Did you set a goal for yourself to expand your knowledge and to get started with some Google Cloud Platform (GCP) certifications this year? 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.
Summary:
- Coursera Courses or Linux Academy
- Hands-on experience
- Read the official study guide
- GCP Documentation
- Best Practices
- Test you knowledge + resources to help you understand how to answer the questions
- Youtube
1. Get your basics right with Coursera Courses or Linux Academy
When 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.
- Coursera to get the overview of GCP: Essential Google Cloud Infrastructure: Foundation
- Linux Academy Course: Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer 2020
2. Get Hands-on Experience with Qwiklabs
Another 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 exam
After 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 documentation
When 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 practices
Last 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 knowledge
Last 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 Videos
In 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:
- Preparing for Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Exam: important topics & resources that will help you successfully ACE the exam
- Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer – The Certified Q&A for GCP : 20 first videos of the playlist are about the ACE exam. The video creator explains how to think when you answer the questions. Really useful, especially if it’s your first GCP certification.
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
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