Cloud computing skills are in high demand among organizations that are looking to operate and maintain thei organization’s cloud solutions. The pandemic and subsequent ‘new normal’ of remote work are furthering demands for these skills. Many are turning to online learning platforms to up their game and acquire the cloud computing skills most likely to help them stand out. And whether you are looking to acquire those skills for work or for play, this collection of Pluralsight cybersecurity courses will help you learn the ropes so you can pilot some of the most widely used tools in no time!

With this in mind, the editors at Solutions Review have compiled this list of top-rated Pluralsight cloud computing courses to consider taking. This platform is perfect for those looking to take multiple courses or acquire skills in multiple different areas, or for those who want the most in-depth experience possible through access to entire course libraries or learning paths. In sum, Pluralsight offers more than 7,000 expert-led video courses.

Note: Our editors assembled this directory by listing top-rated Pluralsight cloud computing courses in a number of different cloud coverage areas, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, cloud migration and transformation, cloud security, and cloud management.

Architecting for Security on AWS
“AWS security architects need to understand how to build security into every AWS deployment at every level. In this course, Architecting for Security on AWS, you’ll learn how to secure your data and your AWS services and resources at multiple levels using a defense-in-depth approach. First, you’ll learn how to protect your AWS credentials using identity and access management. Next, you’ll see how to capture and analyze logs using CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and Athena. Finally, you’ll learn how to implement network and instance security, encrypt data at rest and in-transit, and set up data backup, replication, and recovery. After finishing this course, you’ll be ready to granularly control access to your AWS resources.”

Cloud Computing: The Big Picture
Description: “You hear a lot about cloud computing these days. Ever wonder what that means, and where it fits into your daily job? That’s what this course is designed to teach you. You’ll explore applications in the cloud (commonly called Software as a Service, or SaaS), an overview of cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, as well as private clouds (bringing cloud technology on-premise). By the time you’re done, you’ll know what cloud computing is all about and be ready to start exploring specific implementations.”

Cloud-Native Architecture: The Big Picture
Description: “You’re asked to build more changeable, available, scalable, and secure software. While cloud platforms make some of those characteristics easier to achieve, it’s more about how you build software, not where you run it. In this course, Cloud-native Architecture: The Big Picture, you’ll learn what it means to be cloud-native.”

Cloud Security: Introduction to Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP®)
“Many organizations may make the mistake of skipping architecture and going straight to design. This can be avoided by selecting a cloud service provider that fits with your business requirements. In this course, Cloud Security: Introduction to Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP), you will learn foundational knowledge of how to translate business requirements into selection criteria for a cloud service provider. First, you will learn how to identify which cloud architecture best meets your business requirements. Next, you will discover how to use security architecture to develop a secure cloud consumption strategy. Finally, you will explore how to select a cloud service provider and meet regulatory requirements. When you’re finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge needed to select and consume cloud services securely.”

Foundations for Cloud Architecture
Description: “First, you’ll explore the differences between public, private, and hybrid cloud computing, the business requirements they fill, and their architectural caveats. Next, you’ll learn about the practical variations in public cloud service offerings. Finally, you’ll take a look into how you and your business can benefit from advanced cloud services.”

Fundamental Cloud Concepts for AWS
“AWS certifications add value for both technical and non-technical resources in today’s digital world. In this course, Fundamental Cloud Concepts for AWS, you will walk through the fundamental cloud concepts which explains one of the four major areas that are covered by the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam. First, you will review the concept of cloud computing and the value it provides to organizations. Next, you will learn the organization of AWS global infrastructure. Next, you will discover the economics of cloud computing. Finally, you will review the tools and services that AWS provides to support infrastructure running on their platform. When you are finished with this course, you will have a clear understanding of the cloud and the fundamentals needed for a portion of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.”

Google Cloud Functions Fundamentals
“Developers want to build serverless microservices so they can create new content, reduce maintenance, scale easily, and deliver new features to users faster. In this course, Google Cloud Functions Fundamentals, you will expand your serverless skills to create high-quality Microservices that will enhance the experience of your app or website. First, you will learn to build unique functions that interact with other Google Cloud services such as Cloud Vision and Cloud Datastore. Second, you will discover advanced concepts such as the function’s file system, idempotent function design, and working through memory and timeout issues. Finally, you will explore how to properly log errors and set up monitoring for your functions so you can continue to monitor them once they are in production. When you’re finished with this course, you will have a high-level understanding of Google Cloud Functions that will allow you to create unique experiences for your customers.”

Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals
“Over the last few years, the cloud has proven itself as a successful enabler for organizations of all sizes to improve agility, scale, reliability, and spend management. It has also made available capabilities that have greatly accelerated the adoption of a wide variety of new types of applications – from big data to Internet of Things. This rapidly expanding set of capabilities can be difficult for anyone to keep up with, and that challenge is further compounded when attempting to map capabilities across different public cloud providers. This course, Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals, provides you with an extensive overview of Google Cloud Platform. While the Google Cloud Platform is a more recent offering than some of its competitors, it draws on years of experience running Google’s massive internal infrastructure and exposes a streamlined set of solution-focused capabilities to help you build great systems.”

Microsoft Azure Cloud Concepts
“Over 90% of the Fortune 500 companies use at least one Microsoft cloud service. In this day and age, it’s important for any IT or Business Professional to know what Microsoft offers from a cloud computing perspective. In this course, Microsoft Azure Cloud Concepts, you will focus on the basics of cloud computing by defining at a more general level what the cloud is, why it’s useful, and examine how Microsoft fits in each type of cloud offering. First, you will learn about what the cloud is and why it is important. Next, you will discover the different types of cloud computing. Finally, you will explore the different cloud computing deployment models. When you are finished with this course, you will gain an understanding of why the cloud is so important to today’s businesses and know the differences between, public, private, and community clouds.”

Microsoft Azure: The Big Picture
“Microsoft Azure is a huge collection of services for building applications in the cloud and can often be overwhelming. In this course, Microsoft Azure: The Big Picture, you will learn foundational knowledge to begin planning solutions using Microsoft Azure. First, you will learn about cloud computing and the different ways to run your application code. Next, you will discover the data storage, processing, and analysis capabilities in Auzre. Finally, you will explore how to create networks; integrate, manage, and secure your applications; and develop for Azure. When you’re finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge of Microsoft Azure needed to begin working on your cloud solutions.”

Patterns of Cloud Integration
Description: “This course looks at how developers and architectures can use remote procedures calls, asynchronous messaging, shared databases, and file transfers in cloud scenarios. We discuss pitfalls and benefits of each pattern and how the cloud introduces new design aspects. We look at a wide range of technologies from AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Mulesoft, Informatica, and more.”

Google Cloud skills are in high demand among organizations that are looking to operate and maintain their organization’s Google Cloud Platform resources. The pandemic and subsequent ‘new normal’ of remote work are furthering demands for these skills. Many are turning to online learning platforms to up their game and acquire the Google Cloud skills most likely to help them stand out. And whether you are looking to acquire those skills for work or for play, this collection of Pluralsight Google Cloud courses will help you learn the ropes so you can pilot some of the most widely used tools in no time!

With this in mind, the editors at Solutions Review have compiled this list of top-rated Pluralsight Google Cloud courses to consider taking. This platform is perfect for those looking to take multiple courses or acquire skills in multiple different areas, or for those who want the most in-depth experience possible through access to entire course libraries or learning paths. In sum, Pluralsight offers more than 7,000 expert-led video courses.

Architecting Google Cloud Storage Configurations
“In this course, Architecting Google Cloud Storage Configurations, you will learn how to create and harness elastic storage functionality on the cloud and understand how you can migrate your on-premise data to the GCP. First, you will understand where exactly Cloud Storage fits in the range of storage services offered by the GCP. Then, you will see the features and pricing of the different kinds of Cloud Storage buckets and how to make the right choice for your use case. Next, you will explore in a hands-on manner how to create and use Cloud Storage buckets, seeing how data can be moved in and out of buckets, how object metadata can be created and updated, and the lifecycle management of objects. After that, you will administrate and regulate access to buckets and objects within buckets. Finally, you will know how data in buckets can be encrypted using customer-supplied encryption keys, and how objects can be made publicly accessible either permanently or for a limited time-period using signed URLs. At the end of this course, you will be comfortable creating, configuring, and regulating access to Cloud Storage buckets on the Google Cloud Platform.”

Choosing and Implementing Google Cloud Compute Engine Solutions
“In this course, Choosing and Implementing Google Cloud Compute Engine Solutions, you will learn how to create, run, and manage virtual machines on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You will start off by understanding the breadth of offerings from the Google Cloud Platform – ranging from pure IaaS offerings such as the Google Compute Engine to pure PaaS offerings like the Google App Engine. Next, you’ll see how you can create and work with these VM offerings on the cloud. You’ll create and connect to Linux as well as Windows machines, reserve static IP addresses, attach local SSDs to VMs, communicate between VMs on a network and connect to Cloud Storage buckets. You’ll then move on to administrating these instances on the cloud. You’ll see how availability policies, to handle VM migrations, can be configured, how disk images and snapshots can be created, and how you can instantiate VMs using these images and snapshots. Finally, you’ll be shown how to startup and shutdown scripts to customize VMs can be run.”

