For those interested in obtaining a new cloud certification at an associate level then consider the GCP Associate Cloud Engineer. Its achievable with some hands on practice and some command line memorization.

For those on LinkedIn that passed the AWS Associate Cloud Architect Exam then you would likely find this exam harder. Its clearly a more difficult exam for several reasons and is a differentiator from having just an AWS certification.

There is a major push by GCP around hiring and also marketing. Perhaps in a few years this certification will be “cool” just the AWS Cloud Architect certification that every and their sister in law has.

So here is my summary as a professional test taker….

OVERVIEW OF EXAM

Here is the page to review. https://cloud.google.com/certification/cloud-engineer

Exam Cost $125
Exam Questions 50 and available in English, Japanese, Spanish
Exam Time 2 Hours

•Test Vendor Very Poor Choice of test vendor. (not a fan) availability/flexibility for testing. Kryterion which has only one place to test if that in many cities is beyond me for a giant like Google. Unlike Pearson and Vue which have a significant network of test centers.

Example in Jacksonville there is one location which was a junior college that had a 4 hour/3 day a week testing schedule. I checked Atlanta which had a few more sites…. Unlike VUE/Pearson that can have 20 locations in a city… If you can get past signing up for the exam great…

Below is the quick YT video I did cover the exam point you need to study for the exam and summed up below.

Here is a highlight of what I seen on the exam.

•50 Questions that were mainly multiple choice.

•Only one question had a diagram that wanted you to answer services workflow.

•No case study questions that were like the Cloud Architect exam.

Exam referenced “Google Recommended Practices” multiple times

Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Crash Course
This training is focused on preparing IT professionals in GCP who want to achieve their GCP Cloud Engineer…learning.oreilly.com

TECHNICALS TO STUDY

•Know Gcloud syntax deeply… Example how do you list projects, quotas, . This page review before test

•https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/projects/list

•Understand the correlation between projects and organizations. How to configure Organizations and billing of projects

• https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/creating-managing-projects

•Projects and hierarchy

• https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/cloud-platform-resource-hierarchy#projects

IAM and Security Questions

Over 6 questions were IAM Focused. Know what menu workflow in IAM to enable

•Write to Cloud Storage, Permissions for Auditors, Service Accounts, Logging

•Know the proper menu selection for enabling APIS.

•Get to know how to find quotas via console and the CLI.

• https://cloud.google.com/compute/quotas

•Understand Bigquery pricing(Several Questions on pricing options)

•https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/

Stackdriver Areas to know

•Accounts (Free or Premium)

• Exact steps to setup monitoring and logging .

•Alert options…. Free vs Premium

•How use Stackdriver Trace and Debug. Why use them

Compute Engine Areas to Know –

Know how to authenticate. Numerous questions on best way to deploy windows and linux machines.

•Review pages on Compute Engine Authentication

•https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/

How to securely connect to Compute Engine.

•https://cloud.google.com/solutions/connecting-securely

•Cloud Identity — Capabilities and use case with GCP/GSuite

• https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251

•Compute Engine — Boot Images — How to customize images, import and migrate images. How to migrate VMS from inhouse to GCP

•https://cloud.google.com/solutions/image-management-best-practices

•Migration option for storage. Storage Migration for in house storage and how to migrate between regions/zones.

•Understand CPU Options. When to use GPUs and TPUS as well.

Kubernetes and Containers Must Know

•Kubenetes engine- Yaml Deployments, Create clusters

•Cloud Repositories, Cloud Container Builder, Cloud Container Registry

•https://cloud.google.com/products/

• Create a Kubernetes cluster on Kubernetes Engine.

gcloud container clusters create k0

Go thru this page….

https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/tutorials/hello-app

Other GCP Services to Know

•Cloud Launcher… Deploy templates

•Pub/Sub. Numerous questions on Pub/Sub and how you would integrate it with other services, how to use to it for publisher apps, messaging, resource types and models.

•Cloud Dataflow — — Use for stream and batch data

•BigTable- numerous questions about why and how you could use BigTable. Know it’s a high performance NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads.

•BigQuery. Tested heavily around data ingestion and availability. Once again they want to confirm you know that it’s a fully managed, petabyte scale, low cost enterprise data warehouse for analytics. BigQuery is serverless.

GCP Cloud Engineer Bootcamp Available on Udemy now.

https://www.udemy.com/google-cloud-platform-associate-cloud-engineer-bootcamp/learn/v4/overview

•GCP Cloud Engineer Practice Exams available on Udemy

https://www.udemy.com/google-cloud-platform-associate-cloud-engineer-practice-test/learn/v4/overview

Livelesson Course on Pearson Safari available now.. Become a subscriber.Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Crash Course
This training is focused on preparing IT professionals in GCP who want to achieve their GCP Cloud Engineer…learning.oreilly.com

Another course will be available by October 1 on INE.comGoogle
INE is the premiere provider of Technical Training for the IT Industry. INE is revolutionizing the digital learning…ine.com

Good Luck and I wish much success.

Joe Holbrook. The Cloud Tech Guy