How I Cracked Google Cloud Certified- Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) Exam
The Google Cloud ACE is a tough exam to pass but with the right resources, a dedicated mindset, and enough preparation, you can crack it.
I am going to share my experience, tips and tricks which can be useful in passing the ACE exam. I will start it from the very beginning when I didn’t know much about cloud technology to pass the exam within 5 months, Google recommends that you have 6+ months of hands-on experience with Google Cloud products and solutions.
What did I do for the first two months of my preparation?
I was part of the Google Cloud Career Readiness Program through which I got free Coursera courses and the specialization I choose was Architecting with Google Compute Engine Specialization. It consists of high-quality lectures from Google developers themselves and overall provides a good learning experience within this course, you will get a hands-on experience of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) through qwiklabs which is very nicely blended with the theoretical knowledge that you gain from the courses. It took two months for me to complete all the courses.
What did I do for the last three months of my preparation?
After completing the specialization from Coursera, I wanted to learn more about the services offered by GCP, so I got the Official Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide by Dan Sullivan. This book really helped in getting the in-depth knowledge that is impossible to cover in video lectures. As I was going through the book, I found that many of the topics that were important for exam preparation were missing in the Coursera lecture, so I decided to buy one more course and this was “GCP Associate Cloud Engineer — Google Cloud Certification by in28Minutes Official”. This course significantly helped in gaining both theoretical and hands-on practical knowledge. This Course was specially designed for the preparation for the ACE exam and will expose you to think of the best solution that you can design for a particular scenario-based question.
When I started to feel that I had enough knowledge that I could choose the best solution for the scenario-based question I decided to practice a lot of mock questions available for free on the internet.
Last week's preparation
I decided to read Dan Sullivan’s book and view all the important topics. I also viewed all the mock questions on the internet and was continuously practising scenario-based questions. Practising these questions turned out to be very helpful in the exam.
Important topics that you should not miss
Cloud Logging
Import/Export of data
Cloud Spanner, BigTable, Bigquery
Billing Account
Object Lifecycle Management, Signed URL, ACL, Classification in Cloud Storage
Cloud VPN, Cloud Interconnect
Compute Engine (MIGs ), GKE, App-Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Function
LoadBalancing, Uptime Check, Cloud Pub/Sub
Deployment Manager
IAM (SAML, KMS)
Organisation Hierarchy and transferring data between two different projects of the same or different organisation.
Extra Resources
AwesomeGCP youtube Channel by Satish VJ
Sketchbook by Priyanka Vergadia
Google Cloud Tech youtube channel
Github repo by Satish VJ
Final Words
If you think you aren’t ready to take the exam make sure you reschedule the exam 3 days prior to the day of the examination or Google will charge extra fees. Sleep well before the examination it is very important to have a fresh mind. Read the questions carefully and choose Google’s best-recommended practice in the option. Remember to review all the answers because 120 minutes is enough time. Few questions will be very tough but don’t get scared of them be calm move on to the next one.
All the best for your exam!
