Notes/Guides from my GCP Professional Cloud Engineer exam
Having very good experience in various stages of the software development process, I could say that, this particular certification is purely a developer and DevOps focus exam. If you have software development experience (it can be any programming language) and other related skills eg (SQL, caching, etc.) you can consider that, you are few steps ahead for the exam (It will help you around 25% to 30%). Let’s have a look into important topics for exams without spending time on other stuff.
- Kubernetes: It was strange that in this particular exam, there are so many questions from Kubernetes around 25% to 30% of questions are from Kubernetes. I request everyone to go through one of the best courses in Udemy for Kubernetes.
Udemy Link: https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-application-developer/
- Don’t forget to learn another related tech along with Kubernetes eg. Istio, Knative, Prometheus, etc.
Istio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zDrLvpfCK4
- Relation between Kubernetes service account and google cloud service account (workload identity)
https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/workload-identity - Cloud Build: This is one of the main topics that should be considered for the exam which includes (creating a docker image, push to a container registry, working with workspace, etc.)
https://cloud.google.com/build/docs/overview - Stack Driver: This is another most important topics under the operations section including
- Export application logs to cloud logging, create logs sink. https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/export/configure_export_v2
- Create custom matric using logs and their components (eg counter matrices) & alerting. https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/logs-based-metrics
- Clear understanding of various services and use cases within Stack Driver (eg. logging vs monitoring vs trace vs debugging vs Error reporting vs profiler etc.) - IAM & Security: This topic is forever for every exam including,
- Concept of least privileges.
- Service accounts, dynamic service account rotation (terraform vault) - Databases & Storage: One of the important topics for this exam including
- Different between relational and non-relational databases and it’s the use case.
- Best practice of defining primary keys in Big Table, cloud spanner, etc. and should know the possible problem if you poorly designed primary key (eg. slowness issue)
- Firestore in native mode vs Firestore in datastore mode.
- Lifecycle of objects in the bucket, signed URL, etc. - Data warehouse: including data processing services including
- Use cases of Big Query, the syntax of SQL query, etc.
- Should know publisher and subscriber model in cloud Pubsub. - IAC(Infrastructure As a Code): including deployment manager and terraform.
- Should know the advantages of IAC.
- Deployment manager vs Terraform. - Security and Networking: including Google cloud private access, Firewall rules, various load balancer use cases, etc.
- Deployment Strategies:
- Should know the various use cases/advantages/disadvantages of various deployment methods eg. blue-green, canary deployment, rolling deployment, etc.
https://searchitoperations.techtarget.com/answer/When-to-use-canary-vs-blue-green-vs-rolling-deployment - Various development tools:
- Cloud Shell (it’s use cases)
- Cloud code plugin in vscode and its advantages.
The courses that I followed while preparing
Honestly, I didn’t follow any online course like Linux academy or Coursera for this exam and also didn’t found any course which includes the latest changes in the exam guide. As per my experience working experience and learning from previous certification experience is sufficient for me to crack this exam. Official documentation of various services (don’t forget to read concepts section under documentation)
Verification Link:
https://www.credential.net/95a182a9-b37a-43cf-ab72-db865c09e44e
Other Certifications:
credential.net/profile/narayansharma349/wallet
Other Certifications Guides:
Associate Cloud Engineer:
https://medium.com/@narayansharma91/how-i-was-able-to-clear-my-google-cloud-engineer-exam-c8553835fbb0
Professional Cloud Architect: https://medium.com/@narayansharma91/important-topics-which-need-to-be-gear-up-in-order-to-passed-google-cloud-architect-certification-2cea4e3f3534
Professional Security Engineer:
https://medium.com/@narayansharma91/important-topics-to-passed-google-cloud-professional-cloud-security-engineer-certification-8f2dfcf9ff44
Professional Data Engineer:
https://medium.com/@narayansharma91/experiences-from-my-google-cloud-professional-data-engineer-exam-5b9a5106d31e
Would you like to connect with me to share, discuss any concerns, need any help? Connect with me on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/narayansharma91/
