How to Prepare for and Pass the 2021 Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Certification

Google’s Associate Cloud Engineer Certification is geared towards data engineers with approximately 6 months of experience with GCP services. It tests your ability to deploy cloud solutions, configure IAM permissions and security, handle networking, and more. From my experience, this exam tests breadth far more than depth: you should have a good understanding of GCP’s services as well as overarching technical concepts (like networking and security), but you don’t need to know all the nitty-gritty details. 

How I prepared 

I prepared for the course primarily by taking Udemy’s “Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Certification” course. The course covers the topics Google recommends preparing for, and includes a deep dive into Kubernetes. All-in-all, I found it helpful. The concepts were well explained (though at times I felt like I was being spoken to like a Kindergartener) and included hands-on labs to really hammer in the learning.

Throughout the course, whenever I felt like I was missing something, I’d read through the documentation of whatever service I was learning about. This was super helpful, though intimidating due the sheer amount of information. I recommend focusing less on the ‘How to’ documentation, and more on the product details. 

By far the most helpful study technique was taking practice tests. I spent my last week or two only taking and reviewing practice tests (provided by Udemy, Google, and ‘gcp-examquestions.com’), which quickly revealed which concepts I needed to spend more time on. Taking practice tests was also very helpful because, up until this point, I was overwhelmed with how much information I had to understand. 

The questions revealed that I was spending too much time getting caught up in the details of each topic. For example, I was trying to memorize all the commands to spin up a GKE cluster, manage the nodes, and troubleshoot problems. That was going far too deep. In reality, I just needed to know how GKE operates theoretically. Then, I could answer the questions by applying logic. As another example, rather than memorizing the exact commands, I needed to know that I should use ‘gcloud’ commands when deploying and managing GKE clusters, but if I needed to do some internal work on the cluster itself, like managing nodes, I should use ‘kubectl’ commands. 

Eventually I ran out of practice tests, so then I continued to take the same tests over and over again, but used this as an opportunity to explain to myself why a particular answer was correct or not.

The test 

The test was 50 questions, with a time limit of two hours. That sounds like plenty of time, but I used every last second. My technique, handed down from the wisdom of Matt Housley and Joe Reis, was as follows: 

1. Go through each question, answer using the elimination method. If you’re stuck, take your best guess, flag the question, and move on.

2. Once each question has been answered, start from the beginning and work through all flagged questions. Repeat this step a few times. 

3. With any remaining time, look through all questions again. 

This method worked well, but I geared towards flagging questions anytime I was the slightest bit unsure. When I started to review my flagged questions, I was a little defeated to see that I had flagged half the test.

The questions were definitely hard, but luckily on par with the practice questions I had prepared with. Maybe I’m a little crazy, but I began to notice a pattern: the questions were either testing my knowledge of a GCP service, but from a high-level, or they were testing my understanding of overarching technical concepts. So I had to either answer the question using memorized facts about GCP services (i.e. when to use GKE vs. App Engine vs. GCE), or by applying logic. Most questions even included impossible answers, for example: a possible answer was a GCP service that does exist, or an IAM role that doesn’t exist.

Since you can’t eat or drink anything during the exam, make sure to hydrate before. But not too much - you also can’t get up at any time during the exam..

Reflections

It's always easy to look back and wish you had done things differently. Unfortunately, I can’t go back in time. Fortunately, I passed. Hopefully, you’re reading this before beginning your cert journey. If I could reverse the clock, there are three things I would do differently:

1. I would focus less on the details, and more on the concepts. A great example of this is networking. Networking is one of the more difficult concepts for me to wrap my head around (Ignorance is bliss and I’d like to believe it’s just magic). Rather than learning about networking from a broader perspective (i.e. subnets, CIDR blocks, firewall rules), I took all of those concepts and tried to become a network engineer expert with GCP services. The test didn’t ask me to decode IP addresses, but it did test my understanding of GCP services specific to networking (i.e. when to use Cloud Router). In hindsight, I would have been better off keeping it simple.

2. I would spend more time reading through the specific service documentation. I know I said I did this, and I did, but not enough. There were details about services that I missed (i.e. knowing how App Engine differs from App Engine Flex). The course did go over each service in a good amount of detail, but it is also a few years old and some things have changed.

3. The Udemy course was comprehensive and provided a good framework for what to learn. But it was not enough, and I learned that a little too late. If I could go back, I would have made the course only 50% of my learning (rather than 75%), and spend more time on documentation and practice tests. 

Final thoughts

I would recommend this test for anyone who is just getting started with their certification journey, and/or for someone who is relatively new to the GCP space (but still has some hands-on experience). Dedicate a good few weeks to studying, take lots of practice tests, and leave no piece documentation unread. The test was challenging, but very rewarding!