Google Cloud Platform Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) Guide

ACE Certification Aug 2020

Google has their roots in IT from ages, now they are moving towards capturing to cloud market as well with their strong infrastructure already in place.

You might be certified or using AWS cloud already and planning to be part of multi cloud environment expert as more customers are adapting to build the infrastructure in multi-cloud architecture.

So, let me share the basic difference between AWS cloud and GCP Cloud.

Comparison between AWS Solutions Architect and GCP Associate Cloud Engineer.

• AWS has vast list of services and continuously keep on building new services periodically for their customers. It helps AWS customers to be less worried for managing services instead to be more focused on their application. On other hand, but GCP has strategy to have selected services and go deep in every services to provide best use of services.
• There are many differences in base infrastructure configuration of AWS and GCP, for example VPCs are regional in AWS and they are Global in GCP.
• In certification examination AWS focuses majorly on the operations of the task so be more cautious about the what are the options available while navigating in AWS console. In comparison to GCP exam which are more inclined towards CLI.
• AWS associate exam is easy as compared to GCP associate exam.

About GCP Associate exam

• Exam is available in English, Spanish, Indonesian & Japanese.
• Duration of exam is 2 hours.
• Cost of exam is $125, if your organization is partnered with Google then might get Voucher to appear in exam.
• There will be 50 questions in exam.
• Google does not follow practice to share marks of the exam. Your result will be either Pass or Fail.
• You can take exam at online-proctored exam OR onsite-proctored exam.

Prerequisites for GCP ACE Exam

• According to Google there is no hard prerequisites to appear in exam but recommended to have atleast 6 months of hands-on experience exam.
• I will suggest you do hands-on practice to prepare for exam by creating your account with 300 USD free credits for an year.
• Having knowledge of any other public cloud will be on positive side for you.
• Read the official exam guide before preparing to check if it is aligning with your interest and goal.

Preparing for GCP ACE

In this section I will summarize the topics which will help you to prepare more easily for certification.

Google examine your understanding on the GCP cloud for the IAM permissions, Compute services, Storage option, Networking services, Billing management, Database, Projects management, etc.

IAM

• Details about IAM permissions and service accounts, understanding use case for cross account.
• Difference between Primitive, predefined and custom roles.
• Understand the hierarchy structure for GCP permissions management.
• What are the best practices (IAM, Users groups, least privilege).
• Knowledge of Billing permissions , Big query and access approval permissions.
• Best practices such as “Always use groups”.
• Understand editor, owner & viewer roles. As well as understand permission of role/browse.
• Information about how the projects are managed under organization and permissions.

Compute

• Selection of different services between Compute Engine, Cloud Run, App Engine in terms of fast, type of application & cost as well.
• Understand how Node pools can be managed for Google Kubernetes engine Cluster.
• Usage of on-demand VMs and Preemtible VMs. When it can be used to save cost and when cannot be used.
• SSH Key management including of use your custom key to login to VMs.
• Snapshot scheduler and how it can be used for disks.
• Understand the difference between Cloud data flow, Cloud Data proc and the use cases.
• Understand how and when you can use Google Cloud Pricing dashboard to estimate the cost.
• App engine traffic control split scenarios or migrating from one version to another.
• How to build Compute engine using AMI across projects.
• Automation component by using metadata, startup and shutdown scripts.

Storage

• Types of cloud storage and minimum number of days to store object.
• gsutil, bq tool
• Have a better understanding for cloud launched aka Marketplace and in which cases it is very useful.
• When can memory cache can be used and understand the location of cache and its relationship with virtual machine performance.
• Various types of supported databases along with its supported transaction types.

Network

• Understand the Virtual private network (global) and subnets (regional)
• Difference between Interconnect & Peering.
• Expansion of subnets is possible or not, if yes how and limitations.?
• Subnets communication in same network in different region OR same region different network.
• Load Balancer types and usage with respect to internal and external traffic.
• Understand the firewall rules with usage of service accounts and IP ranges.
• Usage of routers in GCP regional and global.
• Understanding of Cloud DNS zones, records
• Understanding knowledge of network tags , difference between labels and network tags.

Billing

• Permissions needed for the user to manage the billing account or to add the projects with billing account.
• Movement of projects under same billing account from the multiple billing accounts.
• Eligibility for Invoice billing, central billing for multiple projects.

Adhoc Points

• Check which APIs are enabled by default when you create a project and what’s needs to be enabled manually.
• GCP CLI — gcloud config attributes set, unset etc.
• Knowledge of Pricing calculator including how it can be used to get estimated cost.
• Stack driver features and project management, and how to monitor AWS / on-prem resources from stack driver.

Suggested resources and courses

• Official Book — Official Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide
• A Cloud guru course by Mattias Andersson
• Mega thread in A Cloud Guru platform — here

Sample Questions and Practice Exam

Google have their official practice exam which will give you feel for the main exam, (there will be no questions in main exam from practice exam) . Please follow link. [Suggestion — Not give exam multiple times as there is chance you will remember question and response as these are not frequently changed.]

I will suggest you go through practice exam before 3 days for your real exam and see what are the topics you need to brush up again and re-visit before siting in exam.

Please make sure you know every task how it can done via both channel i.e., Console or CLI commands.

Below are the few sample questions:

1. One web application running in XYZ project and one big query dataset is present in ABC project. Your web application want to access big-query to read the table. Which permission will you assign in both projects at what level.

2. You having multiple team using separate projects you want to set budget for projects how it can done.

3. You need to deploy the container based application in best way with very low cost which service will you choose (GKE Cluster, App Engine , Cloud Run, Compute Engine)

4. Your multiple teams want to launch similar machines in the multiple projects in very fast and efficient way. What you should do?

For any help you can reach out to me via comment will try to revert as soon as possible.

All the best, Happy Learning. :)