Adventures learning GCP, the path to multi-certification
So the story begins at the tail end of July 2019 when I started a new adventure in my career by joining CTS (something I wholeheartedly recommend!). My background was quite varied having supported a variety of different technologies, originally enterprise storage arrays before moving into sysadmin roles specialising in Microsoft, VMware, Messaging, and general 3rd/4th line support. Along the way, I had dabbled a little in the cloud by helping to support and deploy a few services in both AWS and Azure, along with leading two 365 exchange migrations. I had however never touched GCP despite loving and using many of Google’s services in my personal use.
Professional Cloud Architect
Joining the platform engineering team originally as a Microsoft specialist, the learning began on day one. Before I even joined I was made aware that CTS desires all platform engineers to achieve the Professional Cloud Architect (PCA) certification, and in my case specifically it was a goal of my probation. So I set off studying for this certification mainly by studying the excellent (though sadly now at least partially out of date) Linux Academy course and doing most if not all of the hands-on labs and running through the practice test several times. The challenge of the PCA is the breadth of services that Google Cloud offers and determining the best choice for various use cases. For anyone considering taking it these days I would highly recommend Priyanka’s brilliant sketchnotes (an example below), Google Cloud products in 4 words or less (which makes a good desktop background!) and simply reading the documentation.
I remember being both relieved and overjoyed when I passed the PCA about two months after first joining CTS, maybe I could get my head around this GCP thing after all!
Professional Network Engineer
Following this initial success thoughts quickly shifted to what to do next, I have a background in networking, having studied CCNA/CCNP material during University. In previous roles, I also found myself supporting both fibre channel (conventional and FCoE) and TCP/IP networking. I also found myself really interested in the way Google’s network works and how it differed from AWS, Azure, and on-prem networking. For example, a Google VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is a global construct that can have subnets in each region (spanning availability zones) Stephanie Wong’s excellent video on this topic is well worth a watch. I also found the way some of the network services worked on Google’s software-defined network (SDN) really interesting. For example, both Cloud NAT and Cloud Router don’t exist on the ‘data plane’ which removes single points of failure in packet transit.
At the time (this exam has been refreshed towards the end of 2021) I would estimate that about 70% of the Networking exam was covered by the PCA study material which was still fresh in my mind. The remaining 30% I gleaned from watching previous Google Cloud Next videos and reading documentation and reviewing reference architectures. This exam also required a good understanding of common networking (80, 443, 21, 22, 3389, etc) ports and protocols (HTTP, FTP, TFTP, TCP, UDP, etc) which thankfully I had picked up already in my study and career. So only three weeks after passing my PCA I was back into the test centre for my Networking exam which I also passed.
Following these initial successes, I decided to take a bit of a break from Google certifications to focus on the Microsoft stack. During this time I passed the 70–740 before unfortunately failing the 70–741 shortly after this Microsoft announced they would be retiring the MCSA which was my target certification. It was around this time I also became a father with all the hard work, sleepless nights, and joy that brings.
Professional Security Engineer
Fast-forwarding to March 2020 I decided to tackle the security exam, to prepare for this I again took another excellent Linux Academy course, to improve my familiarity with topics such as CMEK, KMS, IAM best practices, and such. My exam was booked for the 23rd of March 2020, unfortunately, the day the UK went into the first lockdown. Whilst remote proctoring (aka sitting the exam at home) quite quickly became available for the PCA it wasn’t available for the specialist certifications at the time so I had to wait until the test centre was once again open which ended up being nearly six months later. Thankfully I was eventually able to go and sit it and pass it. This exam has recently (writing March 2021) been refreshed so my knowledge on it is likely out of date but my colleagues who have sat it recently recommend the Google Security Foundation Document and VPC Best Practice documents in preparation for it.
Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
Around the time I passed the Security exam I started working with a new client to help them modernise a legacy Windows application and accelerate the development of custom tooling around this on GCP. In this project I spent a lot of time helping to improve the monitoring of their stack with a particular focus on monitoring, logging, automation, and CICD. To do this I ended up working extensively with Cloud Build and several of the Stackdriver (now Google Monitoring) tools. All of these experiences I thought aligned really nicely with the content in the exam guide for the Devops Engineer Exam while building on my practical experience by looking at the theory behind ‘Devops’, with a focus on things like incident management, SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, deployment methodologies to name but a few sections. For this exam, I highly recommend the cloud guru course (as of March 2022 this course is split into 5 tracks), but also recommend Google’s SRE book available digitally for free, or in printed form.
