Why choose Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?
I hope all are safe during this pandemic crisis(COVID-19). I want to utilize this lock down period usefully and thought of pulling my long term goal of achieving my cloud certification. Upon different cloud vendors out in market, I decided to go with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as it has evolved from being a niche player to a serious competitor to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and also it gives you an lump sum of 300$ free trail credits upon sign up for 1 year which is more than enough for the Hands-on.
How much time it took for me to face the 1st question of the exam?
Give priority when you read terms like “reduce costs”, “find the simple solution” "fewest steps""Google's best practice". These terms will act as decision maker when you are between likely options or near misses.
To be frank I had zero prior experience in cloud before but I have been working in Infra for years so that experience helped me to relate some technical terminologies used in Cloud like VMs, Load balancer, firewall,VPN, DNS,Database,containerization and micro services which are the core concepts.But still if you are from a software developing background, its easy to catch up things and it takes little more time. It almost took 1 month for me to get ready for the exam and it differs from individual. Basically I spent lot of time in practicals to understand how these GCP services work exactly.
What is needed for the exam?
The important thing is to work with GCP and understand its key design and operational concepts. This approach will help you reason through tough exam questions that probe your understanding of GCP’s overall design and recommended best practices. You should have hands-on experience working on certain GCP services like Compute Engine, App Engine, Kubernetes Engine and Cloud functions and wisely choosing the storage according to the requirement over various storage options on board. Google's recommendations is to have at least 6 Months of Hands on as pre-requisite for this certification.You are also expected to have a very thorough experience in using the command line utilities like gcloud, gsutil and kubectl.
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Key points to be noted in terms of exam:
"The certificate is valid for 2 years from the date of getting certified"
- The exam has 50 Questions exactly.
- All questions are multiple choice type (All questions are based on a scenario and no direct questions).
- You have 120 minutes to complete the exam(almost 2.4 min per Question which is more than enough).
- Google has kept the passing score as confidential.
- End of the exam all you will know about your result is just Pass or Fail only. No score or detailed feedback will be provided.
- The certificate is valid for 2 years from the date of getting certified.
- The exam is conducted at Kryterion Test Centers and also you can take it online as well.
- To take test online you must install Sentinel software and set up your Bio metric Profile prior to your scheduled exam time.
- Check the system requirements and pre-requisite for Online proctor.
Note: When you take exam in your home it will take at least couple of weeks to get your official certificate from google due to huge number of exams taken during this time. In case you take in center it will be 3 to 5 days.
What is the exam curriculum?
Google officially have not provided curriculum of this exam however I will give some rough figures based on my experience.
1. Compute Engine | App Engine | Kubernetes Engine - 30%:
Google cloud VMs (instances) are definitely one of the core infrastructure components that you should read about. You should be aware of scaling activities, authentication types, using keys,metadata, instance group and Health checks.
Kubernetes also has its definite place in the exam. Be ready to handle some Kubernetes questions. Even if you have Kubernetes experience outside the context of GCP, it’ll be quite helpful.The third type of Compute service that the exam asks about is Google App Engine. Ensure that you know how to handle multiple services and versions of the application.
2. IAM | Logging and Monitoring - Stackdriver - 20%:
You can expect a lot of IAM related questions. You should have an in-depth knowledge of how to use IAM Users, Roles and Service Accounts. It’ll also help, if you can practically grant roles to certain users/resources using service accounts within the same project and across projects. You should also be able to check the audit trail either by logs or activity history. You should be familiar with checking the logs, finding the error,monitor the performance and setting up alert policy for resources using different strackdriver tools like Debug,Trace and Logging.
3. Storage | Database | Cloud Functions - 25%:
GCP offers a vide range of services meeting different requirement of customers. When it comes to storage, GCP has object storage and for relational and non relational database it has many options like Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, Datastore,Firestore and Bigtable. You should be knowing use case of these services, when and where to implement. Cloud functions like Cloud Pub/sub, DataProc, Dataflow, which are completely server less and just services.
4. Networking - 25%
The exam was not very heavy on networking concepts, but a basic understanding of how VPCs, Firewalls and some other networking components work helps a lot. Also, read about using multiple VPCs together in GCP or with your on-premise network. Understand the difference between shared VPC, VPC peering and VPN and Cloud Interconnect. Review fundamental concepts like IP addressing, CIDR blocks, DNS,firewall rules and access controls. While reading the questions and learning the networking concepts try to bring the setup visually in your mind so that it will be easy for you to understand.
Exam Tips:
Mark questions for review if you are in dilemma so that you can come back later.
Read the questions carefully and identify key services ,software and technical requirements.
Give priority when you read these terms like “reduce costs”, “find the simple solution” "fewest steps""Google best practice". These terms will act as decision maker when you are between likely options or near misses.
Focus on how to choose/use storage, database and cloud functions as there are wide options in GCP.
Among the GCP services,rule out the other options which talks about a service/method which is not a part GCP service but still GCP supports.
(Ex- You can do a job using Cloud functions and also you can do the same job by writing a script, in this case go for the Cloud function).
What are the preparation methodologies that I used?
1.Official Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide written by Dan Sullivan.
This study guide has almost 18 chapters separated by modules that are predominantly required to pass the exam and also it has around 20 questions end of each chapter. It also has answers with explanation for all these at the end.
2. 5 hours video course on Udemy by the author of official ACE study guide Dan Sullivan.
This course will give you good knowledge on practicals as he will demonstrate on how to setup each resources and how it actually works. End of the course it has an practice exam with 50 questions which are pretty much easier, by taking this your confidence level will boost up. After the exam you can review the answers with explanation as well.
3. Coursera - Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure
Which has lots of basic things to be learnt about GCP, author Philipp Maier
4. Google’s Practice test for the Cloud Engineer Exam
This is Google's official practice test however it has just 20 question and the same question repeats every time, you can take this test for gaining experience on facing questions.
All the very best !!! Good Luck
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