Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam

DevOps

If you want to learn about Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps tools available in Google Cloud then the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification is the right challenge for you.

Site reliability Engineer is an interesting topic and taking time to learn about it would definitely be a valuable experience. The saying goes class SRE implements DevOps.

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

Step #1: Check out the Exam Guide

The exam guide lists all the objectives to be covered. It is very helpful and at a glance you have an idea of what areas you need to learn in order to prepare for the exam. You can check out the current exam guide here.

Step #2: Sign up for Google Cloud training

After you have reviewed the exam guide, if you think it worth your time check out some of the Google Cloud learning material. Google Cloud has Google Cloud Skills Boost. Log in an enroll in your learning path and begin learning. For this one, let’s pick the DevOps Engineer, SRE Learning path.

Once you select the learning path, you will see several courses with labs to complete.

learning path

If you are looking for other options for Google Cloud training, there are courses available on Coursera and Pluralsight.

Coursera links:

• Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Cloud DevOps Engineer Professional Certificate

Pluralsight links:

• SRE and DevOps Engineer with Google Cloud

Step #3: Check out the SRE books & playlist

There are a few book available online and in store. These books go into more depth and are a valuable source to understand the SRE discipline.

• Site Reliability Engineering
• The Site Reliability Workbook

There is also SRE Google website

• https://sre.google/

The YouTube playlist

• class SRE implements DevOps
• Engineering for Reliability

SRE content

Step #4: Hands-on Experience with Labs

There are several labs contained in the learning paths and you should aim to complete them. By completing the labs and quest you get the opportunity to earn skill badges.

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 own environment to get more hands on practice. While learning you can explore the various options that exist in a services configuration.

codelabs

Step #5: DevOps Topic Deep Dives

The Google Cloud documentation is technical documentation. Here just a few of my recommendations for topics you can read up on.

• Data incident response process
• Google Cloud’s operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)
• Secrets Manager
• Binary Authorization
• Continuous integration, Continuous Delivery
• Cloud Build, Cloud Run, App Engine
• Artifact registry, Source Repositories
• GKE, Anthos
• Application deployment and testing strategies

I’ve also put together a prep sheet for this exam available on https://www.startcloudnow.com/google%20cloud.html

Start Cloud Now

Step #6: Sample questions

There are sample questions on the certification website that you can check out here.

Step #7 Sign up for the exam

Sign up for the exam here.

Also feel free to check out my other certification preparation articles—

• Preparing for success with the GCP Professional Cloud Network Engineer Exam
• Preparing for the GCP Cloud Professional Security Engineer Exam
• Preparing for success with the Google Professional Database Engineer Exam-2023

If you want to ask a question, find out more or share a thought? Please connect with me on Linkedin or twitter @ammettw and send me a message.

I’ll be in touch.