GCP Practical Workshops: Learn by Playing

Introduction

When I launched my first GCP workshops at Orange, my goal was clear: to make learning Google Cloud fun, hands-on, and accessible to everyone. At the time, I was the only team member working full-time on GCP — most of the other engineers were still focused on the traditional stack built around SSAS, SSIS, and SQL Server. Before organizing these workshops, I had already laid a solid foundation through the “15 Minutes of GCP” — a weekly session designed to democratize key Google Cloud concepts across the team. This experience showed me just how much a practical and interactive approach could accelerate skill development. In this article, I’ll take you behind the scenes of the two interactive workshops I designed and led. Let’s dive together into this educational adventure, full of insights on how to effectively share technical knowledge while sparking enthusiasm and engagement!

Workshop 1 : The Lost Cookie Challenge

I wanted our first GCP workshop to feel less like a training session and more like a small adventure. So, on a quiet morning, every teammate opened their inbox to find a mysterious message — short, encrypted, and impossible to read. Somewhere, hidden deep inside a GCP bucket, lay the key to unlock it: their own “cookie,” disguised as a tiny text file with a silly color-coded name. Yellow, red, blue… harmless-looking, yet crucial. To retrieve it, they had to spin up a Cloud Function, use it to explore Cloud Storage, and fetch the right file. The function would run inside a pre-wired Workflow I had set up, so they could focus on the fun part — finding their treasure — instead of wrestling with service accounts or configuration hurdles.

I set the scene in a 15-minute presentation, showing just enough of the tools to spark curiosity, then walked them through the rules of the hunt in another 15 minutes. From there, the challenge was theirs to tackle whenever they had a break during the day. Each decrypted message was a personal nod — a movie quote handpicked for that person — wrapped in a lighthearted backstory about lost cookies scattered across the cloud. Some colleagues, armed with a strong dev background, blazed through the hunt in under an hour. Others took their time, experimenting, asking questions, and enjoying the process. By the end, everyone had found their cookie — and without even noticing, they had learned to use Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, and Workflows. Exactly the kind of playful first step I wanted to give them into the GCP universe.

Workshop 2 : The Fortune Cookie Hunt

If the first workshop was a gentle stroll into the GCP forest, the second was a trek into the wild. This time, the team found themselves in an inn straight out of a heroic-fantasy tale, seated around a long wooden table. Dessert was served: a plate of fortune cookies, one for each adventurer. But before anyone could open theirs, a strange magic swept through the room — the cookies flew out the window and scattered across the world. Somewhere in the vast landscape, each person’s cookie was waiting… if they could find it.

Technically, this “world” lived inside a GCP bucket, procedurally generated through my own admin tools. It was divided into a hundred themed zones — the Dark Marshes, the Enchanted Glade, the Forgotten Keep — each split into four sub-areas. Most were empty; a few contained the elusive cookies, color-coded for their rightful owners. Unlike the first workshop, this wasn’t a hand-holding exercise. The resources from Workshop 1 were still there, but I gave no ready-made Workflow template. Instead, participants had to think like engineers: inspect the API documentation, choose their approach, and adapt the patterns they already knew. Some explored methodically through the directory tree; others went straight for a bucket-wide blob listing. Both worked — as long as you found your own cookie.

Adding to the fun, the only way to read the cookie’s “ancient Elvish” message (in reality, a Caesar cipher) was to bring it back to the inn’s innkeeper — a Workflow-based NPC — who would only help if the cookie matched your identity. A few cheeky players tried delivering cookies meant for someone else, only to be politely but firmly rejected. I had even built the ability to reshuffle the entire world at will, preventing brute-force directory clicking from spoiling the game.

Beneath the playful lore, the exercise hid a real-world challenge: simulating a production-scale environment with complex, multi-level storage structures. Our existing SSIS production contains thousands of objects across hundreds of processes; this workshop was a taste of how those scenarios might play out in GCP, and how to navigate them efficiently. In the end, everyone found their cookie — and took another confident step into the cloud.

Conclusion

These two workshops were more than playful experiments — they were a structured, progressive journey into GCP for a team used to a very different stack. By starting simple and gradually increasing the challenge, I could spark curiosity, build confidence, and create a safe space for exploration. The result? A team more comfortable with cloud concepts, better equipped to navigate real-world scenarios, and eager for the next step.

• Start small and increase complexity step-by-step.
• Use engaging scenarios to lower the barrier to entry.
• Encourage autonomous problem-solving over spoon-feeding.
• Simulate real-world production complexity early.

These sessions were just the beginning — the foundation for deeper adoption of GCP, and a reminder that learning can be as fun as it is impactful.