After an initial false start, certifications for the Google Cloud Platform are now coming back into vogue with the major difference being this latest round of certifications are now more focused on five key types of applications running on the Google cloud service.

To help solution providers attain those certifications CBT Nuggets in partnership with Google has launched a series of online training videos that guide IT professionals through what they need to know to pass the Google certification test.

Garth Schulte, a CBT Nuggets trainer that specializes in the Google Cloud Platform, said the courses cover everything from how to deploy Docker containers on the Google cloud to the application programming interfaces (APIs) that Google exposes to enable developers to deploy applications. Specifically, the video courses align directly with the Google certification program by focusing on Google App Engine; Google Cloud Storage; Google Cloud SQL; Google Compute Engine and the Google BigQuery services. As part of the partnership with Google, IT professionals that have an active CBT Nuggets subscription can earn up to five free Google Cloud Platform certification exam vouchers when they watch at least 50 percent of any CBT Nuggets Google Cloud Platform training course.

Despite the absence of any real marketing effort, Schulte says Google maintains its position as the third largest provider of cloud services behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft because of its singular focus on application developers. Schulte said that Google is especially popular among developers of Big Data applications that appreciate the fact that Google makes available the network it built for its own applications to third-party developers. In contrast, other cloud service providers have created alliances with providers of third-party network services that charge extra for the large volumes of data transfers that usually don’t occur as fast as they do on the Google network, said Schulte.

From a pricing perspective, Schulte noted that Google is able to keep pace with AWS and Microsoft because it leverages the scale of IT investments made in providing search and email services to continually lower its compute and storage costs, which it then passes on to its cloud service provider customers.

Naturally, there’s a lot of contention concerning the business value of any certification. But in the case of emerging technologies such as cloud services, Schulte said certifications give the end customer a higher degree of confidence in the abilities of the organizations they contract to build and deploy their cloud applications when the people working for them are certified. There may not be much help from Google in terms of marketing the business value of those certifications, but in a world overcrowded with solution providers claiming to have cloud expertise every little certification, at least to one degree or another, helps create some level of much-needed differentiation.