Are you preparing for Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer exam? Many questions would be hovering into your mind like what will be the difficulty level of the exam? On which GCP services should I spend more time? and so on.

Don’t worry! I also had these questions in my mind while preparing for my Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification exam. I got over these questions and finally passed the certification exam. Yes, I’m a Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer now! 

Review N Prep is dedicated to providing you the high-quality and up-to-date content for your certification preparation. For this, the team keeps on tracking the exam format and important topics by giving different certification exams.

As per the experience, we’ll prepare the exam-oriented online course and practice tests for you to pass the Google Cloud Associate Engineer certification exam in the first attempt. Here, I’ll share my experience and review on the Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer certification exam. Let’s first begin with the basic introduction to the Google Associate Cloud Engineer exam.

Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Exam

Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer exam is intended for the Google Cloud Engineers who are expertise to deploy applications, monitor operations, and manage enterprise solutions. Associate Cloud Engineers can use Google Cloud Console and the command line interface to perform various tasks to maintain one or more deployed solutions on the Google Cloud platform.

The Associate Cloud Engineer exam checks one’s expertise to:

  • Set up a cloud solution environment
  • Plan and configure a cloud solution
  • Deploy and implement a cloud solution
  • Ensure the successful operation of a cloud solution
  • Configure access and security

Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam Details

Here is a quick insight into the basic exam details such as the number of questions, duration of the exam, registration fee, exam format etc.
  • Number of Questions: 50
  • Exam Duration: 120 min (2 Hrs)
  • Exam Format: Multiple choice and Multiple select.
  • Exam Language: English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German

Preparation for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam

To begin with everyone has the same questions about the preparation of this exam – what should I study, and what are the important topics? But before sharing the important topics for the preparation of Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer exam, I’d like to answer a few questions that may be hovering into your mind.

How many hours did I spend on the exam preparation?

So, I’m a working professional with 13 years of IT experience and couldn’t spend endless hours on this preparation. So, as per my schedule, I decided to give 2-3 hours every day for 2 months for the exam preparation. You can decide as per your schedule and your prior knowledge. If you have worked in IT before, IMHO, 2 months should be more than enough.

Which resources did I use to prepare for the exam?

Review N Prep, are focused to make our practice tests aligned with the Google Cloud Platform study guide and resources. For this, I used most of the official preparation resources as listed below:

What are the Important Topics for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam Preparation?

It is very important to prepare yourself with the important topics to clear the exam in the first attempt. So, as per my experience, here I enlist the important topics, you should have a proper understanding of, in order to pass the Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer exam.

  • IAM
    • Too many questions on IAM roles (Least privilege principle). For example, testing user knowledge on billing account roles, storage access roles, compute engine role, etc. 
    • How to list and describe the roles using CLI
    • How to filter the roles and members using GCP console
  •  App Engine
    • How to deploy applications on App Engine using CLI.
    • Use cases on App Engine Versions functionality
    • How to split the traffic between multiple versions in the App Engine. 
  • VPC (Networking)
    • How to configure firewalls and use cases
    • Shared VPC
    • VPC peering vs VPN vs Interconnect 
    • Types of load balancers and use cases
  • Projects
    • How to create projects
    • Linking projects with the billing accounts
    • How to list and describe the existing configurations
    • How to create and manage projects via CLI
  • Billing Accounts
    • Required roes to create and manage the billing accounts 
    • Understanding the relation between Billing accounts & Projects & Organizations
  • Compute Engine
    • The understanding of market place uses cases (Ex: If the user wants to deploy functional software packages without having to manually configure the software or Virtual machine instances)
    • Auto-scaling types (Selecting best scaling type based on the given scenario)
    • When to use External IP address (Static external vs Ephemeral external IP)
    • Importance of metadata and labels
    • High availability (Spreading the resources across the Global vs Regional)
    • Understanding Managed and Unmanaged instance groups.
  • Cloud Storage (Object-based)
    • When to use different storage classes available in GCP (Ex: Multi-regional vs Regional vs Nearline vs Coldline)
    • Changing or conversion of storage classes. (Ex: Multi-regional to Nearline, Multi-regional to Coldline, etc)
    • Automatic deletion of objects and Objects transfer between the different storage classes using lifecycle policies
  • Kubernetes Engine
    • The deployment process of docker file
    • How to create a docker file and understanding of container registry
    • Autoscaling in Kubernetes
    • Working of cluster nodes and services
  • Databases
    • Relational databases: SQL vs Spanner
    • When to use BigQuery and Cloud Bigtable
  • Bigdata Tools
    • Difference between Dataproc vs Dataperp
    • Questions based on Pub/Sub use cases and integration with other services
    • Data Analytics tools use cases
  • Image-based Questions: Got 2 Questions
    • Provided the sample company cloud architecture diagram with blanks and asked to fill the blanks with suitable GCP services as per requirement demand 
  • Stackdriver
    • Importance of Stackdriver in the Google cloud and how it works
    • Creating and configuring the workspaces
    • How to add projects form different GCP accounts to single Stackdriver account via GCP console

An important tip for the GCP exam is the process of elimination. For each multiple-choice question if you aren’t sure of the answer try to eliminate as many wrong answers as possible before making the final guess. The analysis is more important!

Once you are prepared, it’s time to introspect yourself and identify your strong and weak areas.

For now, you can try Google Cloud Engineer Practice Exam but we’ll soon launch an online course and practice tests for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer exam. We’ve created a Google Data Engineer Free Test with 50 practice questions; you can also try that to check your readiness for the exam.

If you are not able to score well in the practice exams, put extra time on your weak areas and make yourself confident. That’s it, guys. You are ready for the exam.