Hi,
I just finished my first ACE exam and passed! The mega thread helped a lot and basically what people pointed out are very accurate.
About my background and preparation, I’ve been using AWS in my company for ~2 years and < 1 year of GCP experience (mainly in GKE) myself for smaller projects. I spent 2 days finishing up the qwiklab quests (for the coupon… lol) and 2-3 days to finish the coursera videos (GCP fundamentals: core). Unfortunately, I discovered here the last night before the test so I only watch the last-prep videos and taken simulation test. The simulation test pointed out I have weaknesses in IAM so I re-read some GCP docs about service accounts and best practices and I’m glad I did 🙂
Also about the exam:
no question with > 1 answers was encountered
many questions are about setting up IAM. Concepts of setting up different kinds of roles in different levels (org/folder/project/resource) are must-know. And also knowing the best practices of setting up permissions for enterprises is very important.
many questions about AppEngine — the difference between Standard vs Flex. How to handle deployment, rollback, traffic-split, etc.
also many questions about instance lifecycle — setting up LB + managed instance group with high-availability, autoscaling, autohealing, etc. I kind of regret that I didn’t review these capabilities in a more detailed way.
some questions were also about VPC — CIDR, subnet, and a bit routing
setting up billing accounts and related IAM roles are also must-know
basic understanding of k8s — Deployments, DaemonSet, StatefulSet
Storage and database — need to know the difference of storage classes of GCS and the difference and use-cases of DB options.
Also, it’s very important to recognize keywords in the questions (like "relational data", "transaction", etc), which without them, the answer could be completely different.
Thanks Mattias for putting up the mega-thread and everyone’s valuable feedback here. I’ll go back to finish up the course in ACG anyway and update here if I have any further comments 🙂
2 Answers
Congratulations Daniel! Thanks for the feedback too! So, are you planning on going to Next 19? Or did you get the pass yet?
thanks 😀 I haven’t gotten the pass but I’m very excited about going to Next in SF!
Congratulations, Daniel! 🎉 I’m glad you and so many others are getting value from my Exam Report Mega-Thread! 😁 Of course I’m linking this thread into there, too, now, as it includes lots of useful tips on what to study!
I find it very interesting that every question you got was single-response. I’m pretty sure I got a fair number of multi-response questions on mine, but of course we get different questions on our exams. Hmmm…
Anyway, I hope to see you at Next, next month! Both Daniel and any other students reading this!
Mattias
Congratulations on passing the exam. i have just passed my ACE exam few hours ago and i would like to say that the difficulty of this exam is far from those associate exams which i have experienced in the past. i wasn’t really confident that i would pass the exam due to some tricky and deep question being asked. i have not sure if they have revised the questions to a deeper level but seems not as simple as what i have heard like knowing how to differentiate or position cloud storage/db options and what i got is really to test you the commands tru really tricky way…. i am surprised that i passed. that’s the feeling i got despite i have done many many practices, studies from many sources…
also i have 1 multi choices questioned and one with diagram..