Cloud Digital Leader
First a confession, I decided to take the Cloud Digital Leader exam (which I spotted was being available to book when I did my Devops Engineer exam) purely in the hope of getting limited-edition beta exam merchandise as a colleague got some for doing Devops whilst that was in beta. I didn’t really prep a great deal for this exam other than to refresh some billing concepts around sustained and committed use discounts. Beta exams, unlike their GA counterparts, are with an opportunity to give feedback on the questions. This was itself quite an interesting experience in meant I spent a fair bit of time commenting on individual questions which were a bit rough and ready at the time (with some typos still in some of the questions and answers). Overall though this exam was somewhat more technical than I expected covering probably about 60–70% of the PCA content. This exam has though also been recently refreshed to better reflect the exam guide and reduce the amount of technical content though so my first-hand experience is out of date.
Recertification of PCA and Network Engineer
After completing my 12-month customer engagement I had some time on ‘the bench’ before starting my next engagement. I used this as a prime opportunity to pick up both the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and Terraform Associate Exams the former of which I highly recommend the Kode Kloud course. Following these, I also had both my PCA and Network engineer exams to recertify. To prep for these, I studied some new material and focussed on practice questions to get myself into the exam mindset again. Whilst I didn’t require as much prep as the first time round recertification still proved a challenge and I was glad to pass both of them.
Professional Cloud Developer
Around when I sat my recertification my company announced a certification incentive scheme and additional study support which I spoke about in the video below:
Having already achieved the lower target when it was announced I gave real thought to aiming for the complete set (the seven professional GCP certs) which offered a still higher reward. Of the three remaining Developer, Data and ML I decided that developer was for me the ‘lowest hanging fruit’. I prepared for exam by doing about 10 hours of the Cloud Guru course. I found I was able to skip much of the content as a lot of the content is similar to the DevOps engineer exam just from a slightly different perspective. When exam day came I found it fairly straightforward and was happy to pass.
Professional Data Engineer
So with five down, I was left with the two that were firmly outside my usual wheelhouse as a platform engineer, Data and ML. Out of the two I opted to go for the Data exam first, partially because I was assisting the CTS data engineering team in delivering a data warehouse for a customer, but also because this exam has been out a long time and has a good amount of course material. Again I opted for the Cloud Guru course but unlike the Developer didn’t skip any of the content as pretty much all of it was new to me, certainly at the depth required anyway. The content of this exam is pretty thorough and requires a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the various GCP data structures (eg Bigquery, Spanner, Bigtable, Firestore etc), tooling (eg Dataflow, Dataproc, Composer), and processes (eg DLP). After completing the course I then went through several practice tests to get familiar with the types of questions I might be asked before I opted to book the exam. When I did sit the exam just before Christmas 2021 it was hard and honestly, I was both slightly shocked and relieved to pass.
Professional ML Engineer
So the final, and for me most challenging exam. This is a fairly new exam with not all that much course content floating around. Undeterred by this I purchased a course from Whizlabs, which honestly I probably wouldn’t recommend as I found the content was a little bit all over the place. What I did find really helpful though was the Google Machine Learning Crash Course which really helped me understand core ML concepts like overfitting and regularisation. I also found some practice questions which helped me improve my question answering and give me further documentation to look at. In all, though this exam is hard, I wouldn’t attempt it unless you have done the Data Engineer first as data pipelines are critical to supplying the data that training, validating, and productionising ML models require. You will need to be familiar with the entire Vertex AI product set and a good amount of theory of ML models. I set myself the target of completing the exam by the end of February so as to get my certification incentive (should I pass it). With this target in mind, I prepped as much as I could and decided to just do a run at it and hope for the best (in full knowledge CTS would graciously pay for a resit should I fail!). On the day of the exam, I was apprehensive but did as best as I could but wasn’t convinced it was enough then when I saw the preliminary result of a pass I didn’t quite believe it, and as it sunk in I was overjoyed!
What I have found helpful in sitting exams
Whilst every exam is different and has required me to study a variety of different areas there have been some useful guides common to all of them:
- Sathish VJ’s excellent Awesome GCP Certifications Github Repo: https://github.com/sathishvj/awesome-gcp-certifications
- A Cloud Guru, where a course exists I have generally found them very good: https://acloudguru.com/
What’s next?
I have a little while before I need to begin recertifying the exams (at the time of writing Security is due in September). I am toying with the idea of doing the Collaboration Engineer exam, principally to gain a deeper knowledge of Cloud Identity, which underpins GCP IAM (in a similar way that Azure AD interacts with both Azure and 365). I am also considering deepening my knowledge of Kubernetes by focusing on passing the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam. Finally, I have committed to joining the leadership development program at my employer CTS.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, my musings about my path to GCP multi-certification have been interesting and helpful. I would like to take this opportunity to thank a few people:
- My wife has encouraged, supported, and created space for me to study.
- My colleagues likewise have encouraged, supported, and shared their wisdom with me. I hope to have reciprocated wisdom back in addition to the Velvetiser for the office. If they sound like the sort of colleagues you want (and trust me they are!) we are always hiring!
- And finally, anyone out there that has shared any thoughts or wisdom about these exams, through sharing we make out community stronger.
About CTS:
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