Just passed the Google Associate Cloud Engineer exam!

Over the moon to have passed this first time. Although it didn’t go without a tonne of work for 3/4 months beforehand. I’ve done a blog post here (https://sarahcit.wordpress.com/2020/02/23/becoming-a-certified-google-cloud-engineer/) but here’s a summary of how I found it and some tips from the areas I was most tested on, I hope it helps:

• IAM – read Googles documentation on IAM best practices, including how to handle service accounts/keys. Remember the concept of least privilege and custom roles. 

• VPCs – understand CIDR notation and how to work out how many IPs, how to set firewall rules, expand IP ranges

• Stackdriver monitoring/logging – know how to set up your workspace (if multiple projects, too) and the differences between logging, monitoring, debug, trace etc.

• Command line – know your gcloud commands, gsutil and others such as cloud bigtable (cbt). I read into the documentation and also tried commands until they stuck in my head, and I used the ‘–help’ a lot. Know the overall command syntax order and you should be fine to work it out if you have a question with two similar answers with only one word difference (which I had!)

• App engine/compute engine. Know the constraints (i.e. only one app per project in App engine) and the different options available – App engine flex/standard and the different compute engine machine types, and most cost effective option for changing one element (i.e. adding more RAM)

My main piece of advice is to use a few different resources to gain an overall better understanding, use Googles free trial ($300 credit) to go through tutorials/labs and dig into the UI and command line. Do as many practice exams as you can! 

I found that the Udemy Google Associate Cloud Engineer course (which Mattias did), along with the official study guide from Dan Sullivan (which comes with an online test bank) plus reading through Googles online documentation for any weakness I found really helped. Do the practice exams to find the areas you need to work on and then go back and re-do them until you’re confident answering them.

Good luck!! 🙂