How I passed my GCP Associate cloud engineer exam
Hello Friends, considering the recent popularity and prominence of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) I decided to take the certification on this and I passed my GCP Associate cloud engineer (ACE) exam.
Even though it is considered as entry level exam and precursor for all Google professional level exams it was quite comprehensive in coverage. I will share my experiences here so that it could be useful to others. Please provide your comments/questions.
Since there were several resources I referred, I will try to detail on them. I tried to provide the order in which I followed and which logically made more sense to me but you feel free to choose whichever order it works depending on the availability of resources since some of them are not free.
Following link got the exam topics which will help you in what concepts to be covered.
Resources:
- Create free google cloud account from below link.
Associate engineer exam mainly tests on hands on so it is very important to practice commands and which one to use under what condition. You need to know some of the options we can pass to commands as part of customizing the service.
Once you create a free account from above link , it is free for 90 days with $300 credit and you can pretty much practice all services as needed. Important thing is if you created some service and finished practicing on it better to delete the resource so that you will not be charged otherwise the $300 credit will be finished off very soon and you may not be able to run anything after that :)
All google cloud exams and in general any certifications exams are mostly based on scenario/usecase and they usually test your understanding and application of concept rather than the concept itself.
So you will not get a one liner questions like which RDBMS service offered by GCP ? answer : Cloud SQL and all like that. it is more indirect in nature where they may mention that user got fixed schema for data to support application and his data may expand upto 30TB ,database may be used regional in nature and he needs to have a fail over replica so which storage/database service might work for him?
So it is important that you practice and get the confidence with working knowledge on the platform.
you may be wondering what to practice on the platform so following resources will help you.
2. Official Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide.
https://www.amazon.in/Official-Google-Certified-Associate-Engineer/dp/1119564417
this is an excellent book written by Dan Sullivan and it gives a firm base to start off with your cloud journey. All concepts are nicely explained along with some theory and background information before getting in to google specifics. Each chapter got 10 or more questions at end which will test your knowledge so that you can feel confident. The commands mentioned could be practiced in google free account as mentioned in point#1.
3. Qwiklabs.
This is an excellent platform for hands on apart from google free account. There will be lot of curated labs to try on various services like creating virtual machines, disks,creating networks,creating storage solutions (Cloud SQL,Fire store instances,spanner etc),data warehouse services like Bigquery etc.You will be given free credits and you can use them to try the labs. You can purchase additional credits as well to practice more.
If your employer got tie ups with google they may open qwiklabs (https://googlecourses.qwiklabs.com/ )where you will get free video lessons and free hands on labs as well.
These labs will be timed like 45 min,1 hour etc. so when you are ready and sure that you can spend an hour without interruption then only attempt the labs as it will get closed automatically at stipulated period. It will keep showing the time at top left so you can follow along.
4. Once you prepared you can try to attempt google sample questions from below link.
please note that same questions will not come in exam but it will be similar in nature so you will get a hang of what to expect. Trust me! the sample questions are not that easy unless you prepared enough :)
https://cloud.google.com/certification/samplequestions/cloud-engineer
5. Youtube links.
below videos got 20 questions and detailed descriptions on how to arrive at answer. Explains on how to look out for key points from questions and approach the answer.
In the play list refer to videos prefixed with ACE-1,ACE-2 etc.
there are lot more videos than above but I did not really go through anything else because you need to do more practice rather than watching just the videos.
6. udemy courses:
There are few courses but I just went through below one only. This is again by the official exam guide author Dan Sullivan himself .There will be practice test in last section so its good to attempt it and check the score.
https://www.udemy.com/course/google-certified-associate-cloud-engineer-2019-prep-course/
7. And finally the best resource to cover is below
GCP documentation
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/concepts
You might be thinking I am a little crazy as documentation is too vast and not possible to read through .You got it right. the idea is not to read all pages but to focus on key concepts first few pages and the best practices. Best practices documentation is the most important I should say . The reason is sometimes you will see more than one option could work in answers but what you really need to choose is what google thinks is better as part of best practices.! So its more to understand the reasoning from google perspective and to make sure we are aware of it.
So that sums up the resources I have used.
I used to create notes on my own on concepts which are very new and not that obvious to me, example : creating networks,firewalls etc.possibly these are simple for somebody from network background but definitely not for me .!On best practices also I used to note down points just to make sure we dont dig into documentation again and again as it is easy to get lost once you jump into documentation.The notes is really my scribbling pad so thats why I am not sharing here and its more from my point of view on where I might need to focus more on.But I hope you got the point on why it could be important.
Right before one day of exam the notes is what I referred as its not possible to revise all resources that you have gone through from day1 as part of your prep.
There is one interesting webpage which summarizes all google services in 4 words or less. worth taking a look at it right before the exam.
Lot of other people wrote about their experiences and below link got many of those along with some other resources. Feel free to check this.
https://github.com/sathishvj/awesome-gcpcertifications
Few tips for the exam day:
- The questions will be lengthy like 4–5 lines minimum so it is important to keep a time check and not to get lost in one question. Time management is really important.
- If you are not sure of one question just mark it for review and move ahead.
- Exam is for 120 minutes with 50 questions so the time as such is enough, not to say neither less nor more.
- There is no passing score :) might sound interesting but what it means is you many not really know how good ( or bad !) you did and at the end of exam and once you submit you will just get a result as “PASS” or “FAIL” that's all. Google says there will be few questions which will not be counted for score but you never know which are those hence treat all of them as relevant for exam and don't leave any.
- There is no negative marking so just make sure you attempt all of them to the best of your knowledge.
- There could be multi answer questions as well so make sure you choose all the relevant answers. They usually mention the correct number of answer like 2,3 etc so you know how many you have to choose beforehand.
I hope this article helps with guiding in your exam preparation and please feel free to leave comments if you think I missed something or wanted me to add any specific points. thank you and best of luck with you exam prep and to crack the exam.! keep learning.!
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