I took my Google Associate Cloud Exam (ACE) on 1st December at NTUC Learning Hub and managed to pass on my first try. Overall, I started to pick up this on June 2021 via the online learning platform
In this post, I will be sharing the tips, things you should be focusing on and hopefully can help you better prepare for your Associate Cloud Exam and get certified.
Contents
What is the Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam?
The Associate Cloud Engineer Exam (ACE) is from Google one of the popular certification cloud platform exams in the current market. It is designed to assess your understanding & knowledge of Google Cloud Platform’s services, tools, and capabilities to fulfill the needs of an entry-level engineer.
These are the topics that will be covered under Google ACE
- IAM, Billing Accounts- understanding different types of roles, service accounts, user groups, etc with Google Best Practices
- Different databases Types – Cloud Spanner, Cloud SQL, Bigtable etc
- Logging like using Stackdriver
- Storage Types – Regional, Multi-Regional, Coldline, Nearline, most importantly when to use it for different scenarios
- Networking – includes VPC, IP address, Firewall Rules
- App Engine, Kubernetes, Compute Engines, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions
Why I took This Exam & Why Should You Take It Too?
The main reason why I took this is due to my boss listed in my performance management key target for personal growth development to get certified in GCP. Hahaha. Actually, that’s not really the main reason why I should pick up and take the exam.
As Google is considered one of the leading cloud platform providers like AWS, Azure, etc, it will be beneficial for me to have the knowledge and understanding of various different cloud providers, especially when working with the SRE team in my organization.
Furthermore, we do have websites and other apps running and moving on the GCP, it will be helpful for me & my business user if I have a better understanding.
How to Prepare For The Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Exam?
Basically, I started this new learning journey around June 2021 and it took me about 6 months.
A Cloud Guru for Google Associate Cloud Engineer
I started off with Acloudguru, one of the leading training providers for the different cloud platforms. Since the company I work at already has a corporate subscription to ACloudGuru.
Even though it is online training but it is well well covered and suitable for beginners without any experience. The trainer was able to deliver the course very well and I have no problem understanding during the course. The course is well structured, well updated and they have a course called Kubernetes Deep Dive which is quite fully covered for beginners like myself. Kubernetes will be also one of the key topics that will be covered in the exam.
Most importantly, they have lab exercises for each different topic for you to have hands-on practice on the GCP.
Other Online Courses & Resources To Prepare Google Cloud Associate Engineer
Besides AcloudGuru, you may want to take a look at other learning resources as well,
Coursera – https://www.coursera.org/learn/preparing-cloud-associate-cloud-engineer-exam
Qwiklabs – https://www.qwiklabs.com/
Udemy – There are plenty of Google ACE courses, you can simply do a search over in Udemy. Or you can use the link here- https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?src=ukw&q=google+associate+cloud+engineer
Another useful resource that I also would like to share will be where he consolidates all different people learning experiences & tips to get Google Ace Certified in GitHub- https://github.com/sathishvj/awesome-gcp-certifications/blob/master/associate-cloud-engineer.md
Also during my free time, you may want to take a look at this Youtube Channel below, Cloud Advocate as well with plenty useful information about Google Cloud.
Lastly, you may want to check this out in other Reddit communities to see the discussion related to Google Cloud here.
About ACE Exam
The exam costs USD $150 and you can register through WebAccessors by Kryterion. The registration process is very straightforward. There will be 50 multiple choice questions and you will need to complete them within 2 hours.
You can read more about the exam requirement and guide at the Google official site here.
Tips And Tricks To Help You Pass The GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Exam
Here are some of the tips and hopefully can able to help you ease the pressure and better preparation for your certification exam.
- The questions and the multiple choices can be very tricky. Read it carefully especially with the words they used.
- You are able to mark those questions that you are uncertain about and review again once you complete the rest of the questions.
- Another way that I use to choose the correct answer will be to eliminate and filter the wrong choices first. To make your life easier.
- Make sure you fully understand Google Best Practices especially for IAM and questions also focus on the easiest and/or cheapest cost to configuration and implementation.
- You may not be an expert on gcloud command but you need to know and understand some of its basic commands
- Do attempt all the 50 questions.
- Recommended to sign up for the free tier to experience some hands-on
After The Exam – FAQs
Where can I check whether I pass the exam?
After you complete the exam in the exam center, there will be no result shown. You can check your Google Associate Cloud Engineer result at the Webassessor website.
Go to My Assessments on the top menu after you login to your account. You should see your result under Completed Exam.
How long will I become a Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer certified?
According to Web Assessors, it will takes 7 – 10 working days for Google to do a review for the final confirmation. You will be notified by email confirmation.
In my case, it took about 3 working days to receive the email confirmation from Google Cloud. You can click on the Pass hyperlink and you will see something similar below:
Final Thoughts
I believe taking Google Associate Cloud Engineer will be a good learning experience and definitely will help your career development.
Hope all these personal experiences, resources & tips given are able to help you with the preparation of your Google ACE certification.
Do comments below to share your experience or questions related to Google ACE too!