Creating and Administering Google Cloud SQL Instances
“In this course, Creating and Administering Google Cloud SQL Instances, you will learn how to create, work with and manage Cloud SQL instances on the GCP. First, you will assess the range of data storage services on the GCP and understand when you would choose to use Cloud SQL over other technologies. Then, you will create Cloud SQL instances, connect to them using a simple MySQL client, and configure and administer these instances using the web console as well as the gcloud command-line utility. Next, you will focus on how Cloud SQL can work in high-availability mode. After that, you will configure failover replicas for high-availability and simulate an outage event to see how the failover replica kicks in. Finally, you will see how to use read replicas for increased read throughput and how data can be migrated into Cloud SQL instances using a SQL dump or from CSV files.”

Designing and Implementing Solutions Using Google Machine Learning APIs
“In this course, Designing and Implementing Solutions Using Google Machine Learning APIs, you’ll learn how you can use and work with Google Machine Learning APIs, which makes powerful pre-trained models on Google’s datasets. First, you’ll delve into an overview of the machine learning services suite available on the Google Cloud, and understand the features of each so you can make the right choice about what service makes sense for your use case. Next, you’ll discover speech-based APIs allowing you to convert speech-to-text and text-to-speech with additional emphasis support using SSML, and how you can call these REST APIs using simple Python libraries. Then, you’ll learn about Natural Language APIs and see how they can be used for sentiment analysis and for language translation. Finally, you’ll explore the Vision and Video Intelligence APIs in order to perform face and label detection on images.”

Google Cloud Functions Fundamentals
“Developers want to build serverless microservices so they can create new content, reduce maintenance, scale easily, and deliver new features to users faster. In this course, Google Cloud Functions Fundamentals, you will expand your serverless skills to create high-quality Microservices that will enhance the experience of your app or website. First, you will learn to build unique functions that interact with other Google Cloud services such as Cloud Vision and Cloud Datastore. Second, you will discover advanced concepts such as the function’s file system, idempotent function design, and working through memory and timeout issues. Finally, you will explore how to properly log errors and set up monitoring for your functions so you can continue to monitor them once they are in production. When you’re finished with this course, you will have a high-level understanding of Google Cloud Functions that will allow you to create unique experiences for your customers.”

Google Cloud Functions: Getting Started
“Developers want to build serverless microservices so they can create new content, reduce maintenance, scale easily, and deliver new features to users faster. In this course, Google Cloud Functions: Getting Started, you will learn the skills you need to create high-quality microservices that will enhance the experience of your app or website. First, you will set up a Google Cloud project, install the gcloud command line tools, and set up Google Cloud Functions on your local machine. Next, you will explore all of the different events your functions can respond to, including storage, PubSub, and HTTP triggers. Finally, you will dive into deploying the functions and see how everything integrates seamlessly into the Google Cloud Platform. When you’re finished with this course, you will have a solid understanding of Google Cloud Functions that will allow you to create and deploy your own microservices that will automatically scale with your users.”

Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals
“Over the last few years, the cloud has proven itself as a successful enabler for organizations of all sizes to improve agility, scale, reliability, and spend management. It has also made available capabilities that have greatly accelerated the adoption of a wide variety of new types of applications – from big data to Internet of Things. This rapidly expanding set of capabilities can be difficult for anyone to keep up with, and that challenge is further compounded when attempting to map capabilities across different public cloud providers. This course, Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals, provides you with an extensive overview of Google Cloud Platform. While the Google Cloud Platform is a more recent offering than some of its competitors, it draws on years of experience running Google’s massive internal infrastructure and exposes a streamlined set of solution-focused capabilities to help you build great systems.”

Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals – Core Infrastructure
“This course provides an overview of Google Cloud Platform products and services. Through a combination of presentations, demos, and hands-on labs, participants learn the value of Google Cloud Platform and how to incorporate cloud-based solutions into business strategies.”

Setting up a Cloud Solution Environment on Google Cloud
“The first steps to getting started on a project on Google Cloud include making critical decisions and building an environment you can use. In this course, Setting up a Cloud Solution Environment on Google Cloud, you will learn foundational knowledge of/gain the ability to set up a project for your organization. First, you will learn how to create projects, manage permissions, and enable APIs. Next, you will discover how to handle billing including exporting your billing information to Big Query. Finally, you will explore how to install the Cloud SDK and set up gcloud to use your projects. When you’re finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge of setting up a cloud environment which is needed to build your next great idea.”

