Journey from System Engineer to Google Cloud Engineer
How I cleared 3 Google cloud Certification in 6 months , without any Cloud Prior knowledge. GCP ACE , GCP PCA , GCP PDE.
Before we start let me give a little back ground about me and what we are going to discuss i.e. how to clear google certifications.
I had 7 years of my Professional life invested into Enterprise monitoring domain. This domain talks about building monitoring solutions specially for infrastructure. It usually covers the standard/base monitoring required by any company to run its infrastructure/application with no or minimum downtime. Alerts being configured on different metrics using tools from various vendors like MicroFocus , BMC , IBM or some other open source tools available today . These tools does not require any high level development skills , all you need is OS system level understanding , some of basics of how application runs. So i decided to do something exciting in my life and somehow i got enrolled into GCP training through my company/Google Partnership Program.
Initial 6 Months took me to complete 1 Module in Coursera. Really everything was new for me from cloud itself to different cloud storage to docker to k8s to containerization and what not :) . I was felling like a alien. Eventually over a period of time , i found my self very interested and decided to go at least for 1st level certification. Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer.
Lets start now with the steps i followed to be a Cloud Engineer. Currently i am working as Cloud Consultant with one of the reputed international company.
Step 1 : Complete all Coursera associated with GCP ACE. This is really amazing course which given me the qwiklabs access . Do labs as many times as you can. I have done 100 of labs during this time.
Step 2 : Once you feel little confident (not enough to go for certification ) , you can (I did) enroll for GCP ACE course available through udemy. This courses blowed my brain as it talks a lot of k8s and lot of devops stuff , which is not really need for ACE exam (It will gonna help for PCA though). So do not worry if you got found yourself very naïve. PS: This course have sample papers which are horrible , do not go for those.
Step 3 : By now , all you need is some practice . I have gone through numbers of website . Most of them had similar questions. udemy samples Practice test sums up all in one place. It really good for practice. If you are able to score more then 80% in all exams. Tada!! you are ready for certification .
Step 4: Congrats you are GCP ACE now. Lets move to GCP PCA. This exam is more detailed in terms of what we learnt in ACE . We really need to go through numbers of courses to be confident enough. These course make the the base strong for GCP PDE Exam as well .
Step 5 : Just make sure you do any as many labs you can do. Not all services you should know in details , but you should know when to use which services. For example , if question is asking about analytics data , you should think of Big query or Big table. If it talks about SQL data then you should think of Cloud SQL and Bigquery. When questions talks about SQL type you should know its Datastore . So if question comes as , we need SQL , cost effective and analytics Database , clearly answer is Bigquery.
Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Exam | Coursera
Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Cloud Network Engineer Professional Certificate | Coursera (optional)
Step 6: Once you had gone through the courses , next is practice some questions available on Google site itself as sample test. You can check some website as well like Professional Cloud Architect Exam | Free Practice Test (simplilearn.com) or AwesomeGCP — YouTube or LMS | Whizlabs
Steps 7 : You should be ready for exam :) . if not do not worry , It took me 4 reschedule to write my PCA exam. Be consistent , take your practice labs as many as possible, which will give you confidence to answer the questions.
Step 8 : Congrats you are Google certified PCA. Moving to GCP PDE , you need to revise earlier Data Engineers course plus some Machine learning courses available. This ML module is enough for PDE exam Google Cloud Big Data and Machine Learning Fundamentals | Coursera
Step 9 : Again do as many qwiklabs as you can , practice google sample paper . Check some online available questions. Once you feel ready , go for it. When i had given my exam i was not expecting the PASS. I found it most difficult as coming from System engineer background , technology like Apache Beam , Apache Airflow , Hadoop were very new. But good thing is exam wont expect you to build pipelines or build some ETL right away. All you need to know the strength of each service. For example if you want stream jobs , you can think of dataflow . Once you will complete the courses you will be very familiar with all these services. :) So go for it.
Notes :
- Links might be broken as do not exist any more.
- qwiklabs is now the official google training portal. Coursera have courses but may be labs are not available anymore. Below links will take you to qwiklabs courses which are more updated from google cloud end.