Ace the Google cloud engineer certification with this prep

The Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer certification can significantly increase the market value of your skills. It's also a good way to fill in your knowledge of the Google ecosystem of tools and capabilities. This is an ideal program for anyone involved in running, managing or building enterprise architecture on the Google ecosystem.

The Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer is a key step on the path toward Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect certification. According to a Global Knowledge survey of top IT certifications, a Google Certified Professional Architect earns an average of $175,761, which is over $25,000 more than the next highest certification. Job listings for Google Cloud certifications have also been growing faster relatively to Azure and AWS. A survey by job listing site Indeed.com found that between 2015 and 2019, the number of job listings for Google Cloud grew by 1,337.05% compared to only 302.47% for Azure and 232.06 for AWS.

Google recommends that candidates have at least six months of experience working on the Google cloud platform. The company has even launched a challenge, offering successful candidates $100 in Google merchandise for those who can pass certification within three months. That almost covers the $125 cost to take the test itself. There is also plenty of free training available from Google directly, along with cloud credits to get started experimenting with projects. The training covers topics such as Google cloud fundamentals, Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, managing cloud resources, configuring a cloud environment and automating infrastructure with Terraform.

The Google cloud engineer certification test can take up to two hours, and covers many topics, including setting up a cloud environment, planning and configuration, deployment, operations, and configuring access and security. Many of the fundamental principles are deploying services on other cloud platforms like AWS and Azure. However, there are some different tradeoffs in how services that support storage, scalability, redundancy, security and analytics are set up and optimized.

Here is a representative sample of the types of question you can expect on the actual exam.