Passed Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Exam on 30th June 2019

I have passed the Google cloud Associate Cloud engineer exam on 30th June 2019 and got an email from Google with the certification on the next day.

When I have started with Google Cloud, I was not looking to get certified. Just wanted to explore Google’s cloud offering. After some time, without any direction I was just reading whatever I could find on the subject without any direction. 

Then decided to go for the ACE certification.  

Preparation Sources:

1. Coursera

• All the 5 required coursera courses (GCP fundamentals, Essential & Elastic cloud infrastructure), K8S engine course and  Security and Networking specialization courses.

2. A Cloud guru

• Introduction courses and GCP ACE certification course and practise exam. Mattias’s explanation of data flow way of thinking was very helpful. This way of thinking has helped me even when I was taking courses in other platforms.

3. Linux Academy 

• Introduction courses and GCP ACE certification course. This certification course I took just few days before my exam and it was a refreshment. The practice exam also helpful. I took this practice 4 times and confident about the preparation when I get consistently above 90%.

4. Pluralsight

• Several courses on GCP. Nothing specific to exam objective but for the overall understanding of Google cloud. Most of the courses I have taken are from Janani Ravi and her explanation was good.

5. Qwiklabs

• Lot of hands-on-labs. https://rajanand.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CLOUD/pages/65913/

6. Official Google Cloud ACE study guide by Dan Sullivan

• I was having only two days before exam and gone through almost all the chapters and the review questions & answers at the end of each chapter. I found this study guide was very helpful as a last day preparation.

7. Google practice exam

• I took this Google’s practice exam twice initially when I have started preparation. It was helpful and got a understanding of exam question pattern / structure.

Exam Topic:

1. Compute Engine

2. App Engine

3. Kubernetes Engine

4. Cloud Storage ( lifecycle management, storage classes )

5. gsutil

6. gcloud (configurations. etc))

7. IAM ( roles, etc)

8. Monitoring & Logging

9. VPC (firewalls, router,)

10. Audit / Activity logs