Cloud Complexity Is an Engineering Problem First

Cloud computing is often packaged and sold as a plug-and-play service. Behind that user-friendly abstraction, however, lies an engineering reality that is considerably harder to manage. Unlike a laptop — where hardware specifications are fixed, physical, and predictable — cloud infrastructure is globally distributed, virtualized, and highly configurable.

Cloud instances can vary by compute size, processing power, and storage. But they also differ along more specialized axes: some configurations are optimized for high-throughput transactional workloads, others for big data analytics, machine learning inference, logging and monitoring, or security-hardened environments. Designing and operating cloud infrastructure requires skills across network architecture, data services integration, security access control, and workload orchestration — simultaneously.

For organizations deploying cloud at scale, this complexity creates a widening skills gap. That gap is the problem Pluralsight is positioning itself to solve.

Pluralsight’s Strategy: From E-Learning Platform to Engineering Intelligence

Pluralsight, headquartered in Utah, has historically operated as an enterprise technology skills and e-learning platform. As of 2019, the company was moving deliberately beyond that identity — toward becoming a platform that provides analytical visibility into how engineering teams actually work, not just what courses they complete.

A significant step in that direction was Pluralsight’s acquisition of GitPrime in May 2019. GitPrime integrates with major code repositories — including GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab — and captures data from developer code commits. By connecting learning activity to actual coding behavior, Pluralsight aimed to surface actionable insights about engineering team performance and identify where skill gaps are translating into real workflow bottlenecks.

Following the acquisition, Pluralsight rebranded its core skill development offering as Pluralsight Skills and renamed the GitPrime product suite as Pluralsight Flow. According to the company, Flow provides software engineering leaders with data-driven analytics to eliminate bottlenecks, improve collaboration, and support better decision-making across development teams.

Language Analytics: Connecting Learning to Code Output

The initial integration point between Flow and Skills is a feature Pluralsight calls Language Analytics. This data visualization links the time engineers spend on Pluralsight courses with the code commits those engineers are making in their repositories. The intent is to help engineering managers understand not just what their teams are learning, but whether that learning is showing up in practice — and to align skills development roadmaps with active development priorities.

Pluralsight co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard explained the strategic value this creates for major platform vendors:

“We work very closely with major technology partners including Google, Microsoft, and others. The reason these firms will share the proximity that they do with us on software tools skills comes down to the fact that they value the breadth of our content. Scott Guthrie is a Pluralsight user and he can see how engineers are using the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. With the GitPrime integration, he can use Pluralsight to see into code commits and be able to assess if programmers are using Microsoft tools in a way that fits with the company’s longer-term vision for development.”

— Aaron Skonnard, Co-founder and CEO, Pluralsight

Skonnard acknowledged that code commits are an imperfect signal — not all committed code is high-quality or functional. However, commit activity does indicate where engineering effort is concentrated, which provides a reasonable proxy for where value is being delivered.

Google Cloud Platform: New Skill IQ Assessments and Course Library

Pluralsight’s GCP initiative centered on the launch of a dedicated Skill IQ assessment for Associate Cloud Engineers on Google Cloud Platform, alongside new courses covering data analytics, machine learning, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure fundamentals.

Pluralsight’s Skill IQ is a short adaptive assessment — typically around 20 questions answerable in approximately five minutes — that places an engineer in a percentile ranking for a given skill area. At the time of publication, Skill IQ covered more than 60 skills spanning languages, frameworks, tools, and processes. The GCP-specific assessment measures competency across:

• Application development services
• Data services
• Kubernetes and container orchestration
• Network design
• Virtual machine management
• Logging and monitoring
• Access configuration and security

Nate Walkingshaw, Chief Experience Officer at Pluralsight, described the business driver behind the GCP partnership:

“The rapid growth of demand for cloud services in the enterprise has also sparked an explosion in demand for skill development on cloud platforms. As the frequency and complexity of cloud deployments grow, some of the most advanced enterprises around the world are turning to us to help them make sure their IT teams have the necessary skills to make every cloud project a success. As part of those efforts, we are working closely with our partners at Google Cloud to host a robust library for skill development, ensuring GCP customers get the most out of their cloud investments.”

— Nate Walkingshaw, Chief Experience Officer, Pluralsight

Jason Martin, VP of Professional Services at Google Cloud, reinforced the partnership’s rationale:

“Google Cloud has seen tremendous growth as enterprises are accelerating cloud adoption to implement business-critical IT projects. As more enterprises increasingly turn to the cloud, the need for skill development is larger than ever before. Pluralsight is a valued strategic partner for Google Cloud as we work to help customers deploy transformational technologies in the cloud.”

