Feedback on Google ACE exam

Just finished the exam and it said "Passed" – Thanks Mattias!

Been using GCP in prod for a couple of years migrating our systems off prem. My background is Unix/Linux system builder, Java/C/BASH/Go programmer, networks switches firewalls of various brands for a couple of decades, jack of all trades. Have experience of writing cloud functions, writing PubSub subscribers & publishers, Stackdriver, GCE, instance groups, IAP, HTTPS load balancing, GCS and GKE in dev, BigQuery, Cloud SQL. Not used App engine at all!

My motivation to do this course was to force myself to learn the parts of the platform I don’t use & learn more in depth, and with some structure as opposed to reading manuals (the platform and docs seems to change every week). Also to migrate my "legacy" on prem skills into the modern cloud world.

The courses I did were ACG, Linux Academy & Coursera Network specialisation, because I like networking. I also subscribe to the GCP Youtube channel, which has regular best practice, tutorials announcements which help. I found the ACG exam simulator hard, and was glad of that, because I think I underestimated this exam a little because it said "Associate level".

I started using gcloud command line in my day to day job even for tasks that are easier in the web console, as a way to make gcloud second nature.

The main difficulty I found with studying was the breadth of the subject matter, its difficult to know how deep to delve into each topic/resource. Each topic is pretty endless and ever changing. 

The course I found excellent, could do with more App Engine particularly how flex/standard  interact with VPC, shared VPC and service accounts/services perhaps. May be a bit more on regional network load balancers and their backends, couple of questions on that.

Nigel’s k8s course is a work of art – but I’m biased being an English northerner too 😉 

The exam – 30 straight forward questions, 10 or so questions with multiple similar answers that need re-reading especially if English isn’t your first language – double check for the one word difference which seems a bit harsh to me. A couple of questions that didn’t seem to me to have a right answer and gave a bit of a headache. 10 questions that were tough, mainly IAM roles to grant access to various resources (usually logs or storage) using ‘Google best practice’ ie. ‘least privilege’. Basic networking questions, a couple on GKE, was hoping for more GKE and less App engine.

Thanks to the people who posted on this thread which directed my revision.

Also, anyone out there who has like me been in IT for years and is looking to skill up on cloud, your "legacy" skills are all applicable in the new cloud world. These cloud platforms seem to be the new OS.

Cheers.