Preparing for success with the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Network Engineer Exam
If you are interested in learning networking on Google Cloud, then the Google Professional Cloud Network Engineer certification is the right challenge for you. The exam covers a lot of the core areas of networking in GCP and is rigorous enough to keep you thinking.
I’ve taken a few Google Cloud professional certifications and the key to success is preparation. The exam was refreshed in January 2022, which covers
- Designing, planning, and prototyping a Google Cloud network
- Implementing Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) instances
- Configuring network services
- Implementing hybrid interconnectivity
- Managing, monitoring, and optimizing network operations
To help you be successful at this exam, I’ve put together a few tips.
Step #1: Check out the Exam Guide
The exam guide lists all the objectives to be covered. It is very helpful and at a glance you have an idea of what areas you need to learn in order to prepare for the exam. You can check out the current exam guide here.
Step #2: Sign up for Google Cloud training
After you have reviewed the exam guide, if you think it worth your time check out some of the Google Cloud learning material. Google Cloud has Google Cloud Skills Boost. Log in and enroll in your learning path and begin learning. For this one, let’s pick the Network Engineering Learning Path.
Once you select the learning path, check out the details in the Preparing for Your Professional Cloud Network Engineer Journey. This free training that will show you what topics are important on the exam, and give you an idea of where your strengths and weaknesses are.
If you are looking for other options for Google Cloud training, there are courses available on Coursera and Pluralsight.
Coursera links:
- Preparing for Your Professional Cloud Network Engineer Journey
- Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Cloud Network Engineer Professional Certificate
Pluralsight links:
- Preparing for Your Professional Cloud Network Engineer Journey
- Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Cloud Network Engineer Professional Certificate
Step #3: Hands-on Experience with Labs
There are several labs contained in the learning paths and you should aim to complete them. By completing the labs and quest you get the opportunity to earn skill badges.
You can also visit https://codelabs.developers.google.com/ search for networking. You would see several codelabs you can do in your own environment to get more hands on practice. While learning you can explore the various options that exist in a services configuration.
Step #4: The juicy stuff — Network Topic Deep Dives
The Google Cloud documentation is technical documentation. Here are a few of my recommendations for topics you can read up on.
- Network best practices
- Organizational constraints
- Private service access, Private Google access
- Cloud router
- DNS best practices
- Choosing a Load balancer, Ingress, Session affinity
- Networking on GKE
- Hybrid connectivity options
- Cloud CDN
- Invalidations
- Troubleshooting
- Signed urls
- NGFW
- Cloud Armour
- Cloud NAT
- VPC
- VPC service controls
- Network Intelligence Centre
I’ve also put together a prep sheet for this exam available on https://www.startcloudnow.com/google%20cloud.html
Step #5: Sample questions
There are sample questions on the certification website that you can check out here.
Step #6 Sign up for the exam
Sign up for the exam here.
Remember the most important aspect of the journey is learning. So keep building and experimenting on Google Cloud and don’t forget to celebrate your success.
Also feel free to check out my article s—
- Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer Exam
- Preparing for success with the Google Professional Database Engineer Exam-2023
- Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam
If you want to ask a question, find out more or share a thought? Please connect with me on Linkedin or twitter @ammettw and send me a message.
I’ll be in touch