Passing 10x GCP certifications: A return on experience (Part 1: How)
I recently passed successfully 10 GCP certifications. This article in 3 parts will try to give insights on
- Part1 How: What is the process of preparing and passing the certifications
- Part 2 Why: What is the interest of passing them
- Part 3 What: List of learnings I found interesting about GCP
Table of Contents
· Presentation
∘ My journey with GCP
∘ Currently acquired GCP certifications
· Main learning tools
∘ Mandatory: The courses and Labs
∘ Good additional learning option: Sketchnotes
· Other options:
∘ The Arcade
∘ Google Cloud Quickstarts and tutorials
∘ Google Codelabs
∘ Champion Innovators Content Library
· Getting ready
∘ Creating your accounts
∘ Google Cloud Skills Boost: courses organisation
∘ The “study plan” course
· Learning advices to the candidates
∘ Remove the frictions
∘ Optimize your learning time
∘ Validating the labs
· Feedback to Google
∘ Skills boost mobile app
∘ Labs debugged or deactivated
· Registering for the exam
∘ Sample exam
∘ Google Cloud Certification site
· Passing the exam
∘ The initial “Oh shit!” feeling
∘ Answer and forget
· Post exam
∘ Official approval
∘ Perks
∘ C2C: Google Cloud Customer Community
· Conclusion
Presentation
My journey with GCP
I have spend the last 6 years working mainly with Google Cloud Platform, helping some companies migrate their workload from AWS and Azure toward GCP, organising their Cloud/Devops/SRE departments. During this time, I have passed and renewed the Google Cloud Architect certification multiple times.
Lately, I decided to leave the company I was working with, and to invest a bit of time on personal projects and self-training. More on this in part 2 of this post.
I enjoyed a lot that learning time and ended up passing 10 Google Cloud certifications out of 11.
Currently acquired GCP certifications
Foundational:
Associate:
Professional:
- Professional Cloud Architect
- Professional Cloud Security Engineer
- Professional Cloud Network Engineer
- Professional Cloud Developer
- Professional Cloud Database Engineer
- Professional Cloud Devops Engineer
- Professional Data Engineer
- Professional Google Workspace Administrator
- Preparing for: Professional Machine Learning Engineer
I’ll probably pass the last one, the Machine Learning Engineer, shortly to unlock the Pokemon “Gotta catch’em all” achievement. :)
You can find the detailed description of each following this link: https://cloud.google.com/learn/certification
So how do you pass Google Cloud certifications?
Main learning tools
Mandatory: The courses and Labs
To my knowledge, there are 3 places where you can find the certification courses:
They are basically the same courses so you can pick your preferred platform but I recommend going with the official Google Cloud Skills Boost.
Good additional learning option: Sketchnotes
I suggest to buy the following book: Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects from Priyanka Vergadia
It exists in Kindle or paperback version and is a great source of information about GCP as it is perfectly summarised and filled with a lot of visual sketchnotes. It will be useful whichever certification you are passing.
Alternatively, you can check the website of Priyanka Vergadia: The cloud girl
That’s the only one I highly recommend using, in addition to the courses, if you want to get prepared for the exams. A lot of articles you will find about the certifications will list a ton of learning materials, giving the impression you have to read it all and spend a year getting prepared for a single exam. I think it’s a mistake. Don’t complexify your learning plan.
Google Cloud Skills boost Courses + Sketchnotes = good fast simple learning plan
Other options:
The following options will be listed for “awareness”. They are useful but are not mandatory if your goal is to get certified. Just know they exist but I think the courses should be enough. They can be useful later, when you need to read or test a specific subject for a business case you are facing.
The Arcade
If you’re into gamification more than focusing on passing certifications, you can give a try to The arcade, which will give you points for regular learning challenges and will open the access to goodies.
I personally didn’t use this one much as I already have most of the badges and unfortunately there is no current way to validate past badges in the Arcade area. Not gonna redo all labs. :)
Still, it seems to be a fun way to learn about GCP.
Google Cloud Quickstarts and tutorials
GCP quickstarts, tutorials and interactive walkthrough
Google Codelabs
You will find various guided, hands-on coding tutorials driving you step by step on a real application case. This covers a wide range of topics, GCP being only a subset.
