We said goodbye to 2020 and 2021 has arrived: a new year to gain more knowledge! Did you set a goal for yourself to expand your knowledge and to get started with some Google Cloud Platform (GCP) certifications in 2021? This article is a quick but complete guide on how you need to prepare in order to pass the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Certification. Show
Summary:
1. Get your basics right with Coursera Courses or Linux AcademyWhen you are completely new to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you definitely need to start with a course that involves the essentials of GCP to give you a high overview. 2. Get Hands-on Experience with QwiklabsAnother thing you need to do is to get some hands on experience. One way of practicing is to get some hands-on experience on GCP. You can do this with Qwiklabs. There are many labs that you can follow, but these are the ones that you need :
3. Read the official study guide for the Associate Cloud Engineer examAfter knowing the overview of GCP, you can understand in depth everything you need to pass the Associate Cloud Engineer exam by reading the “Official Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide”. I like to learn in a more interactive way, so I used a screen reader while reading this book. This helped me to save a lot of time by keeping me focused. Even if you already have some experience with GCP, chances are high that you don’t know all the services evenly well. So you need to put some extra focus on the sections that you don’t know that well yet. For example, I worked with Cloud Functions, App Engine, Datastore and Data Catalog in the past. For me these sections were the easiest. But I had some difficulties with Compute Engine and Kubernetes, and I had to focus more on these. 4. Go through the GCP documentationWhen you are not a fan of reading a book, or want to expand your knowledge after reading it, you can also consult the official GCP documentation. In contrast to some other IT products, Google has put a lot of effort into making the documentation understandable and complete. In this Google Docs you will find an overview of all you need to know in order to be able to pass your Associated Cloud Engineer exam with links to GCP’s documentation. There’s also this article that goes through everything you need to know for the exam. 5. Know Google’s Best practicesLast but not least, knowing Google’s best practices is quite important to choose the right answer on your exam. Some of these best practices are about security, IAM and billing. For billing, you need to recognise the cheapest and easiest solution to implement, instead of learning all the prices by heart. One example regarding billing that you will come across during the Coursera courses, is about storage. Also check out these best practices resources:
6. Test your knowledgeLast step is to test your knowledge with the sample questions. Most of the articles suggest taking the test one day before the exam. I would suggest trying it at least one week before the exam, so that you know the structure of the questions. Moreover, you can study the sections that are your weakest points. Probably you will be able to imagine some possible questions that you might have to answer in the exam, while reviewing these sections. 7. Watch Youtube VideosIn addition to the test exam, there are some Youtube videos that will definitely help you to understand the way you need to think before answering the exam questions. We’ve found these particularly useful: After studying all of these resources, you will be ready for your exam! You might consider mixing up your path of learning to keep it interesting and at your own taste of learning. One thing I would definitely recommend is to have the sample test at least one week before the exam so that you can adjust your point of view while reviewing. The youtube videos are really helpful to give you an idea of the best way to approach the questions. There are many more resources to study and many more videos you might find useful, but we are giving you a quick clear path to get your certification. Good luck! Written by Devoteam G Cloud Google Cloud Engineers Vicky Bizergianidou, Rik Pauwels & Andrea Bombino Do you want to join our team of certified Google Cloud engineers? Check out our open job positions & apply today! One of the goals of mine was to get certified in Cloud. When they said, “Everything is moving to cloud” a few years back, I didn’t really understand, but then Microservices architecture gained popularity with Docker and Kubernetes. It changed everything for me as a Software Developer. My organization started the “Lift-and-Shift” migration for the applications deployed in an on-premises environment. I developed a passion for Cloud and Cloud-Native technologies. Therefore, I started preparing for Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Exam and got certified. Why Google Cloud?Google Cloud (or GCP) along with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure form the “Big 3 Public Cloud Providers”. Even though Google Cloud is the youngest member of this exclusive club, it is also the fastest-growing Cloud provider in recent years. They have huge partnerships with consumer credit reporting agency -Equifax, music-streaming giant - Spotify, Finnish multinational consumer electronics company - Nokia and recently with Major League Baseball (MLB). Personally, I feel Google Cloud is extremely developer-friendly. It is also tackling internet of things (IoT) and hybrid environments (some resources in on-premises and some in the cloud) both of which are acknowledgements that not everything is but it will be on the cloud. Who is an Associate Cloud Engineer?According to Google,
Google also states that,
The above percentages indicate those who strongly or somewhat agree with the statement. Findings from a survey conducted with Google Cloud certified individuals in May 2019 by an independent third-party research organization. Preparation for the ExamBefore attempting the exam, I had already created a trial account that would give $300 for trying out all the services. Currently, the trial account is for 3 months, but when I signed up it was for 12 months. You can go to the below link and create a trial account. Obviously, the best practice one can have is by having hands-on on the services provided by Google Cloud. Even though I was working in GCP for 3 months for my organization and I can tell you this - preparing for the exam requires you to have knowledge of all the services and also, it is a tough exam to crack. About the ExamThis is a multiple-choice question exam with 50 questions in total to be answered in 2 hours. There would be questions where which you can within 30 seconds, and then some would take at least 2 minutes as the questions would be lengthy. I was able to answer all of them within 50 minutes. So if you are familiar with your services, you can easily complete the exam with an ample amount of time left and also review your options. Yes, you can review your answers before submitting. You can mark a question for review if you don’t feel that confident about the question and then later re-visit if you have time. There is no negative marking, so even if you don’t know an answer, just take the best guess. There is no official passing score for the exam. Google seems to have its own algorithm in place to determine whether you passed the exam or not.
