How I Passed Google Certified Associate In 3.5 Days

First of all I would like to start by saying that it is much of a better choice to spend much longer revising and really looking in depth with all of the services, however as I already have 4 AWS certifications I was looking at this as more of a challenge than anything; could I really pass the exam in such a short time-frame?

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My original plan was to spend 4 days on this however due to it being near Christmas, I took half a day off to go out drinking (this also is not advised), leaving me with only 3.5 days to actually get this completed.

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I started by going to a coffee shop (with noise cancelling headphones) and started watching all AcloudGuru’s videos, including the Kubernetes Deep Dive. I spent the first two days doing this and re-watching these as these would give me a visual and auditory representation of how to use the services I would be using.

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These two days were quite tedious as I spent over 10 hours each day doing this and wrote notes of the services that I would like to investigate more, the list came to:

• How to set up a GCE instance via CLI and console.

• How to set up a GKE cluster via CLI and console.

• How to set up a GAE instance via CLI and console.

• How to use Stackdriver and install it.

• Go through the Google Pricing Calculator.

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Further to this I made a small list of comparisons between google and AWS with notes on Googles side of this:

https://pasteboard.co/ILfbr5o.png
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Next I decided to note down all the different storage options that were mentioned and more notes on those also:

https://pasteboard.co/ILfcpgL.png

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Then finally all of the other services:
https://pasteboard.co/ILfd262.png

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The next day (3rd day) I spent most of my time actually using the services, so I was deploying all the previously mentioned, this gave me the knowledge of the CLI side of this as that is what I mainly used, rarely touched console however did use it the first time to understand the setup that I was expecting.

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The logging to Stackdriver took some time as when researching it more, I found that there was completely different methodologies for logging, so I created a comparison table on how to handle the logging:

https://pasteboard.co/ILfdk53.png

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Once I had completed that I had a good understanding how to use the environment so spent the rest of that day and the half of the final day going through exam simulator questions.

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I do have to mention here that I didn’t just use AcloudGuru’s, I also used Linux Academy’s which gave me a total different range of questions and glad that I did as it really helped using both of them.

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From the exam results I was only getting about 70-80%, however that did improve when I looked into and noted down the results from the elements failures:

https://pasteboard.co/ILfdCnn.png

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Another part I did have to look into is what was the first to happen out of a range of services and which one was the last to happen – this might be a little vague as the “What happens” section really depends on what selection of answers you have, however it gave me an understanding of what services are likely to start first or last.

https://pasteboard.co/ILfdSIf.png

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Then finally I went through the exam simulators and noting any down that I was getting incorrect and also writing down the answer, from them I would research into why I got those wrong and what tripped me up.

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This ended up with my scores being in the 80-90%, each time I took the simulator questions, I would have liked to spend an extra day or so going over and getting it as close to 100% however I had already set myself a challenge and booked the exam before I had even started.

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On the exam day, I ensured that I booked at 11am as I find that it gives me the best level of energy for the exam, however when I was approaching the test center I gave a 5 minute glance over the exam notes I had made and then put it all away and went to register for the examination, for which I was surprised that there was no whiteboard or markers provided so luckily I did not need to write anything down.

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I completed the exam with over an hour to spare, I did not have to flag any questions, I just took my time and went through each question at a time, once complete it came back saying PASS which was great (Note google does not give you an exam score it is just PASS or FAIL).

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I noted in the exam the following bullet points:

• Subnetting – this I was hoping more of as I love subnetting, however there was only 1 question about VPC’s and one about CIDR ranges.

• Scopes and Service accounts – there was a few questions about this.

• Logging.

• Migrating Project Assets – I had quite a few on this, these usually go into how to move certain assets such as GKE clusters, GAE or GCE into different regions.

• Autoscaling.

• Archival – These questions are usually which class is best to use when you need to access less/more than X amount of days.

• Roles and Permissions – These you need to definitely study.

• Databases – Difference between them and when you would select one over the other (Cloud SQL, CloudSpanner, BigQuery, BigTable, Cloud Datastore).

• When to use CloudDataproc and CloudDataflow.

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Usually I use the following methods for study:

• Visual and Auditory (Watching and Listening to the Videos).

• Linguistic and Kinaesthetic (Making notes and reading them out).

• Logical and Kinaesthetic (Actually performing the actions).

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Hope this helps someone however I would advise creating your own notes, as half of the knowledge retentions is in writing it down and thankyou to Mattias and Nigel Poulton for the training videos.

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Best of Luck,

Lewis