Learn exactly how I earned my Google Cloud Certification

Gaining certification is just as important as completing a degree. The main reason you need to be certified from Google is to prove companies that you are no less an expert from professionals. The certification is merely a stamp of approval of skills.

With companies in the market actively aiming to make more out of the Cloud Platform, there has been an increase in the demand for Google Cloud Training & certifications. There are a wide variety of resources and tools available globally that will help you to achieve these.

In this article, I will discuss all the resources and tools I have utilized to earn my Google Cloud Certification online.

What to know before taking the Google Cloud certification?

There are a few prerequisites to undertaking the certification. The Google Cloud certification is vast and pretty straightforward, but it requires the right balance of theory and practical skills.

Google Cloud exams are well known for being extensive and completely comprehensive, so it is not possible to estimate the significance of training beforehand. It is quite surprising that Google does not provide a rating or a score. Rather, it gives a Pass/fail result which does not help much to explore the reason you need to work on.

Google Cloud certifications are mainly segmented into three different types of courses.

• Google Cloud Architect
• Associate Cloud engineer
• Data Engineer

I decided to undertake all three courses in a span of a few weeks, and this is not as easy as it seems to be. It demands a commitment to the subject and a deep understanding. In this article, I will help you out to understand the basic concepts you need to know beforehand, and you can ace these certifications.

COURSE 1: Google Cloud Architect

During the first week, I decided to begin with Google Cloud Architect Training. Here’s how it turned out:

I began by selecting the course for Google cloud certification. This exam merely checks your ability to provide a solution to the Cloud. The exam covers 80% conceptual and theoretical skills and 20% of practical skills.

Things you must know beforehand:

• Components of cloud and how they operate
• Managed services accessible on Google Cloud

Some of the important concepts covered were:

• Storage options that are available on Cloud
• Deployment and rollback in App Engine
• Kubernetes and docker files
• Deployment manager tool
• Monitoring
• Filtering
• Debugging
• Tracing
• Generating monitoring alerts
• Safety and security with IAM roles
• Firewall settings

COURSE 2: Associate Cloud Engineer

The next course was that of the Associate Cloud Engineer. This certification tests your ability to deploy solutions on Google Cloud.

You must have prerequisite knowledge about how Cloud works and strong practical familiarity with it. Along with that, you must also know how to:

• Write GCloud commands
• Copy roles from projects
• Setting up a custom Cloud solution environment
• Planning a cloud solution
• Configuring a cloud solution
• Custom Roles
• Designing for security and compliance measures
• Working knowledge of GCloud SDK and GCloud console
• IAM Roles
• App Engine IAM rolls
• Billing IAM roles
• Service accounts

Basic knowledge of computing, Kubernetes and App Engine is also required as you will learn how to create disk images and snapshots, compute VM from image files, share images with other projects, default scope of computing VM.

Kubernetes requires you to create and deploy a docker image on a cluster, create a cluster and monitoring storage.

Networking and setting up of VPC, custom mode VPC and automatic subnet VPS is also required.

COURSE 3: Data Engineer

During my next course of Google Cloud Data Engineer Training, I studied mainly about Big Data solutions on GCP. The course is specifically designed to assess your ability to design a big data solution on the Google Cloud Platform.

You will be required to know basic big data products and their storage, display, and processing concepts.

BigQuery is a theory that you must understand completely for his project as you can ace almost 40% of this exam with it.

As I mentioned earlier, the GCP and Google Cloud Certification are vast and deep. It seems pretty straightforward but requires a lot of attention and knowledge. During my entire course of preparation, I divided each course into separate modules and sections so I could understand better.

Here are a few tips to ace your exam in Google cloud certification:

• Have prior knowledge of how Google Cloud Storage works.
• Understand the IAM roles
• Identify resources on the Google Cloud platform
• Basics of Stack driver
• Go through previous practice exam questions.

Additionally, if you possibly understand and comprehend the most basic concepts from the Google Cloud documentation, then you already have 70% of what it requires to clear a Google Cloud Certification. The remaining 30 percent is based on your hard work, practice and your state of mind during the exam. So, take the examination with a relaxed and peaceful state of mind.

What you can do after taking the exam:

As discussed previously, Google displays your results as Pass or Fail. In case you don’t pass, you’re allowed to retake the exam again in a span of 14 days. On the off chance that you are not able to clear the second attempt, you have to wait for 60 days before the next attempt at the exam.

If you successfully clear and pass the exam, you will receive an online Certificate and certification badge that you can display on all your social media handles and more importantly, LinkedIn where you can be selected for job
prospects.

All the best!