I passed GCP ACE exam few weeks ago, was happy to get it done. This certification had been 1.5 years in the making.
I have a strong interest in cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes and I saw a gap in the team that I was at last year, the classical dev and ops gaps - I was interested to be the person to fill that gap. I had a support from my then manager to invest time into GCP and this certification - which I was very thankful for.
However last year was a whirlwind – COVID hits and everything went crazy, from not having much to do in quarter 1 (after teams restructure) and then crazy busy quater 2 to 4. And I just couldn’t keep the momentum going for study.
Thankfully this year, I have transitioned to a platform engineer role (also embedded devops) - which means majority of my time is spent on infrastructure in GCP. This has helped a lot with my study for the certs. And furthermore some of the things from the study has immediately helped me on my day to day job for example the handy Activities tab that shows changes to IAM roles - I wouldn’t know this weren’t for the exam.
Resources
For this exam, I used these resources:
Official Google Cloud Certified ACE Study Guide
Quite outdated honestly, especially the storage (GCS) chapter. I would say it’s nice but not a must have resource. The book comes with questions bank and exam simulation which is quite useful. It’s also nice to read a book rather for a change - and not having to look at your monitor all the time.
A Cloud Guru / Linux Academy / Pluralsight
They are all the same company now - the course that I did was by Mattias Andersson. This was a really useful course and essential for learning and understanding - definitely recommended. If you just want to pass the exam - I reckon you could get by doing to Tutorial Dojo exams below.
Tutorial Dojo
The practice exams from Tutorial Dojo were excellent although some questions were eerily similar to the ones that I encountered in the exam (which is a bit concerning).
I have utilised Tutorial Dojo cheatsheets as well to help me prepare.
Docs
The best practices guides from GCP are well written - so I recommend reading them few times, especially this Best practices for enterprise organizations
Tips
Expect questions on the main GCP offerings:
- GCE
- GCS - storage classes, scenario on which storage class is suited for the purpose.
- GKE - not many Kubernetes questions and the questions are basic Kubernetes like deployment.
- Logging and monitoring - some of the questions were quite difficult for me
- BigQuery
- Networking
Conclusion
The exam was actually not that hard and I think I was way over-prepared for it. AWS Solution Architect exam was harder (as expected as ACE is associate level).
I would love to get Kubernetes (CKAD) certification next.