Aug 9, 2022

4 min read

Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam

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.

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.

There is also SRE Google website

https://sre.google/

The YouTube playlist

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.