Logan Song - Journey to Become a Google Cloud Machine Learning Engineer: Build the Mind and Hand of a Google Certified ML Professional

Build the mind and hand of a Google Certified ML professional

Dr. Logan Song

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

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First published: September 2022

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To Grandpa and Grandma, your love made this book possible.

To Dad and Mom, your DNA is in the book.

To Peiying, Peihua, Peixing, and Hengping, your encouragement is visible on each page of the book.

To Nancy, Neil, and Nicole, you are the driving force of the book.

To Tracey, thank you for allowing me to spend so much time on machine learning in the cloud.

- Logan Song

Dr. Logan Song is the enterprise cloud director and chief cloud architect at Dito (www.ditoweb.com). With 25+ years of professional experience, Dr. Song is highly skilled in enterprise information technologies, specializing in cloud computing and machine learning. He is a Google Cloud-certified professional solution architect and machine learning engineer, an AWS-certified professional solution architect and machine learning specialist, and a Microsoft-certified Azure solution architect expert. Dr. Song holds a Ph.D. in industrial engineering, an MS in computer science, and an ME in management engineering. Currently, he is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, teaching cloud computing and machine learning courses.

From Thanksgiving of 2021 to August of 2022, it took nine months to complete this book. I want to thank God for the amazing grace that made this book possible.

This book would not have been possible without the great support and collaboration from the Packt team: Sean Lobo, Prashant Ghare, Aparna Nair, Dhruv J. Kataria, the technical reviewer, the copy editors, and the whole Packt production team. Its been such a great pleasure working with the team!

I also want to thank my friend Farukh Khalilov, and the graduate student assistants at the University of Texas at Dallas, for their tremendous help in developing and verifying the Google Cloud practices and Python labs in this book. My gratitude is beyond words.

Vijender Singh is a certified multi-cloud expert having 5+ years of experience and currently working with the Amazon Alexa AI team to tackle the effective use of AI on Alexa. He has completed an MSc with Distinction from Liverpool John Moores University with research work on keyphrase extraction. He has completed MLPE GCP, 5x Azure, 2x AWS certification, and TensorFlow certification. Vijender is instrumental in co-mentoring and teaching colleagues with machine learning and TensorFlow, which is a fundamental tool for the ML journey. He believes in working toward a better tomorrow.

Before starting the Google Cloud Machine Learning journey, you need to ask yourself a serious question: am I committed to taking this path?

In the summer of 2015, I was facing the same question: do I really want to get out of my comfort zone and pursue a new career called cloud computing and machine learning? At that time, I had been working in the traditional IT industry for over 20 years and was very comfortable with my professional life. Starting a new journey meant that I would have to learn from scratch!

For the whole summer, I was thinking about this question, along with another fundamental question: what do I really want to do in my life?

And one day, I came across Steve Jobs famous commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 (https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/), and suddenly I heard a voice: Stay hungry, stay foolish!

At that moment, I made up my mind.

Today, I am so thankful to God for what happened in that summer and on that day!

Now, if you are determined as I was in 2015, lets march on our journey, together.

- Logan Song