Passed my Google ACE Exam Today

I just wanted to write a detailed post about the exam and provide my perspective which people might find helpful and share the links that I found useful for my preparation. I will start by saying that lectures from Mattias Anderson are Gold! When I started looking at GCP I had 0 knowledge about the cloud and GCP but by watching the lectures and reading about these things I did gain some understanding. Also the questions Answered by Mattias in the forum are super helpful and guide you in the right direction. I will be posting many more after I take the PCA course and explore that. Thank you Sir. Also Qwiklabs and hands on practice is great. I tried to achieve everything hands on that is being discussed in the lectures. Still I felt I lacked due to inexperience at work (where I do Mobile App development)

Now, for my experience on taking the exam, Out of the 50 questions I marked 27 for Review that I was not 100% sure about. I reviewed them after I completed all questions and tried to eeliminate the choices that seemed wrong. I found that I could eliminate 2 choices easily and 2 choices would make logical sense and will be harder to eliminate. You have to read the questions very carefully about subtle hints that it provides like "Best Practice", "Cheapest Option", "Quickest" etc.

I got a lot of questions abt VPC (not CIDR or subnets) but more related to how instances in different projects can communicate. Also I would highly encourage to understand IAM and how to set up GSuite users. Also Kubernetes is something that you should know pretty well. I had almost 7-8 questions about it and how to troubleshoot issues. Another Area that I did not see a lot of posts about but I saw atleast 4 questions on the exam is SSH into an instance. There were a few questions about App Engine (Traffic splitting, warmup requests etc.)

I read a lot of Google Documentation, but here are the links that I would suggest you read and understand.

https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/service-accounts Understand Service Accounts and access scopes

https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/understanding-roles (Really important to understand App Engine, Big Query, Storage, Compute Instance and Billing Roles here

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/lifecycle (Understand Object |Lifecycle Management and how to use it with GCloud)

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/ (Know about the storage options SSD and PErsistent Disks, also read about Snapshots)

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/export-data-bigquery Understand Billing Data Export

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/php/an-overview-of-app-engine Make sure you create an App Engine App and know about Traffic Splitting and Live Migration

https://cloud.google.com/logging/ Understand stackdriver logging, Audit Logs, Export Options and also know about the Stackdriver Profiler, Debugger and Error Reporting

https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/choosing-load-balancer I found the table and the diagram very helpful on how to decide about the best Load Balancing option

https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/using-vpc Make sure You understand VPC and why it is used

https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/troubleshooting Common troubleshooting for your GKE Clusters

I did not get any question about Kubectl but I found the following very useful for my learning

https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/cheatsheet/

I understand that this is not a comprehensive list but I am sure that questions will come up after you read this. This will be a good list to get you started. Again Thanks ACG, the course was very helpful.

Best of Luck to others who want to take it.

Thank you