— Jason Martin, VP Professional Services, Google Cloud

Courses in the Google Cloud library on Pluralsight Skills are also integrated with Qwiklabs, which provides sandboxed, hands-on Google Cloud Platform environments. This allows engineers to practise skills in live cloud infrastructure rather than purely theoretical exercises — a meaningful distinction for skills like Kubernetes cluster management or VPC network configuration that require environment interaction to learn properly.

Microsoft Azure: Five New Role IQs and 98 New Courses

In parallel with the GCP announcement, Pluralsight expanded its Microsoft Azure skills coverage with five new Role IQs — a role-level version of Skill IQ mapped to specific job functions — along with 22 new Skill IQs and 98 new courses aligned to those roles. The five new Azure Role IQs are:

• Microsoft Azure AI Engineer
• Microsoft Azure Data Engineer
• Microsoft Azure Data Scientist
• Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer
• Microsoft Azure Security Engineer

These Role IQs are specifically designed to align with Microsoft’s official role-based Azure certification paths, giving engineering leaders a structured way to benchmark team skills against industry-recognized competency standards and identify gaps before they affect project delivery.

Jeff Sandquist, General Manager of Partner and Developer Relations at Microsoft, commented:

“Azure is a customer-driven cloud platform that enables organizations to tackle their biggest technology challenges. We see Pluralsight as a core partner to help our customers drive project success. Pluralsight provides technology leaders the necessary means to measure skills across their teams and to skill up people on the Azure roles needed to successfully drive cloud adoption.”

— Jeff Sandquist, General Manager Partner and Developer Relations, Microsoft

Why Cloud Skills Strategy Is a CIO-Level Concern

The business case for investing in cloud skills measurement is straightforward: cloud deployments fail or underperform not only because of technology choices, but because engineering teams lack the depth needed to configure, secure, and operate the infrastructure they deploy. Role IQ and Skill IQ assessments give CIOs and CTOs a quantifiable baseline — a starting point for building a skills development roadmap rather than relying on self-reported competency or certification status alone.

Pluralsight’s model also covers cloud-adjacent disciplines — networking fundamentals, big data platforms, and security — which matter because cloud engineers rarely work in isolation from these domains. An Azure DevOps Engineer who cannot reason about network security groups or data pipeline architecture will struggle in production environments regardless of their compute skills.

The Bigger Picture: Distributed Cloud and the Growing Skills Demand

Pluralsight’s expansion comes at a time when cloud itself is undergoing a structural shift. IDC analyst Frank Gens described the trajectory in his Worldwide Cloud Forecast, 2019–2023 report:

“The cloud of the next five years will be markedly different from that of the past decade, with the focus shifting to the ‘distributed cloud’ — as the public cloud leaders’ innovative services become deployed in enterprise datacenters; in distributed locations like retail stores, branch offices, factories and hospitals; and at an expanding variety of edge locations.”

— Frank Gens, IDC, Worldwide Cloud Forecast 2019–2023

Distributed cloud — where public cloud services are deployed closer to the workloads that consume them, whether in on-premises data centers, edge locations, or industry-specific facilities — increases the surface area that engineers must understand and manage. Hybrid architectures, edge orchestration, and multi-cloud governance all require skills that did not exist at meaningful scale five years ago.

For DevOps and platform engineering teams, this means the pressure to upskill continuously is not a temporary phase of rapid cloud adoption — it is an ongoing structural feature of working in cloud-native environments. Platforms that can measure where skill gaps exist, connect learning to actual engineering behavior, and align development curricula with real-world job roles will be progressively more valuable to engineering organizations as cloud complexity grows.

Key Takeaways

• Pluralsight Flow (formerly GitPrime) connects code commit data to learning activity, giving engineering leaders data-driven insight into team productivity and skill alignment.
• Skill IQ for GCP Associate Cloud Engineer provides a structured, measurable assessment across core GCP domains including Kubernetes, networking, security, and data services.
• GCP courses integrate with Qwiklabs for hands-on sandbox practice in live Google Cloud environments.
• Five new Azure Role IQs — covering AI Engineer, Data Engineer, Data Scientist, DevOps Engineer, and Security Engineer — align to Microsoft’s official certification paths.
• As cloud shifts toward distributed and hybrid architectures, continuous, measurable skills development becomes a strategic engineering priority, not just a training exercise.