Simply put, there is no single resource that can be referenced for the preparation. In fact, the more you know the services, the better you retain. One thing to note - Google will never ask you a straightforward question like “Which is the cheapest storage?”, rather it would be, “Suppose you are the Cloud Engineer…”, or “… is the recommended practice by Google”. The questions are mostly short scenario-based. Google recommends you to have hands-on experience for at least 6+ months. But that's just a recommendation. I have seen people passing the exam within a month. However, you need to practice different kinds of scenarios while studying and always try to relate any system to GCP. Resources I used for The ExamFor my preparation, I practised a lot by exploring everything whatever is listed in the official exam guide. Additionally, I also took the Udemy course by Dan Sullivan who is the author of the Official Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide. This course is extremely great and all the important points that you need to know for the exam are highlighted. Some of my colleagues had opted for the book and commended the author to me without reservation. For passing the exam, you should definitely have extensive knowledge of VPCs, subnets, VPNs, Cloud Interconnect and Cloud Routers. For that, you must read Stephanie Wong’s articles on Networking. The below article proved to be gold for me. It is equally important for you to know everything about Kubernetes and Google’s implementation of Kubernetes Engine called GKE. You can easily find a lot of great videos on YouTube. What I referred is the below comics on Kubernetes from Google. Kubernetes ComicsGKE YouTube Videos“What is GKE?” by Google on YouTubeAnother great resource for understanding GKE is from Priyanka Vergadia’s #GCPSketchnote series covering GKE (and other services) and her YouTube videos. What is Kubernetes Engine? by Priyanka Vergadia on YouTubeGCP FlowchartsOne of the best articles I read (right before exam) is ‘A GCP Flowcharts a day’ by Grace and it is incredibly easier to remember everything if you just gaze at her Flowcharts articles every day. Google also emphasizes on knowing the best practices for Enterprise organisations for passing the Exam and you must read the Google documentation thoroughly. High-Level Overview in a NutshellEveryone has their own approach to learning a course and I am no exception. I often make notes which seem useful but then this article would be 30 minutes. I will try to give a high-level overview of whatever I seem important. But there would so many things which I may not cover, so please make your own notes (if you make any) and compare with mine. Resource Hierarchy in GCPOrganization > Folders > Projects > Resources Resources Hierarchy image by Google CloudIAM & Security in GCP
Compute Options in GCPThere are 4 compute options in GCP.
Storage Options in GCP
Get familiarity about the Use Cases of Bigtable, BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Storage. Storage Classes in Cloud StorageGoogle recommends you to use storage classes of Cloud Storage based on the frequency of the objects. Standard storage class - access frequently Get familiarity about the Object Lifecycle Management in Cloud Storage. Managed Instance Groups (MIGs)A managed instance group (MIG) contains an identical virtual machine (VM) instances that are based on an instance template. MIGs support auto-healing, load balancing, autoscaling, and auto-updating. Autoscaling works by adding more instances to your instance group when there is more load (upscaling), and deleting instances when the need for instances is lowered (downscaling). See ref. Unmanaged Instance GroupsAn unmanaged instance group is simply a collection of virtual machines (VMs) that reside in a single zone, VPC network, and subnet. An unmanaged instance group is useful for grouping together VMs that require individual configuration settings or tuning. See ref. Networking Options in GCPNetworking is one of the most important topics that come in the exam. I would highly recommend to read more about it and understand it.
I can’t stress enough how important these topics are for the exam. You must know how to choose your load balancer. Everything about VPNs and VPCs should be known. You just know that subnets are created when VPC network is created. Subnets are regional resources but they can communicate with any other subnet inside a VPC. Each subnet defines a range of IP addresses. When you create a subnet on your own, you need to provide the IP address range. DNS ResolutionWhen a VM instance is created, the DNS entries are automatically created resolving to a formatted hostname. A fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is the complete domain name for a specific computer, or host, on the internet. The FQDN consists of two parts: the hostname and the domain name. Example, If you had a VM instance “kangaroo” with a project-id “my-project”, then the DNS FQDN would be, Address Allocation For Private InternetsThis is taken from a document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has reserved the following three blocks of the IP address space for private internets: We will refer to the first block as “24-bit block”, the second as “20-bit block”, and to the third as “16-bit” block. Note that (in pre-CIDR notation) the first block is nothing but a single class A network number, while the second block is a set of 16 contiguous class B network numbers, and the third block is a set of 256 contiguous class C network numbers. Some Other Important Things
Read. Practice. Repeat.It is extremely important for you to have hands-on experience as already emphasized a few times in the article. It is also important to have practice exams before appearing for the cloud exam. I took the official practice tests by google available for free. The more you practice, the more you become aware of scenario-based questions. I think one should never appear for the Cloud exam without taking the practice tests. Final ThoughtsCloud computing is the most in-demand skill a developer must-have. I wanted to get certified and glad I did. I wanted to share my journey in the article. Trust me on this, you will learn a lot when you are reading, researching and practising for a certification. I have barely scratched the surface in this article. I would suggest you have your own preparation, make your own notes, choose your own course, everything is available out there, the important thing is that with the journey and your research on services, you will learn a lot. If you enjoy reading stories that help you learn, live and work better, consider becoming a subscriber. Becoming a member will get you unlimited access to 10000s of stories, articles and writers. It is just $5 per month. If you sign up using my link, I will earn a small commission that helps me write more articles. |