Google GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Certification Tips

I just passed my Google Associate Cloud Engineer Certification. It is a bit more difficult than the AWS ones since it covers more topics and goes deeper into certain areas such as Kubernetes.

You have 2 hours to answer 50 questions. Most of the answers are single choice but there are some multiple choice answers. There is no passing score and you will only get a pass/fail result. You should aim to get around 70% right but this is just my guess. The exam cost $125 and it can be done online.

The exam covers many areas and you will require to know gcloud commands, IAM roles, and Kubernetes.

The main areas are IAM(you need to know the most important roles including billing account roles), Compute Engine, Kubernetes, VPCs and networking and deployment and monitoring. Make sure you are confortable setting up permissions, access management, gcloud commands, managing VMs, VPC networks, subnets, load balancers, compute and storage. Also, you will get few questions about Stackdriver, different machine types, etc.

Preparation

Start by creating a free trial account in GCP, get familiar with the console and try some of the tutorials in the console. Also, start watching the GCP Next videos to get more familiar with the different services. Take the free Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals course and play around with the console for a couple of months, then jump into the certification courses.

Recommended Courses

• Coursera has several great courses many of which you can enroll for free. I recommended starting with Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals, to get familiar with the platform. Then take the Getting Started with Google Kubernetes Engine if you are not too familiar with Kubernetes. Finally take the Preparing for the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Exam course.
• The official certification book is a great resource, very complete and highly recommended if you prefer to paper-based rather than video content.
• Cloud Guru has a GCP course which is great, I took it in Udemy. However, the quality and content is not as good as their AWS counterparts and the practice exams are not as similar to the real exam but I do still…