Passed GCP ACE Exam: Sharing my experience/tips and thanking the ACG Community!!!

Hello ACG community members, I was able to pass my Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer exam today!!!

Firstly, I would like to thank Mattias Andersson for laying down the fabric for this exam. Secondly, I would like to thank Nigel Poulton for adding cherry on cake with Kubernetes course (it’s a big must to pass the exam).

My Background

I have got 15 years of experience in Data/Analytics space and has been working with Cloud for last 5 years (AWS: 4 years, GCP: 1 year). Though I was familiar with many of the GCP services and resources, but was lacking depth and hands-on. My main objective to appear for this exam was to take a deep-dive and understand the nuts-and-bolts of Google Cloud and gear up for my next exam as well …. yes …. Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect!

How I prepared?

To start with I did a Crash Course on Google Cloud Platform, this was kind of a move trailer, which helped me get a helicopter view of all the GCP services.

Followed by Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer 2020! This is a wonderful course, just apt for start preparing for the certification exam. What I like about this course is how the instructor, helped us thinking in terms of "Mental Models". Also, every chapter in this course has great links to google docs to take a deep dive (it’s must to go thru in detail to be confident in the exam). There are few areas that you need to cover as an addendum – Kubernetes, Cloud Run, Cloud Run with Anthos , VPC advanced concepts (links mentioned below)

• Kubernetes Deep Dive by Nigel Poulton

• Introduction to Serverless on Google Cloud by Joseph Lowery

• GCP Network Engineer – Part-1

• GCP best practices for enterprise organizations – Almost 50% of the questions in certification exam will ask you to recommend solution/answer based of Google’s recommendations

• GCP Comics – Yea!!! to some fun to your learning, go thru the GCP Comics, they are fun way to get your concepts right if you are bored of reading Google Docs and watching videos.

• gcloud Cheat sheet/gsutil commands – Make sure you cover common gsuil commands, gcloud commands for creating/managing Compute Instances.

• GCP Flowcharts

• Helping other ACG community members – This is very important from learning perspective. I am glad that I was able to help many of community member taking ACE certification course, this has not only helped them but indeed helped me to better understand the concepts. Pushed me to read more and do some hands-on.

All the very best to the fellow learners. Big Thank you to ACG community!!!