How I passed the GCP Associate engineer exam (03/06/2019)

I Passed the GCP Associate Cloud Engineer exam on Monday 3rd of June at my first attempt.

As the core base of knowledge for passing this exam, I used several resources which I’ll list below.

Coursera :

Architecting with Google Cloud Specialization

Security in Google Cloud Platform Specialization

A Cloud Guru (ACG) :

Link Here: https://acloud.guru/

Introduction to Google Cloud Platform

Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer

Kubernetes Deep Dive (don’t skip this)

Udemy:

Kasey Shah’s exam prep (KS)

Link Here: https://www.udemy.com/share/101ekQBEcdd1pUQnQ=/

In addition to the above, in order to increase practical experience, I completed various applicable codelabs (kubernetes) which can be found here: https://codelabs.developers.google.com/

Upon reflection, (at the time of writing) I found that the resources above provided a good foundation for the exam though I strongly recommend going through the material a number of times.

Both ACG & KS offer practice exams, they don’t pretend to offer questions that you will find in the exam, but going through them helped me identify and focus on areas for further study; I made sure I was getting high scores consistently, by re-reading the google documentation where I had incorrectly answered questions….It felt like groundhog day.

I also used online resources such as Medium. com, Dev.to, and LinkedIn groups as a resource for material related to GCP as a way of studying what people in the trenches are doing in the real world.

I’ve previously shared this (somewhere) but for the sake of completeness, you should definitely connect with David Das Neves on Linkedin who shares material on a daily basis and has put together a list of resources for various GCP exams. Of Course, you should follow Google on Linkedin and subscribe to the various Youtube channels which offer instructional webinars as well as the talks from the various conferences, its all good stuff. 🙂

I also found some great Kubernetes and Helm resources from a chap called Jon B Campos on Medium.com, also on medium, stuff from a Devops team called ReactiveOps. There is a plethora of material out there which can help formulate a picture of the what people are doing in the real world, of which I’ve just scraped the tip of the iceberg…….

When performing Coursera labs I first completed them using the console, did the odd few via CLI and subsequently various google codelabs via the command line.

Things I wish I had done:

Spent more time going through building/completing scenarios using the command line; those which I completed proved to be invaluable.

Read (rather than skimmed) the SRE book;

https://landing.google.com/sre/books/

I found the exam to be tricky with some challenging questions, though have to say I quite enjoyed the experience.

Hope this helps someone out there. Good luck with your exams!