How to score SIX certs in SIX weeks

Parth Mehta
Nov 7 · 5 min read

At the Telegraph we are incentivised to acquire cloud certificates, they are not only paid for, they also help with career progression. You are also give 2 study leaves in addition to your annual leave. Earlier this year, Telegraph decided to use GCP as their primary cloud provider. So naturally, we were encouraged to get Google Cloud certified.

Having passed Google Certified Cloud Architect last year, I was required to get Networking and Security certifications. Both of of these exams were freshly out of beta earlier this year and there were no study materials available for them except google cloud documentation. Having recently started working on GCP I thought it would require sizeable efforts to learn security and networking concepts using google cloud documentation alone. So I thought it was best to wait until Linux Academy or aCloudGuru came up with courses on them.

It was not until mid September I finally got courage to book Networking exam. After having went through the GCP networking mock test I felt fairly comfortable booking the exam. Still no courses on GCP networking exam though.

Time management was an important factor for success in this case. Until I booked the exam it was a little harder to get motivated to work hard. Once I booked the exam I tried to revise in every opportunity I had. For example, during commute I could easily steal a couple of hours in a work day for study. I studied during lunch breaks. It was very challenging to ignore the guilt of not playing with your kids when you are studying. So it was hard to revise when in the evenings. So I found it easier to focus during night time after kids were asleep. In the end, joy of achievement was enough for me to think it was worth it. Taking that initial step to book the exam and having that urgency and a definite timeline was a great motivator for me.

25 Sep: After having gone through study guide I started reading through Google Cloud Documents trying to familiarise myself with concepts. Read medium articles from people who had the courage to take exam before me. Before I sat in the exam I didn’t feel sure but I passed so the prep work I did must have been enough. After having sat through the exam I feel GCP networking exam was fair. And you do not need prior networking experience to pass the exam.

5 Oct: Gained a bit of a confidence boost from passing the exam I thought was one of the toughest of cloud exams. 10 days later I attempted passed Docker Certified Associate. DCA was harder than I thought, you are supposed to memorise docker commands which I feel was bit unnecessary. However Linux Academy course was good enough to cover around 80% of the topics which got me through.

15 Oct: Attempted and passed, Google Certified Professional Security Engineer. A reasonable overlap with networking exam, GCP security was easier to pass than GCP Networking one. Ever helpful Linux Academy had a course for this, which was suffice enough to cover the topics needed to pass the exam.

18 Oct: Passed Certified Jenkins Engineer exam. Linux Academy Jenkins course and topics covered in this medium article were enough for me to pass the exam. That said I did have prior exposure to Jenkins at work which helped with the questions about Jenkins interface.

2 Nov: Certified Kubernetes Administrator and Certified Kubernetes Application Developer. These two exams were a lot different than MCQ based cloud exams I did earlier. Having read medium articles who passed these exams before me I knew it would help to be organised. I benefited having spent some time to create base objects which I reused:

alias kk=kubectl
mkdir src
kubectl run nginx — image=nginx — restart=Never — dry-run -o yaml > src/pod.yaml
kubectl run busybox — image=busybox:1.28 — restart=Never — command sleep 36000
kubectl run nginx — image=nginx — restart=OnFailure — dry-run -o yaml > src/job.yaml
kubectl run nginx — image=nginx — dry-run -o yaml > src/deployment.yaml

If you get some time it pays to recheck your answers. Having saved yamls created for each questions in their respective folders made it easier for me to find the objects I had created.

for i in {1..24}
do
mkdir q$i
done

Linux Academy CKA and CKAD courses were sufficient to pass the exams.

Special Credits: It’s been hard work and focus to achieve this. But it would not have been possible without

  1. the support of my wife for single-handedly taking care of two naughty munchkins while I prepared for the exams.

2. Support of line manager was crucial who allowed to take days off to take exam on a short notice.

Parth Mehta

Written by

Cloud enthusiast, a husband and father of two. Have a passion for web performance. Views are my own.

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