Passed the GCP ACE today!

Hi there folks. I passed my GCP ACE today! With everything still fresh in my mind, I thought I’d share some considerations as you prepare for your exam.

• All my questions had only a single correct option (no multiple selection questions)

• Generally speaking, two of the four answers didn’t make sense even regardless of the context of the question. Read through each choice carefully as you might be able to eliminate some options down even before trying to place it in the context of the question.

• I got a LOT of questions on MIGs and load balancers, especially around health checks and auto scaling. Know your parameter flags here!

• I received several questions asking the various ways in which you’d check to see that a user / resource had the right IAM roles / scopes. Also got several questions around knowing specific roles to use per each service. They were generally easy enough to logic through without memorization, but it wouldn’t hurt to review the main roles of each service.

• I think this was a luck of the draw thing, but I got 4 questions on Cloud Run. I wasn’t really expecting that.

• Several questions on Stackdriver configuration, including best practices for configuring Stackdriver as a unified thing amongst multiple projects

• I didn’t see a ton of questions on either App Engine or GKE. The questions that I did get were pretty vanilla, so while ACG’s deep dive on K8s is great for practical purposes, don’t feel like you have to know K8s inside and out to pass this exam.

• I personally struggled most to understand the use cases between Cloud SQL, Datastore, and Bigtable. (BigQuery seemed clear enough to me.) If you struggle with these concepts too, give them some extra review.

This test was pretty difficult. I have 4 AWS certifications, and I’d say it’s definitely harder than the Solutions Arch – Associate exam. Fortunately, A Cloud Guru provides some great material here! Thanks again, ACG!