Hi Folks,
Just passed my ACE cert. I want to thank Mathias for the quality of his course. Definitely instrumental in my success.
That being said as things could always been optimized I have a few comments. Per the real life exam (that may has changed over time) the importance of the command line details (or even console details) stated in the course is not completely there.
The nature of the questions are more « architecture » oriented and best-practice operations…
I feel that the use cases are « classical », like mastering a VM deployment in a VPC with proper security and network conf. Warning, classical does not mean easy…On average the level of difficulty is medium-high. I have not seen really a single « easy » one (actually I found one, but the wording was super confusing that ultimately I am not 100% sure of my answer).
Overall, the level of quality of the questions is high. This means that the question makes sense, the answers also and you feel that it is useful to know what they ask…I cannot say that for all the certifications I passed! 🙂
Regarding the services coverage:
you need to master the setup of Projects & Billings & roles (surprising no? 🙂 )
you need to master the deployment of VMs in zones, region, VPC with best practices + logs & monitoring
you need to master AppEngine & Container services (GKE, CloudRun) as an alternative
you need to master the different type of storage and database services
In my opinion you do not need to be a Kubernetes expert (with the depth described in the a cloud guru course)…but a decent architecture understanding could suffice.
Now for the AWS certified folks (I have 5 AWS certs), this exam is slightly harder than the AWS associate ones, but easier than AWS pro or specialty.
Does that help to be AWS certified to pass ACE?…well sure, but not that much (I bet that it helped me for 10 to 20% of the questions). Of course my cloud general background helped me for 100% of the questions…
Keep in mind that Google is different from AWS. Projects does not exists in AWS! The network layer is very different (VPC are globals instead of regional, Subnet are regional instead of zonal, load balancer options are differents, ).
Hope this feedback will help you to pass the exam!