Google acquires cloud training startup Qwiklabs

Google has announced that it has acquired Qwiklabs, a training platform for those who want to learn about public cloud infrastructure services.

“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,” Jason Martin, director of professional services at the Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.

Though terms of the deal have not been disclosed but Google is hopeful that the acquisition will close the skills gap in the cloud. The company plans to use the service for educating businesses and helping them get the most of the cloud and the money they invest into cloud-based services.

Qwiklabs that was launched in 2012 has only focused on teaching skills for Amazon’s AWS platform so far. Amazon even uses Qwiklabs as its go-to service for offering self-paced labs for developers on its platform.

More than 500,000 people have gone through 5 million hours of training on the service, Qwiklabs founder and chief executive Enis Konuk, a former Sun and VMware executive, wrote in a blog post.

Qwiklabs says it will continue to offer lab learning credits and subscriptions on its site and it looks like the existing AWS labs will continue to function.

Google has been actively boosting its cloud services this year. The company acquired Anvato a few months back to help improve its cloud solutions for scalable video streaming. Then came Google’s purchase of training service Synergyse, which has since been incorporated into Google Apps.