2022 Google Cloud Professional Cloud Developer Certification Review
TL;DR — I highly recommend this certification for anyone looking to validate their knowledge on what it takes to develop and deploy modern applications on GCP. Scroll to the bottom to see the main topics covered on the exam and what resources I used to study.
Why I Decided to Get Certified?
I recently started my current role at Google as a Cloud Consultant this past July. All of my cloud experience prior to Google was with AWS exclusively. So I knew I needed to ramp up on Google Cloud pretty quickly to be successful in my role.
One of my favorite methods of learning is through certification. I’ve created the personal goal of acquiring all 11 of the available GCP certifications as a way to gain more knowledge around GCP. While I understand that a certification is just a certification and is no substitute for experience, I believe it provides a solid foundation on which to build additional knowledge.
Coming from a software engineering background, I figured the Cloud Developer certification would be the best one to approach first.
My Exam Experience
On Oct 4, 2022, the newest version of the Professional Cloud Developer (PCD) exam was released. I attempted and passed on Oct 7, 2022 so I’m assuming I’m one of the first to attempt the new version.
In the official Certification Launch Announcement, they explained that the new Professional Cloud Developer exam has an increased emphasis on Cloud Run, GKE, and serverless architectures, and less emphasis on infrastructure tasks and legacy services. The new exam does not have a case study. From my experience, I would say that’s a pretty accurate description for the most part.
I’ve listed the main topics that were covered in the exam when I took it in the next section.
The exam format is pretty standard to other GCP exams. There were 60 questions that needed to be completed within a 2 hour time frame. That allows for roughly two minutes per question. I submitted the exam with about 22 seconds to spare.
Through the process of elimination you can typically rule out at least 2 of the possible choices on multiple choice and multiple response questions. My general rule of thumb was to try not to spend more than 90 seconds on any one question and if I was unsure, mark it for review and come back to it later before submitting the exam.
Note: I’ve been studying for the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (PCDE) certification for the last month or so. I heard that the PCDE was essentially the Professional Cloud Developer + SRE. And I have to agree with that as well. While taking the PCD/PCDE practice exams, I noticed a lot of overlap between the two certifications. For individuals who have already obtained their PCDE certification, I would recommend attempting the PCD certification as well. And on the flip side, it might be worth exploring studying for the PCDE certification after obtaining your PCD.
There was also one more thing I noticed. Before you start the exam, it mentions that there is a case study. You can ignore this. I think that just hasn’t been updated yet to reflect the new exam version.
Study Tips
My advice for studying would be to take a look at the exam guide as a good high-level overview of what to expect on the exam. Being that I’m coming from an AWS background, it was helpful to go through the Introductory Google Cloud course designed for AWS Professionals. In my case, I would also focus on the topics listed in the next section as those were what I came across during the exam.
Main Topics Covered
For each topic listed below, I would recommend having a solid understanding of what each item is and key features of each.
For topics like deployment strategies, testing strategies, compute options and storage options, I would also recommend paying close attention to the benefits and drawbacks of each and really understanding the appropriate use cases.
Taking the time to get familiar with application debugging via Cloud Operations would also be beneficial.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Deployment Strategies
- A/B Testing
- Canary deployments
- Blue-Green deployments
Deployment Cloud Resources
- Cloud Build
- Artifact Registry
Testing Strategies
- Feature flags
- Backward compatibility in API development
- Unit Testing with emulators
- Emulating Google Cloud services for local application development
- Integration testing
Troubleshooting Applications via Cloud Operations Suite
- Cloud Logging
- Cloud Trace
- Cloud Profiler
- Cloud Debugger
Compute Options (When is the right use case for each):
- GKE
- Cloud Run
- Cloud Functions
- Compute Engine
Microservice Architecture
IAM / Security Best Practices
- Principle of least privilege
- Kubernetes secrets
- Identity-Aware Proxy
- Service Accounts
Storage Options (When is the right use case for each):
- Cloud Storage
- Cloud SQL
- Cloud Spanner
- Bigtable
- Firestore/Datastore
- BigQuery
Pub/Sub best practices
Resources / Study Material
- A Cloud Guru Practice Exams
- Whiz Labs Practice Exams
- Google Cloud Fundamentals for AWS Professionals
- Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects
- Google Cloud Tech Youtube Page
- GCP Product Documentation