Champion Innovators Content Library
Here you can find blogs, videos and podcasts from Google champion innovators about various cloud related subjects
Getting ready
Creating your accounts
So you are ready to prepare for a certification
- First thing first, if you don’t have yet, create a Google account (personal or professional)
- Then create a Developer account
- Then I suggest to subscribe to Google Cloud skills Boost
29$/month
- Unlock Access to 700+ labs and authored courses
- Find curated learning paths based on job role
- Filter by role, skill and topic
- See your progress as you learn and improve your skills
or 299$/year with a few more benefits:
- $500 Google Cloud credits
- One certification voucher (up to $200 value)
- $500 additional Google Cloud credits per year after successfully passing a certification exam.
- Live learning events hosted by Google Cloud Technical Trainers
- Quarterly technical briefings hosted by Google Cloud executives
- 1:1 Consultations with Google Cloud experts
Note: The yearly subscription is currently not available for the customers in the EEA, UK, Switzerland
The yearly option is very interesting and pays up for itself if you plan to pass a certification or use GCP a bit. Unfortunately, I’m from the EEA so I’ll stick for now with the monthly subscription. 😢
- In your personal account, your learning paths list should be initially empty
- Pick a learning path (Click on the [+ add learning path] button or click on the following link)
- If you are new in your cloud journey, I suggest to begin with the “Cloud Digital Leader” path (Select it then [select this path] )
And you’re ready to learn.
Google Cloud Skills Boost: courses organisation
So you picked a learning path. A learning path is split into several activities. Each activity completed gives you a badge that gets added to your profile and that you can share on various platforms (Linkedin, twitter, …) to show your learning progress.
Mine currently looks like this:
The activities can be of the form:
- Course
- Lab
- Quest
A course is a list of chapters consisting of a mix of
- Videos: The course on an atomic topic, with the transcript on the side. You can navigate in the video by selecting the text you are interested in.
- Documents: Some links to a summary of the course, or to more detailed information.
- Labs: Hands-on tasks using a temporary GCP account, already set up for the specific requirements of the task. Sometimes a Kubernetes cluster is provisioned, sometimes some VMs, sometimes a database. You have to open a browser in incognito mode, log in to GCP with the temporary credential given and you get to really use GCP for a use case without any cost (except the 29$/month of the initial subscription)
- Quizzes: MCQs relating to the previous courses and labs. You have to get the passing grade in order to validate the course (varies for each quiz between 50 and 80%). This is what the exam will be made off. The passing grade for the official exam is 70%.
A quest is:
- A list of labs and sometimes videos related to the quest subject (like Kubernetes, Terraform, Big Query, cost reduction, …)
- Often a quest finishes with a Challenge lab that, contrary to traditional labs, won’t tell you how to achieve the required task but will put you in a real work situation. It will give you the problem and check that you solved it correctly without giving you any steps to follow. They are usually … well … challenging.
Some examples of challenge labs:
- You are expected to create container images, store the images in a repository, and expose a deployment in Kubernetes.
- Migrate without interruption a database from a given Postgresql instance to a Cloud SQL instance that you have to set up (with given parameters)
- build a basic Big Query ML fare prediction model for leadership. Perform the following tasks to import and clean the data, then build the model and perform batch predictions with new data so that leadership can review model performance and make a go/no-go decision on deploying the app functionality.
The time given to finish a Challenge lab is often quite tight. Completing one gives a feeling of accomplishment, as it’s also very often the one lab that validates your whole badge. Don’t give up on it.
The “study plan” course
Some paths begin by a “study plan” course. It contains for each chapter a summary followed by a quizz that allow you to test which area requires to be studied and which can be skipped. As I was more interested by the learning than by the speed of certifying, I usually skipped that part and used it at the end as a sample exam. But I have the impression the quizzes are too complicated, as it always made me feel like I was not ready, while I actually was.
It seems to be a constant (see the 1st question of the exam comment). The certification seems to test:
- Your knowledge
- Your ability to understand problems and apply your knowledge
- Your willpower/ability to jump/persist
Learning advices to the candidates
Remove the frictions
Master your work environment
- Use Chrome. Log in Chrome with your Gmail account. Save the open tabs when closing the browser.
- The most successful achiever is not necessarily the smartest, it’s usually the most persistent and consistent. Help yourself to make your student journey be the simplest task as possible (I’m a big believer in always reducing the mental load to the minimum). Use a Chrome group “GCP cert” and store Chrome tabs there, keep the tabs open. So you always have your learning environment ready to be used. You don’t have to remember where you were. You then reduced the task to resume learning to: Open the [GCP cert] group, click on the last tab. Go.
