Just thought of sharing my experience as I passed GCP Professional Cloud Architect(PCA) and Associate Cloud Engineer(ACE) exam recently.
1. Attended Coursera official courses recommended by Google.
2. I also took 1 udemy courses which I got free because of discount running, I watched that in fast forward mode so it works as a revision for me and few more practice questions I got.
3. Lots of Qwiklabs and try out things on GCP, it’s very important to be familiar with CLI and console and qwiklabs is rescue for us. Labs in coursera courses really gives confident and familiarity with platform.
4. Practice Exams from Google — must try and analyze it carefully your weak point and work on it.
5. Read case studies and try to think as much as scenarios related to those case studies
6. Took practice set from Udemy for PCA.
7. Read Official Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide by Dan Sullivan, it helps me in setting fundamental understanding in structured way and really helpful for both PCA and ACE exam, end moment revision can be done quickly and lot of practice questions are close to real exam questions. To buy Official PCA guide and Official ACE guide you can use these link which gives you PDF at very low cost.
8. Understand Kubernetes in depth take separate course for Kubernetes.
9. Main topics to focus — Which Database, Storage to use in which scenario, Migration strategies, Storage strategies, Load balancer types, Pub/Sub, GKE these are the most asked topics
10. For PCA all questions are scenario based and all options may be the possible solution, but your job is to choose the best.
11. For ACE questions are scenario based but small scenarios, not essay type which you find in PCA so be prepare for reading and understanding lot because your mind may have got tired in halfway.
12. For ACE I recommend to use CLI and Qwiklabs as much as possible because question comes with commands in options.
13. Important tip instead of trying to think correct answer try to think best answer.
14. If anybody wants Qwiklabs credit then connect with me on my personal email id- neeraj.mh99@gmail.com, I have some spare credits which I can give you.
My certification link — https://googlecloudcertified.credential.net/?name=neeraj%20maheshwari
Hi Could i check with you which one you have passed first and said ACE first means you have covered pretty much. I am really interested to know what you did in preparation for PCA as in did you cover any "differential stuff" based on the the base you used for ACE? asking this because the differential subject in coursera between the ACE and PCA is the design topic. of course you need to cover the rest which i really appreciate your help to share specfiically for PCA only. forgot to mention i just passed my ACE and now i am aiming to also get certified in PCA.
I took ACE first 80% of stuff is same but PCA is having some essay type question which really exhaust your brain, I took these practice set from Udemy as mentioned in point 6 from where you get some similar questions