How I cleared the Google Cloud DevOps Certification Beta exam 🚀

I recently gave the Beta Exam for Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer and would like to share my experience for the same.

💪 In this blog, I will share some strategies and resources that helped me prepare for the exam, as well as my overall learning journey.

Here we go 🚀🚀🚀

Let’s start with the exam introduction!

The exam covers:

• Applying site reliability engineering principles to a service
• Building and implementing CI/CD pipelines for a service
• Implementing service monitoring strategies
• Optimizing service performance
• Managing service incidents

What is a Beta certification? 🤷‍♂️

Beta certification exams are newly developed assessments that are opened to a smaller audience before being available to the general public.

Why you should go for the Beta exam?🚀

• You get a 40% discount on exam fees! 🔥
• You get a chance to provide your feedback for the exam based on which, the actual exam will be improved.
• You receive all the certification benefits of an actual exam.

What’s the catch?🕵️‍♂️

• It usually has a large number of questions than the actual test and you get 3–4 hours to complete the exam!
• For this particular exam, there were around 111 questions 😰 and the time allotted was 4 hours to complete it.
• It takes a couple of months to get the exam results 😲
• Here are all the details about the Beta exam.

But let me tell you this! It was all worth it 🎯

I was able to complete the exam in 3.5 hours, my head was spinning due to constantly seating in one place and looking at the screen. I tried to keep myself hydrated tho 🥤

Now, the beta period of GCP DevOps certification is over and now the exam is in GA(General-Availability) mode. The exam has around 50–60 questions and you get 2 hours to complete it. Phewwww…. Much relieved 😅

Now Let’s talk about the exam content 🎯

The DevOps exam tests your skills around various topics described below:

• SLOs/SLIs/SLAs, Toil and Error Budget.
• Incident Management, Site Reliability, and Other SRE principles by Google.
• Google’s SRE handbook for Topics 1 and 2 (This is available free of course!)
• Kubernetes, GKE, and CloudRun concepts. Understand how to provision, deploy apps, manage the services, and troubleshoot them. To get started with GKE, you can refer to the below video:

• Google Cloud Operations Suite (Formerly Stackdriver) which includes services such as Cloud Logging, Monitoring, Alerting, Uptime checks, Cloud Trace, Cloud Profiler, etc. You should know how to set up logging and monitoring, apply filters, uptime checks, log-based metrics, and so on. The below videos are a good place to know about Google Cloud Operations Suite.

• What are DevOps and CICD: If you are new to DevOps and CICD, I would recommend going through the below video

• DevOps Tools and services: Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, Cloud source repository, container registry, Terraform, Jenkins, Spinnaker, CICD, Git and Github, git branching. I had a lot of working experience with these tools and technologies so I did not practice much but if you are new to these, I would recommend going through the codelab.
• Deployment strategies and testing using Canary, Blue-Green, A/B testing, Rolling update, Recreate, and so on. You can refer to this documentation and also understand the best practices.

Other resources I would recommend:

• My go-to material for preparation is Google Cloud documentation, skillboost — understand it well. Nothing substitutes for real-world experience but do a few code labs. You can also visit https://codelabs.developers.google.com/ search for the topic you are interested in. You would see several codelabs you can do in your environment to get more hands-on practice.
• You can also try some Google Cloud hands-on tutorial
• Review the exam guide to understand all the detailed topics covered in this exam.
• No GCP certification preparation is completed without the amazing cheatsheet by Ammett W Here’s the link to it along with Priyanka Vergadia’s Sketch Notes on GCP.
• Review sample questions to familiarize yourself with the format of questions and example content that may be covered on the Cloud DevOps Engineer exam.

Thank you for following along on my journey to becoming a Professional Cloud Architect certified by Google Cloud Platform. I hope that my tips and tricks have been helpful to you as you prepare for the exam. If you found this blog to be helpful, please don’t forget to give it a clap or two. If you want to stay updated on my future content, be sure to follow me and consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. Good luck on your journey to certification, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or need additional support.