GCP Associate Cloud Engineer

Recently passed the exam with about 25 hours of preparation over 2 months. Wanted to share some resources I found helpful, how I studied for the exam and my experience taking it.

Resources

It’s hard to find resources that are too descriptive of the exam as google is apparently pretty serious about sending take down requests to sites that host such information, and the exam guide is very broad. In terms of study, thankfully I had a pluralsight license through work and pluralsight recently partnered with google to produce a number of courses. The Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure (3 hrs) course is the only one I’ve taken so I can’t vouch for the others but it was very good, and at the end of every module there is a related qwiklabs practice lab (qwiklabs is owned by google btw, so infer from that what you will).

In terms of other resources, a youtuber called Cloud Tech Guy Joe put up a video series covering the exam content at a high level and that starts here. The other resource I used was this blog by Sathish Vj. Along with Google’s own documentation.

Preparation

Essentially my study plan was fairly simple. I read that blog and watched most of that youtube series and made a note of all the details the guys mentioned as being important (did not know what some words meant that I was making note of at that time). Then I did the pluralsight course and paused it along the way to take notes. The course is about 3 hours long but it probably look me 7+ hours to get through just learning as I went and trying to process stuff. Then I took google’s practice exam which is 20 questions, it’s recommended you spend at most 48 mins on it to mimic the real exam timings — 50 questions in 2 hours. or 2 mins 24 secs per question. After the course I went back through and did all the practice labs again as a refresher.

I took the practice exam on a Sunday and booked my exam for the following Saturday. The practice exam gives you links for further information on all the topics covered, so I made a note of them. I spent about 10 hours that week transcribing my notes from my notebook into a google doc, and using google’s own documentation to fill in any gaps for stuff that was mentioned by Sathish or Joe that wasn’t covered in the pluralsight course, and also covering topics linked in the practice exam.

Did the practice exam again the night before the exam, and went over all my notes between the night before and morning of.

Takeaways

Most of the difficult questions were near the start, unsure if that’s by design or not.

Cloud Run and Cloud Firestore were mentioned, which I don’t remember coming across in my study.

Choosing storage decision tree, and Cloud Storage classes.

Lots of questions that were either using the CLI utilities (gcloud, gsutil in particular) or describing what menu you did something from on the console.

Few questions around autoscaling (CE and KE) and load balancing.

I was surprised by there being multiple questions around connecting an on-premise network with the cloud.

Some general IT infrastructure knowledge helped me out for sure eg. CIDR IP addressing

I really wasn’t too confident going into the exam, and when the first few questions were tough it didn’t help but after getting into the swing of things the exam wasn’t too bad in the end.