didn’t pick up any outside funding and managed to scale the service to accommodate more than half a million users. They’ve collectively spent over 5 million hours learning how to deploy and manage multiple cloud technologies. The company was also the chosen hands-on training provider for AWS’s customers, partners and employees globally.
Now, the Qwiklabs team is joining Google and Jason Martin, Director, Professional Services, Google Cloud has a couple words to share about the upcoming journey.
We’re focused on offering the most comprehensive, efficient, and fun way to train and onboard people across all our products on Google Cloud, including Google Cloud Platform and G Suite. We want to help businesses get the most out of their cloud investment and, with Qwiklabs, we’ll give users a place to learn and expand their cloud skills to deliver more innovation, more features and more efficiency for their customers.
Though Qwiklabs is now with Google, it doesn’t mean that the platform is abandoning its partners and fellow developers who’ve spent huge amounts of their time learning cloud technologies in real-time on Qwiklabs. The company has confirmed that it will continue to offer lab learning credits and subscriptions for its existing AWS labs. The already subscribed developers and instructor-led training sessions will continue to enjoy the same access to the humongous library of hands-on labs.
