How I prepared for GCP Professional Certificate Test

original blog link

Intro

Cloud environment had exponential growth over the course (AWS didn't have RDS when I started) and I wanted to get a firm graps on the subject before venturing into new job. During covid-19 pandemic, I have racked up 4 professional cloud certificates(2 AWS, 2 GCP). I am proud of my achievement. Being certified is rewarding experience, but the knowledge and exprience I gained was more rewarding. If you are interested preparing and taking the test will be great first step, if you are already experienced, this will harden your knowledge in every aspect.

Where to start

If you do not know where to start, I recommend you to start with coursera. You can get first week free and google provides 50% off on first month. (refer to last section for the link)

Coursera

Cloud Engineering with Google Cloud

Cloud Architecture with Google Cloud

Data Engineering with Google Cloud

Qwiklab

Getting hands on is essential you make your knowledge tangible by actually working on the product. Google offers 30 day free subscriptions. I think the quest badge they offer is great example of gamification done right way. Learnig through qwiklab was really fun process for me. You can synthesize your knowledge as you get hands on with what you have learned through texts and slides.

Badges

Jinwook B. | Qwiklabs

If you don't have much time you should at least go through following quests.

• For Cloud Architect

  Cloud Architecture: Design, Implement, and Manage | Qwiklabs

• For Data Engineering

  Data Engineering | Qwiklabs

Practice exams

Once you have firm knowledge it's time for practice exams. I used following courses and it helped me get a good sense how test questions will be formed and what kind of answers will be presented. They don't cover all the topics, but you can definately figure out what you are missing.

Dig deeper into each subject

By this time you are already an expert on several topics and can dive deeper into each topics. You know what you are looking for. These resource will help you get there.

gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words

Google Cloud for AWS Professionals

sathishvj/awesome-gcp-certifications

Taking exam

I won't go into details on how to schedule and make payment. Due to COVID-19, Google offers remote proctored exam for almost all the tests. It was really convenient for me to just take exam at my home. Of course it might better for some people if your house is not as quiet or secure place for taking exam.

Couple things I want to note

• You can change your test time as long as it's 24 hours prior to the exam time. (they will charge you if you change time within 24hours
• Prepare for goverment photo ID (in English) - passport is gauranteed
• Have a good internet connection, it took me 30 min to start exam because my wifi was choppy. I had to go through ethernet and hotspot to get stable connection. It was exhausting process and by the time I start the test, I was already beat.
• Solve easier ones first. 120 min is enough time for 50 questions. Skip or mark for later if you are any doubt or don't under stand and comeback later.
• I will add more if I can think about

Topics you should know

Architect

• Case study
  • 20% of the exam was Scenario-based - Case Studies (Mountkirk, Dress4Win and TerramEarth). They cover this on the official website and also on coursera
• Administratives
  • IAM
    • role
    • policy, effective policy
    • hierarchy
    • binding
    • service account
  • Billing
  • Audit log
  • free quota
• Compute
  • difference between GCE, GKE, App engine, cloud Function
  • app engine runtime for standard and flexible
  • Basic Kubernetes concept
    • pod, services, ingress, etc
• Storage
  • persistent disks
  • filestore
• Stackdriver
• Network
  • VPC, subnet, firewall
  • Cloud DNS, VPN, Router
  • Difference between Dedicated, partner interconnect
  • Types of Loadbalancers
  • Direct Peering vs Carrier Peering
• Deployment
• Database type by scale insurance, distribution, replica consistency, multi-primary, transacrtions, joins and complex queries, latency, serverless
  • Storage transfer services vs transfer appliance vs gsutil

• Know which resources are global, regional, zonal services

  Global, regional, and zonal resources | Compute Engine Documentation

• ETC

  • SRE
    • SLI, SLO, SLA
  • Opex, capex, TCO

Data Engineer

• Dataflow
  • pardo, transform, pCollection, pipeline
  • Windowing
    • session, fixed, sliding, global
  • deduplication
• Bigquery
  • BQML
  • Billing
  • Permission
  • query optimization
  • Responsive, predictive cache
  • Partition
• Dataproc
  • cluster resize, modification
  • HDFS vs Cloudstorage
  • storage connectors
• Dataprep
  • recipe
• ML Engine

• Storage

  Must know storage limit, processing limit and NoOP or unmanaged service

  • datastore
  • cloud spanner
    • key design
  • cloud sql
  • bigtable
    • bigtable key design
    • performance optimization
  • bigquery

• Basic ML knowledge

  • Overfitting/underfitting
  • False positive, False Negative
  • Regression, Classification, Clustering
  • Supervised, unsupervised learning
  • Recall, Precision, Accuracy
  • Regularization
  • AUC

• AutoML

• AppEngine

• Cloud Composer

• pubsub

  • retention
  • push,pull

Offer for Coursera and Qwiklab

Google Cloud Training

Final Word

• Don't just memorize to get correct answer, do enjoy the process of research. Knowledge is power. If you have questions and curious about something dig deeper into the product and make it yours.
• Qwiklab rules!
• Good luck!