How I cleared GCP - Associate Cloud Engineer Certification

Google Cloud - Associate Cloud Engineer Certification

Google Cloud is my first certification in the Google Cloud. Apart from these I have 2 certification in AWS and 1 in Azure and 1 in terraform. GCP-ACE was in my bucket list for a long time. But finally, I managed to clear it.

I have few items that I would like to share with anyone who is interested in taking up this certification but is not sure where to start to when it is the best time to finally book the exam.

About the exam

Length: 2 hours
Registration fee: $125 (plus tax where applicable). If you bases in Asia region (or India) I have taken this exam at $75 only. Not sure if this applies to any other region.
Languages: English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese
Exam format: 50-60 multiple choice and multiple select questions. In my exam there no MCQ only single select.
Recommended experience: 6 months+ hands-on experience with GCP.

Personal experience

I know all of us have been there and faced this situation -

🤔 Whether this is worth the effort?

🧐 Will this cert will be helpful for me in future?

😏 I am working in Azure/AWS how will GCP be any different?

😎 I am pro in Azure/AWS, I can manage other cloud as well?

😨 What if I fail and money will be wasted?

🥱 I am a procrastinator, I don't feel confident enough to sit in the exam?

Let me tell you something. Its not about whether you have 0 certification or 10+ certification. Its also not about how many of them a person has in his linkedin profile and how many can I hook it my profile. Some of us may be multi-cloud champ and we might feel we are left behind. No, thats all bullshit. I still believe that having practical experience and skills to kill it in the work outweighs certification.

But having certification is not the end. Its not the destination that matters, the journey is what matters that most. Saying so, I mean when you prepare for anything, there will be lot of obstacles, procrastination, laziness, boredom and office works etc. But hanging on it and continue to prepare for it day-after-day, you will eventually gain confident.

Enough of philosphy. Jumping to exact points for the GCP-ACE exam. See, I took almost a month or so to prepare this exam. I knew nothing about GCP except thats its AWS competitor cloud. Nor did I have any experience working with it.

So, I took few courses(will provide the names below)to understand the core concepts like - Networking, Storage, Compute, Security, GKE, IAM and security accounts. Since I am from AWS background, I way to learning was to always compare each services with similar service offering from AWS. In that way, it gave me confident as to what the service does and how is it different from similar services of different type, the GCP has to offer.

Example: For the Database offering, it has :

BigQuery: for Data-warehousing
Bigtable: Wide column DBfor IoT/sensors streaming data
Dataproc: for managed Spark/Hadoop Cluster
Cloud Spanner: SQL DB for transaction processing
Cloud SQL: for SQL data

Now if you already knew what is AWS Redshift- a data warehouse service, you wont have go in detail to read about GCP-BigQuery.

Again, if you know what Cloud pub-sub does, then you know you know about a service called AWS SQS (IYKYK)

And thats the trick, you have to be smart when you do cross cloud ceritfication.

But, that does not mean you pull a cheatsheet from google comparing all the services in AWS/AZURE/GCP.

I know you must have made you way to this below picture by now or sometime earlier. 😜

Trust me , I am not saying you have go the shortcut path nor I am big fan or reading the documentation line-by-line. But if your someone who can do some calculation in mind and be pro-active to grasp what is needed and what can be applied some common sense, you won't face much difficulty.

When I appeared for the exam, I had hard time recalling whether these questions have been there in the test series or dumps that I prepared with. Unfortunately, there was not much questions that clased up with the my preparation material. I had to re-think, re-apply the AWS knowledge in order answer each question.

I had to eliminate the wrong ones to get to 1 correct answer that closedly resembles the given requirement.

Remember, there will be 2 answers matching almost the same and you might be trapped to answer one of them which feels right. Don't do that. Read the question 10 times to see if the answer you are about to lock fits the requirement.

Example: you might be under doubt to select 2 answer

1) .... web-application using cloud run and periodic jobs using cloud run
2) .... web-application using cloud run and periodic jobs using compute engine.

You might think 1) should be correct as it has less overhead compared to 2) in which we have to manage the VM ourselves. But if question says- less overhead costs, then 2) should be better fit here.

Lastly, I would say apply your previous knowledge to mark your answers. Remember 2 hrs is enough, so if you are not confident , mark for review and proceed and visit later. I had put review flag on 35 questions.

Resources I used

Now, the main part which you need. Where did I prepared from and what where my main resources materials. Let me put in the sequence wise:

Courses:

GCP Associate Cloud Engineer - Google Cloud Certification
[course on Udemy from - Ranga Karanam]

This one is must so you understand each section-compute, datbase etc in details. I watched in 1.5x speed and tried hands-on with free-trail account I created for myself. You might be tempted to ignore this part and just continue bing watching. But it will definately put you to sleep and later you will end up scrolling insta reels.

Watch a topic > Practice the same in GCP console> re-watch if doubt/stuck somewhere.

Exam Dumps and Test Series:

I used below 2 resources for sample questions

Previous year questions form ExamTopics - https://www.examtopics.com/exams/google/associate-cloud-engineer/
Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Tests - By Dan Sullivan
Previous year question video- [same as 1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ChFLKnXExU&list=PL_HS7IsXErLYst898lfpO5w3OOmMkaBgX&index=10

Disclaimer: The answers in the ExamTopics are not 100% correct so you might have to check the discussion section to see which is correct. Don't trust 100%.

Summary of points

Don't binge watch tutorial or vides - PRACTICE
Don't trust the dumps, use your judegement
Don't start making notes on paper, its time taking keep your notes resources, links etc in Notion or some online note app.
Be disciplined about your commitment and prepare everyday atleast put 15-20 mins to keep you live.
Use comparision technique to understand a service.

Important points on the exam day

Don't drink to much water and Don't eat too much before the exam. This might cause diziness and cost you lack of focus during the exam. Suitable a time that best suits you and during which you have less distraction from family and friends
Don't panic. Ask if anything required prior to exam. You will have to go through basic screening process and system checks. Do not panic if you are stuck at some where or where it is taking longer than usual time to start the checks. Your exam duration won't be compromised.
Dont' rush. You have 2hrs. Settle down and relax. Make yourself comfortable and tackle each questions with outmost care. Give each questions proper time and mind to understand and then proceed. Don't overthink if you are not able to answer, just mark it for review and proceed and re-visit later.
Lastly, its not the end of the world. Just a certification exam. Even if you fail, there is nothing to worry about. Atleast you tried. Yes, there would be small dent on your pocket but you can re-learn, re-attempt and come back stronger 💪

Resources Links:

Some articles worth reading-

Courses & Practice Papers-

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