about me:
Around 3 years experience in cloud -entirely on AWS. I have 5 AWS certs, including SA pro, but had zero experience on GCP or kubernetes.
My prep started with this course, I did all labs, also watched the attached kubenetes course. In addition to this, I purchased whizlabs practice exams and also skipped through the Linux Academy course for this. Overall my prep was only around 1.5 months as I was targeting within Dec 20 to use the exam voucher provided by Google.
Coming to the course, I can guarantee that this course alone is not sufficient for passing. May be the topics are covered, but you have to either read all documentations, or think about doing a lot of labs with a lot of scenarios. If you have any other cloud experience, try to do something that you do there in GCP. To be honest, the kubernetes course was really dry too. It was really difficult to focus on that.
From my exam today, the below topics need to be furnished in this course:
1) different ways of accessing GCE VMs. I had questions about different ways of SSH/RDP/Reset win password etc (Think about project wide/instance ssh keys)
2) Orginaziations/Folders etc
3) sharing of service accounts within projects
4) sharing of VPCs
5) app engine – i think app engine section is totally missing in this course.
For me, my way of studying was to compare every service with its equivalent with AWS, and understanding how similar or how different they were. In the exam, there were a lot of questions which I did not know the answer, but I just used my AWS knowledge to eliminate things that did not really make sense. But then there are some services which does not have an equivalent AWS service – like bigtable – and it was hard me to get the concept. Even now also Im not confident on the differences between all the database services and when to use them.
Overall, I will rate this as same difficulty as the AWS sysops admin exam.
2 Answers
Hi Ebin – what did you struggle with in this course?
I have heard conflicting answers on how hard it was, I felt it was a little easier than AWS SAA.
Here’s a thread where I passed with only 3.5 days studying:
https://acloud.guru/forums/gcp-certified-associate-cloud-engineer/discussion/-Lw4Vj1EuFTAiH2wYyTD/howipassedgooglecertified
My test was actually very similar to yours. It focused more on vpc, ssh and service accounts which nobody highlighted as important.
I agree that the kubernetes course linked was hard to follow but i found the gke course from berri in acg very helpful.
I took 3 months and read a bunch of documentation but i thought that is the way to do it.
Did you find that aws courses are sufficient here or somewhere else by themselves? I would like to do that 😁. Please let me know.
cannot comment on the current status of AWS associate exams or courses. When I took it in 2017, I used only ACG for training, and used whizlabs practice exams. For pro level, I dont think any single course is enough.
haha I read your post and you says that you spent over 10 hours per day. I spent 30 min to 1 hour at most per day. So overall I spent ~30 hours only on studying. Then I took the AWS associate certs back in 2017, so I am not sure about the level of difficulty of current exams. When I took it I was really confident that I was gonna pass before submitting the exam. That was not the case for sysops or this exam.
Ah ok – Yeah i did spend quite a long time studying per day, I find it quite hard to study if its only in 30 mins to 1 hour intervals, as i find not much goes in. With the sysops I did find that quite hard but this I passed first time, even after going out drinking!