I’ve just passed Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam and I would like to share my tips to help you pass the exam. The exam is not hard, it quite basic concepts and you can pass if you have a good preparation. You have 2 hours to answer 50 questions. Most of the answers are single choice but there are some multiple choice answers. There is no passing score and you will only get a pass/fail result. You should aim to get around 70% right but this is just my guess. The exam cost $125 and it can be done online. The exam covers many areas and you will require to know gcloud commands, IAM roles, and Kubernetes. The main areas are IAM(you need to know the most important roles including billing account roles), Compute Engine, Kubernetes, VPCs and networking and deployment and monitoring. Make sure you are confortable setting up permissions, access management, gcloud commands, managing VMs, VPC networks, subnets, load balancers, compute and storage. Also, you will get few questions about Stackdriver, different machine types, etc.
Preparation
Start by creating a free trial account in GCP, get familiar with the console and try some of the tutorials in the console. Also, start watching the GCP Next videos to get more familiar with the different services. Take the free Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals course and play around with the console for a couple of months, then jump into the certification courses.
Recommend Resources
- Coursera has several great courses many of which you can enroll for free. I recommended starting with Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals, to get familiar with the platform. Then take the Getting Started with Google Kubernetes Engine if you are not too familiar with Kubernetes. Finally take the Preparing for the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Exam course.
- The official certification book is a great resource, very complete and highly recommended if you prefer to paper-based rather than video content.
- Exam Dumps on https://www.gcp-examquestions.com. They publish this course on Udemy at this link: https://www.udemy.com/course/gcp-ace-guarantee-part/?referralCode=C9D37BDD296346C4558E
Exam Tips
- The questions are scenario based, many of them require you to know several areas to solve a specific problems such as IAM and cloud storage. So each question may cover more than one area.
- Most of the questions are single choice but I got one or two multiple choice.
- Many questions come in pairs of possible answers. Basically, they combine two possible solutions, so try to discard one of the options. Then, check for clues to decide between the other two options.
- Look for clues such as least expensive, GCP best practices, more performant, etc.
- Usually, the simple solution tends to be the right answer. If you don’t understand the response, do not select it.
- You can mark questions to review, if you are not sure about one questions, mark it and move to the next one.
Main Topics
- Know the differences between the different types of Google Cloud storage such as cold line and near line.
- Check the official documentation of the main services such as App Engine, Compute Engine, VPCs, GCS, Stackdriver, etc. This great doc has links to the official documentation for each exam topic.
- Know the different data base options, you can check my article about massive scale databases for more information. Know the differences between SQL and NoSQL, ACID vs BASE transactions, scalability, consistency, etc.
- Understand the different compute options.
- GCP Best practices is a must read, lots of references in the exam. Also check the best practices for containers and best practices for VPC.
- Make sure you understand how to build solutions for different problems, check this link for more info.
- This article is a must read.
- This youtube playlist goes over the practice exam questions explaining all the topics, definitely a must have.
- Understand the different options for Cloud Balancers.
- Know how an App Engine application is structured and the scaling options.
Conclusion
GCP has several differences compared to AWS, IAM terminology and how it works is a bit different, GCP has more database options and a global virtual network, so Load Balancers, firewalls and VPCs work a bit different. Remember to get familiar with the cli (gcloud and kubectl), understand the roles and memorize some of them, know the different options for storage, database, compute, VPN or load balancers.
Good Luck on the exam!
Source: Medium
