Road to Google Associate Cloud Engineer 2020 Certification — Introduction

4 min readDec 18, 2020

2 weeks ago I obtained my certificate as Google Associate Cloud Engineer after 4–5 months of training.

With this first article, I would like to open a series of posts where I will share the resources I’ve used to train (video courses, blog posts, tests, etc.) and some hints and suggestions that can help anyone who wants to try to get his/her own certification.

Probably I won’t be able to cover all the possible topics and tips that might be used to accelerate your journey but I’m sure that you will find many useful tools to make your preparation easier and smoother.

The Certification

Google provide a good start to understand what to expect from this certification: https://cloud.google.com/certification/cloud-engineer

Visiting https://cloud.google.com/certification/guides/cloud-engineer you can have a precise idea of what you will need to know to pass the test and the knowledge areas that will be covered by it.

What you need to do: watch, read, test, practice and … write

Being ready for your exam required for me all these steps. They don’t need to be done in the exact order as mentioned in the title but I think you should not neglect any of them. You can do them in parallel and repeat the cycle regularly (you learn through watching and reading, you practice, you test, you write and start again)

Watch

The videos help a lot and you can find high quality courses that cover the whole program for your test. Personally I’ve followed the “Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer 2020” on the ACloudGuru website plus the “Kubernetes Deep Dive” that help to cover the Kubernetes part which is very important. This training include also hands-on sessions that can be done in the Playground sandboxes provided by ACloudGuru.

Other platform where you can find good alternatives are Coursera and Udemy

Read and Practice

Videos are good but not enough. You need to integrate them with reading (I did that mainly on the official Google Cloud Documentation) and with usage of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) itself where you should put in practice what you have learnt and discover even more. If you miss ideas or you don’t know what to try, you can refer to the Qwiklabs website where you will find some step-by step labs. Take advantage of the 300$ that GCP offers to the new customers to evaluate their platform.

Test

You have also to measure yourself and test. You can find exam dumps (normally 50 questions each one) to check your knowledge level. Once you have finished it, you can review your score and the answers and understand your weakness. Personally I’ve found Udemy a good sources of tests:

my preferred one is https://www.udemy.com/course/gcp-ace-practice-tests-lates. Several questions I’ve found here were similar to those in my exam and it is the best in terms of explanation (clearness and completeness) of the answers.

Other two resources:

You can also check what Google propose as test example:

https://cloud.google.com/certification/sample-questions/cloud-engineer

Be aware that sometimes you will find similar questions in the different packs. Don’t hesitate to contact the creator of the tests if you have any doubt about the questions you will find or you catch any errors.

Also the ACloudGuru video training include a final quiz to measure your knowledge.

Write

Every time I finished a test, I reviewed the answers and I wrote notes in a Word document especially when I made a mistake or when I saw that the topic was quite present in the different questions. At the end, I’ve built a sort of guide that I could read to refresh the important things (in respect to the certification tests) of all the arguments.

I read the whole doc (around 50 pages) the day before the exam to feel more comfortable and more sure.

This document is now becoming the base of this series of articles

Conclusion

We have seen so far an high level overview of some resources you can prepare to be ready to pass the certification test. It’s very high level and personal but it can be a good starting point for the learning path.

With the next post, “Road to Google Associate Cloud Engineer 2020 Certification — GCloud SDK and the Command Line interface”, we’ll start to become more practical and get the first suggestions strictly related to the questions you might find in your exam.