Google Cloud associate cloud engineer certification is a mid-level certification after the entry-level cloud digital leader. It gives you skills in securing & monitoring applications and infrastructure. You also gain experience working on both public clouds and on-premises solutions. You can use both the Google Cloud console and the command line to build maintain and deploy solutions responsibly and cost-effectively.
I sat for my certification exam in October 2022 and passed which I was very happy about after following certain strategies that helped me ace the exam.
The preparation journey
The Exam: Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer
- Number of questions: 50
- Format: Multiple choice and multiple select (includes 5 case study questions)
- Duration: 2 hours proctored or on-site at a testing centre
- Fee: $125 (plus tax, where applicable)
- Validity: 2 years
1. Understanding the Exam Blueprint
The first step in my journey was to understand the exam blueprint thoroughly. The exam covers a wide range of topics, including:
- Setting up a cloud solution environment (~20% of the exam)
- Planning and configuring a cloud solution (~17.5% of the exam)
- Deploying and implementing a cloud solution (~25% of the exam)
- Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution (~20% of the exam)
- Configuring access and security (~17.5% of the exam)
This blueprint served as a guide, helping me focus on the key areas together with their respective weights as they appear on the exam.
Exam preparation video course
to complete the course I bought Ranga Karanam course on Udemy at $19 and after I had completed going through the course I went through the Preparing for Your Associate Cloud Engineer Journey on Coursera and this helped to fix the knowledge gaps I had.
the Coursera monthly subscription also helped me access much-needed hands-on labs like:
✅architecting with Google Kubernetes engine
✅infrastcture as code with terraform
✅architecting with compute engine
✅hosting a web app on GCP using compute engine
✅creating cross-region load balancing in GCP
Some labs are fairly easy but some will be challenging, the good thing is there is a robust support system at your service.
The automating infrastructure on Google Cloud with Terraform and Kubernetes challenge labs was no walk in the park but I managed.
Why Theory Alone cant Make You a Cloud Engineer
With cloud computing or any technical course, theory alone won’t make you good at performing a task. You can read all cloud storage or compute engine documentation.
Still, without putting it into practice either on the command line or through the console you will not grasp versioning on cloud storage or how to create a managed instance group from an instance template in compute engine.
For a cloud engineer, you must understand how to use the bash command line.
How aced the associate cloud engineer exam on the first attempt
I made it a point to practice on as many questions as I could get my hands on and on the exam, I noted what topics and questions were asked and the exam structure.
for practice tests, I bought the practice exams from Tutorial Dojo at $14.99 which are made up of 12 quizzes with well-explained answers.
How to prepare a practical study guide that guarantees success
There are 5 topics that if you concreate upon you will ace the certification exam easily
✅Compute engine-read about managed and unmanaged instance groups compute engine storage options preemptible VMs and which use cases warrant their use.
✅Billing — you will not miss a question related to billing be knowledgeable on budgets and alerts report billing export, and how billing works
✅IAM/resource hierarchy-you should not assign roles to individual users. Users should be added to groups and groups assigned roles to simplify permissions management (critical) and know about types of roles primitive, predefined & custom, and how to enforce the principle of least privilege.
✅GCP services -read on GCP serverless options like app engine, cloud run, and cloud functions and how they differ. also, check on GCP managed services
✅ Databases there are SQL and NoSQL databases offerings by GCP you should know them well. NOSQL options are datastore and cloud firestore which are managed document databases that scale globally, and Bigtable is a wide-column database for low latency and petabyte scale.
✅Relational databases are Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is a global petabyte-scale database that scales horizontally, while cloud SQL scales up to 64 TB and is regional.
Bigquery is a data warehouse that scales horizontally.
✅ GKE To understand this topic comfortably I would advise you to perform labs to understand pods, nodes, replica sets, cluster IP deployments, etc. Also, practice command prompts related to GKE.
I have made an exam resource that will help you in your preparation and it’s available on Amazon at $5.59 only. this resource will help you tremendously in boosting your confidence for the exam. the good thing is that the answers are clearly explained with references and documentation such that when you find a similar question it’s easier to tackle.
After getting this certification I would suggest you try the cloud resume challenge to build resume-worthy projects.
ALSO READ Professional Cloud Security Engineer practice exam.