- Learn your keyboard shortcuts, as you will switch non-stop between your lab instructions and your lab instance. The default shortcut under MacOS to switch between 2 instances of the same app (Chrome in our case) is (⌘`). Then check the app switch (⌘TAB), next tab (⌃TAB), previous tab (⌃⇧TAB), close tab (⌘t), copy (⌘c), paste(⌘v), …
- Get a note app (Can be iNotes, Notion or whatever of your liking) where you will brain dump the learnings, the “things to dig deeper”, the labs notes. Despite using Notion for all my life dump, I found iNotes to be more handy in my case, simply because I use the web app of Notion and iNote being a desktop app, it allowed specific shortcuts: app switching between Chrome and the notes (⌘TAB), “Chrome” switching between the course and the lab (⌘`)
Optimize your learning time
- Courses are made for a wide range of learners level of knowledge. It goes from obvious to difficult. Learn to fly through the courses and to focus on specific parts. Glance at the transcript and click on later lines if the currently played content is obvious to you.
- You can complete all activities of a learning path if you feel like but it is not mandatory. You can just pick the ones where you need to reinforce your knowledge and leave the ones you are confident in.
- If you can, speed up the videos (x1.5 with subtitles seems to be the sweet spot for me for speakers without a strong accent).
- For me, learning is easier if I enable the subtitles. First because if I zone out while listening to something, I zone out completely and have to rewind the course. And reading seem to limit my zoning-out frequency. It also saves me brain energy as it requires far less concentration to read English than to understand it, given that all courses are given by a diverse group of people from a wide variety of origins, so with some accents that can be difficult for a non-native speaker to understand.
Find your personal best way to learn.
Validating the labs
- In the labs, always check that your answer is validated before closing the lab or it will not be marked as finished and you will have to redo it again from the beginning. It sometimes take a few seconds to a minute before your lab solution can be validated (I think it happens when the data checked by the validator is to be found in the logs). Just double-check that you got 100% displayed before you close the lab.
Feedback to Google
Disclaimer: The overall quality of the courses, the learning experience are amazing. I learned an incredible amount of valuable things. I enjoyed it a lot and I passed all certifications only using the Google provided courses and labs.
The following are a list of things I noted down that could be slight improvement in this experience. But not at all to be taken as a rant or a critic.
Skills boost mobile app
It would be great to have a “Google Cloud skills boost” mobile app. The learning experience is perfect on a laptop in a browser but it’s currently difficult to follow the courses (videos of course, not labs) while being on the move or doing sport (on a phone, tablet, apple TV). I used a Pluralsight account for that. But it requires another subscription and creates a confusing second progression point in time.
Labs debugged or deactivated
It can be discouraging to invest time in a lab, bump on a problem, contact the support, wait for them to try to finish by hand the lab with the instructions they have, to realise that there is an issue and the time is expired or the lab is unfinishable.
It’s understandable to sometimes have some failing labs because of upstream changes in various parts of GCP. It’s an always changing cloud environment. But maybe adding weekly or nightly tests in all labs, automatically deactivating those that are suddenly broken would save a bit of learners motivation.
I submitted quite a few support tickets during my “quest”. And I couldn’t finish some courses due to those. The completionist psychopath in me have been sometimes frustrated. :)
Back to the certification process
Registering for the exam
So you persisted. You got consistent. You validated all badges on a learning path. You know your subject. You feel ready to pass the exam and get certified.
Sample exam
First give a try to the sample exam provided by Google as a last check.
Example for the Cloud Architect:
20 questions is not much. I searched and tried various apps and sites that could help me raise my readiness confidence and my conclusion is: I really don’t recommend to buy or try sample exams form other places. Google exams are really written in a smart way. They test your knowledge but most importantly they test your ability to think. Most test exams I bought from other sources ended up usually being of really low quality, and even often filled with mistakes or answers that didn’t make any sense. Save yourself of a lot of confusion. Save money. Just don’t try them and stick with the simple plan.
Google Cloud Certification site
If it’s the first time you are passing a certification, you should create an account in the certification centralization site
From there you will be able to schedule an exam through Kryterion.
You will have the choice between:
- On-site proctored: You just go with your ID and your booking code. You will probably use a computer in a classroom.
- Remote proctored: You will use your computer, at home. You will have to use a custom browser, that locks down your computer to not use any third party tools. You will be asked to show your ID, show all your surroundings using the webcam, and accept being monitored (mic and cam) during the exam for obvious cheating control reasons.
