How to pass the Google Professional Cloud Network Engineer certification
Today I took the Professional Cloud Network Engineer certification. This is how I managed to pass the exam. 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.
- 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.
Notice that this exam, like the Professional Cloud Security Engineer, as of the time of this writing, is available in English only.
In my previous post, I shared the strategy I used for passing the Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification. This time, given my lack of in-depth networking experience, I decided to follow the same strategy I followed for the Cloud Architect and Data Engineer exams:
- Read the exam overview;
- Read the exam guide;
- 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 VPC 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. Google Search is your best friend here :)
- For most of the products, I had to perform additional search for the concepts (VPN and DNS, for example) related to the product. The Cloudflare Blog was a really useful source of information for these cases.
- Then, I took the practice exam. 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 prepared you are.
- After I finished the practice exam, I took notes of the topics I didn’t do well and re-read the relevant documentation I collected on step 4 above.
- Finally, I took the practice exam again (you can take it as many times as you want) and kept repeating steps from 4 to 8 until I felt confident to take the actual exam.
Study guide
As for the other exams, I made the study guide for the Cloud Network Engineer certification 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:
Disclaimer
This guide is shared with the only intent of helping people aiming to take the 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, as well as its connectivity and security characteristics;
- As described before, you have 2 hours to finish the exam. Keep in mind that good time management is crucial for your success (I ended up submitting my exam with only 1m40s left 😰);
- 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.
Conclusion
The Cloud Network Engineer certification is the hardest one I took so far (compared to the Cloud Architect, Data Engineer and Security Engineer certifications). I believe it’s due to the fact that all my career was focused on Software Development until now.
Just because I got certified, it doesn’t mean I am now a network specialist (and I don’t intend to be). In the end, a certification is just a “piece of paper”, right? On the other hand, I certainly learned a lot during this process and having some networking skills in my belt certainly makes me a better professional.
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.
Stay tuned! I hope to share the study guide for both the Google Professional Cloud Developer certification by December 2019.
If you think this is helpful, please leave your 👏 and feedback below.
Thanks for reading and good luck!
