How to pass the Google Professional Cloud Developer certification
Today I took the Professional Cloud Developer certification. This is how I managed to succeed. Again, as a bonus, I share here the study guide I created for this certification.
About this certification exam
- Length: 2 hours
- Registration fee: $200 (plus tax where applicable)
- Languages: English, Japanese.
- Exam format: Multiple choice and multiple select, taken in person at a test center. Locate a test center near you.
- Prerequisites: None
- Recommended experience: 3+ years of industry experience including 1+ years designing and managing solutions using GCP.
Reference: Professional Cloud Engineer official exam page.
Following a strategy similar to the one I followed for the other Professional Exams (Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Data Engineer, Professional Security Engineer and Professional Network Engineer), this was my process for studying for this exam:
- Took the practice exam to get a glimpse of its format. The practice exam provides an explanation for each of the questions after you finish and is very good to have an idea of the format of the questions you’ll face and how much you should prepare for the actual exam.
- Read the exam overview;
- Read the exam guide;
- Read the HipLocal sample study case;
- Visited the products page of the platform and identified each product that could be related to the topics listed on the exam guide.
- For each of the products identified in the prior step, I visited its Documentation / Concepts page and started reading about each of the concepts that I considered relevant for the given product. Check the Cloud Build concepts page, for example.
- You’ll probably notice some products seem to overlap with each other and find it difficult to known when to use one or the other. Again, Google Search is your best friend here :)
- Finally, I took the practice exam again (you can take it as many times as you want) to check how much I improved from step 1.
Study guide
As for the other exams, I made the study guide for the Professional Cloud Developer certification publicly available.
Again, you can freely copy, change and distribute this material. The only thing I would kindly ask you is to keep a reference to original material and give me proper credits.
To use it, create your own copy. Once you do it, the spreadsheet will be made writable to you and you’ll be able to update the Status column, which you’ll help you to track your progress along the material:
You’ll probably notice this guide has far more items that the others I published before. This is probably because I got biased by the others, so I’d recommend you to first take a look at the official exam guide and judiciously use this guide I’m sharing. Anyway, knowledge is never wasted :)
Disclaimer
This guide is shared with the only intent of helping people aiming to take the Professional Cloud Developer, Professional Cloud Network Engineer, Professional Cloud Security Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect and / or Professional Data Engineer certification exams. Be advised there is no guarantee that following the guide will make you pass the exams. Use it at your own discretion.
Tips for taking your exam
Most of the tips I shared in my previous posts also apply to this exam:
- Know what each product does, what it’s good for and what it’s not good for and how it differs from similar offers;
- As described before, you have 2 hours to finish the exam. Keep in mind that good time management is crucial for your success;
- Don’t spend too much time on questions you don’t know. If you aren’t sure about an answer, mark the question to be reviewed later and move on to the next questions.
- Practice as much as possible using the practice exam.
- If you can afford it, practice using the Qwiklabs Quests below. This will help with to put the main concepts in practice, which is a very good thing to do in your preparation for this exam.
Qwiklabs Quests
- Cloud Engineering Quest
- Cloud Development Quest
- Kubernetes in the Google Cloud Quest
- Security & Identity Fundamentals Quest
Conclusion
Based on my experience, I’d say this exam has a slightly more narrow and deep approach than the Cloud Architect, which follows a more wide and flat one, in my opinion.
I just noticed the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer is available. This is certainly a certification I’ll pursue in 2020 for getting fully certified on the Google Cloud Platform. If you are interested on this one, please stay tune for updates :)
I hope this article and the referenced study guides help you in your journey to become a Google Cloud certified professional and wish you all the success.
If you think this is helpful, please leave your 👏 and feedback below.
Thanks for reading and good luck!