I prefer by far the remote choice, as there are a lot more slots available, even during late night, which is more practical for workers or parents. There is no need to go to an exam center, often in a central location, so with heavy traffic, find a parking place, use a computer with a low quality screen and sometimes with a bit of noise in the near classrooms.
If you can, just go remote.
The cost is the same for either choice (remote or on-site) depending on the category of your certification:
- Foundational: 99$ + tax (Cloud Digital Leader)
- Associate: 125$ + tax (Associate Cloud Engineer)
- Professional: 200$ + tax (Cloud Architect, Data Engineer, Cloud developer, etc…)
If you fail the exam, you have to wait
- 14 days to try it a second time
- then 60 days to try it a third time
- then 365 days afterward
So better not using the brute-force method. :)
On the opposite, I didn’t fail any of the 10 I tried, so I probably got over-prepared. The right amount of studying is difficult to find.
Notes:
- Certifications are valid 2 years. You have to retake the exam if you want to keep being certified. This makes complete sense to keep the value of certifications high. It’s a valid proof of actual knowledge and capacity to use it.
- No food, beverage, watch, phone, toilet break during the exam.
Passing the exam
The initial “Oh shit!” feeling
First question of the exam is WTF, always. During the 10 certifications I passed, I never began the first question by saying to myself “piece of cake, I’ll do that with the eyes closed”. Quite the contrary in fact. I always began with a “Oh shit!” at the first question. :)
Maybe it’s made on purpose but the first question will probably rip your soul. Expect it. Embrace it. Do your facepalm. Question your life choices. Tell yourself you’re screwed. And quickly get over it. Don’t loose time. Answer the best you can. Then begin the rest of the questions. It’s probably gonna be fine.
I think I have read somewhere that there are some questions that are not counted in the final grade and are there just for test purpose. The first question might actually always be one of them. But who knows, please don’t skip it because of me. :)
Answer and forget
As a general rule, I would advise to always use the method of answer and forget.
Yes, the interface allows you to mark questions you want to come back to at the end, but I really believe it’s more confusing that anything else. Do you really think you will know better in two hours, after having thought hard about 49 other tough questions? No way. You will be brain dead. You will not have auto-generated magically the studying part that you skipped while watching the last episode of “Walking dead”. Just answer the best you can and pass to the next question. Forget it. Don’t create mental load for nothing. The goal is to get 70% right, not 100%.
After answering all the questions, you will have the opportunity to answer an optional small survey, then you will see a Pass or Fail on the screen.
That simple
Post exam
Official approval
After a few days to a week of passing the exam, you will receive by email the confirmation from Google. The email seems to arrive faster when you take an on-site proctored exam. Probably because the checks needed are simpler (cheating, breach of rules, ID verification, …) and they don’t need to be reviewed by Google. So if you are in a hurry to get your official certificate, maybe pick the on-site version.
Your certificate will be added to your Accredible wallet, that certifies that it is valid, using a blockchain ID. Don’t forget to set each certificates as public, so it will be visible in your wallet by others. And you can, from there, also share it to various social medias like LinkedIn.
As an example, here is my personal wallet:
And here is my LinkedIn profile where I shared them:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bricedelvallee/
Setting your certificates on public will also show them in the Google Cloud Certified Directory, where people will be able to find you by filtering for location, skills, etc..
Here is a sample search for certification owners in Athens, Greece: Google Cloud Certified Directory
Perks
For each certification I passed, I had the choice between goodies and charities. Maybe depending on the period, the availability and/or the type of certification, I could get a hoodie (with the Professional cloud architect) or some mugs (for all other certs). If you are not interested in the goodies (or you already have 6 mugs :) ), you can opt for giving money to charities.
I also have now 50% discount coupons for each certs I passed that I can use to renew or pass new certifications.
C2C: Google Cloud Customer Community
I encourage you to come register to C2C community website.
Please leave a message. Present yourself, or give a feedback on your certification journey. Ask questions if you have. I hang out in a few sections, mainly but not only, the french section (my native language) and the Greek one (my current location). You might also find some events, virtual or in-person, that would be of interest to you.
Conclusion
I hope this article gave you a good grasp of the process of studying and obtaining a GCP certification, the How.
Maybe I had a few years of hands-on behind me that helped, but the first time I passed the cloud architect one, I barely had any GCP experience. So it’s definitely achievable. Just don’t be afraid to persist a bit, to follow through.
Go! Now! Try it! The learning will be tremendous.
Google Cloud is so amazingly well architected. I had quite a few WOW moments on my way. But this will be the subject of another post.
