This is a list of useful contents to be used while studying to Associate Cloud Engineer certification.
I got the idea to organize content like that from João Vitor Guimarães Medium post.
A great reference to related content should be sathishvj/awesome-gcp-certifications repository listing many useful resources.
I received access to Pluralsight and Qwiklabs for free in a Google Developer Groups promotion, but I didn't use it because I fell I learn better reading. 😬
For whom likes flowcharts, this post has a collection of them.
☑️ Partially studied
✅ Fully studied
- September 5th, 2020 - Spent around 1 hours studying
- August 30th, 2020 - Spent around 2 hours studying
- June 21st, 2020 - Spent around 2 hours studying
- June 13th, 2020 - Spent around 2 hours studying
- May 3rd, 2020 - Spent around 2 hours studying
- April 26th, 2020 - Spent around 3 hours studying
- April 25th, 2020 - Having studied around 40% of the content, took the practice exam and got 11 of the 23 questions right. Proportional, I guess. :)
- April 19th, 2020 - Spent around 4 hours studying
- April 5th, 2020 - Started to study. Spent around 3 hours studying the basic concepts (many of that I already knew)
- Review choose right services for each needs (add one new section)
- Review different storage options
- Review cloud Pub/Sub
- Review load balancing
- Read all commands to remember; list 1, list 2
- Review Cloud Run, App Engine auto-scaling
- Review IAM and permissions (console and command line)
- Review Monitoring
- 1.1 Setting up cloud projects and accounts ✅
- Creating projects
- Assigning users to predefined IAM roles within a project
- Managing users in Cloud Identity (manually and automated)
- Enabling APIs within projects
- Provisioning one or more Stackdriver workspaces
- 1.2 Managing billing configuration ✅
- Creating one or more billing accounts
- Linking projects to a billing account
- Establishing billing budgets and alerts
- Setting up billing exports to estimate daily/monthly charges
- 1.3 Installing and configuring the command line interface (CLI), specifically the Cloud SDK (e.g., setting the default project) ✅
- 2.1 Planning and estimating GCP product use using the Pricing Calculator ✅
- 2.2 Planning and configuring compute resources ✅
- Selecting appropriate compute choices for a given workload (e.g., Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, App Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions)
- Using preemptible VMs and custom machine types as appropriate
- 2.3 Planning and configuring data storage options ✅
- Product choice (e.g., Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Bigtable)
- Choosing storage options (e.g., Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive)
- 2.4 Planning and configuring network resources. ✅
- Differentiating load balancing options
- Identifying resource locations in a network for availability
- Configuring Cloud DNS
- 3.1 Deploying and implementing Compute Engine resources. ✅
- Launching a compute instance using Cloud Console and Cloud SDK (gcloud) (e.g., assign disks, availability policy, SSH keys)
- Creating an autoscaled managed instance group using an instance template
- Generating/uploading a custom SSH key for instances
- Configuring a VM for Stackdriver monitoring and logging
- Assessing compute quotas and requesting increases
- Installing the Stackdriver Agent for monitoring and logging
- 3.2 Deploying and implementing Google Kubernetes Engine resources. ✅
- Deploying a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster
- Deploying a container application to Google Kubernetes Engine using pods
- Configuring Google Kubernetes Engine application monitoring and logging
- 3.3 Deploying and implementing App Engine, Cloud Run, and Cloud Functions resources. ✅
- Deploying an application, updating scaling configuration, versions, and traffic splitting
- Deploying an application that receives Google Cloud events (e.g., Cloud Pub/Sub events, Cloud Storage object change notification events)
- 3.4 Deploying and implementing data solutions. Tasks include:
- Initializing data systems with products (e.g., Cloud SQL, Cloud Datastore, BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Dataproc, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Storage)
- Loading data (e.g., command line upload, API transfer, import/export, load data from Cloud Storage, streaming data to Cloud Pub/Sub)
- 3.5 Deploying and implementing networking resources. Tasks include:
- Creating a VPC with subnets (e.g., custom-mode VPC, shared VPC)
- Launching a Compute Engine instance with custom network configuration (e.g., internal-only IP address, Google private access, static external and private IP address, network tags)
- Creating ingress and egress firewall rules for a VPC (e.g., IP subnets, tags, service accounts)
- Creating a VPN between a Google VPC and an external network using Cloud VPN
- Creating a load balancer to distribute application network traffic to an application (e.g., Global HTTP(S) load balancer, Global SSL Proxy load balancer, Global TCP Proxy load balancer, regional network load balancer, regional internal load balancer)
- 3.6 Deploying a solution using Cloud Marketplace. ✅
- Browsing Cloud Marketplace catalog and viewing solution details
- Deploying a Cloud Marketplace solution
- 3.7 Deploying application infrastructure using Cloud Deployment Manager. Tasks include:
- Developing Deployment Manager templates
- Launching a Deployment Manager template
- 4.1 Managing Compute Engine resources ✅
- Managing a single VM instance (e.g., start, stop, edit configuration, or delete an instance)
- SSH/RDP to the instance
- Attaching a GPU to a new instance and installing CUDA libraries
- Viewing current running VM inventory (instance IDs, details)
- Working with snapshots (e.g., create a snapshot from a VM, view snapshots, delete a snapshot)
- Working with images (e.g., create an image from a VM or a snapshot, view images, delete an image)
- Working with instance groups (e.g., set autoscaling parameters, assign instance template, create an instance template, remove instance group)
- Working with management interfaces (e.g., Cloud Console, Cloud Shell, Cloud SDK)
- 4.2 Managing Google Kubernetes Engine resources. ✅
- Viewing current running cluster inventory (nodes, pods, services)
- Browsing the container image repository and viewing container image details
- Working with node pools (e.g., add, edit, or remove a node pool)
- Working with pods (e.g., add, edit, or remove pods)
- Working with services (e.g., add, edit, or remove a service)
- Working with stateful applications (e.g. persistent volumes, stateful sets)
- Working with management interfaces (e.g., Cloud Console, Cloud Shell, Cloud SDK)
- 4.3 Managing App Engine and Cloud Run resources. ✅
- Adjusting application traffic splitting parameters
- Setting scaling parameters for autoscaling instances
- Working with management interfaces (e.g., Cloud Console, Cloud Shell, Cloud SDK)
- 4.4 Managing storage and database solutions.
- Moving objects between Cloud Storage buckets
- Converting Cloud Storage buckets between storage classes
- Setting object life cycle management policies for Cloud Storage buckets
- Executing queries to retrieve data from data instances (e.g., Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Bigtable)
- Estimating costs of a BigQuery query
- Backing up and restoring data instances (e.g., Cloud SQL, Cloud Datastore)
- Reviewing job status in Cloud Dataproc, Cloud Dataflow, or BigQuery
- Working with management interfaces (e.g., Cloud Console, Cloud Shell, Cloud SDK)
- 4.5 Managing networking resources. Tasks include:
- Adding a subnet to an existing VPC
- Expanding a subnet to have more IP addresses
- Reserving static external or internal IP addresses
- Working with management interfaces (e.g., Cloud Console, Cloud Shell, Cloud SDK)
- 4.6 Monitoring and logging. ✅
- Creating Stackdriver alerts based on resource metrics
- Creating Stackdriver custom metrics
- Configuring log sinks to export logs to external systems (e.g., on-premises or BigQuery)
- Viewing and filtering logs in Stackdriver
- Viewing specific log message details in Stackdriver
- Using cloud diagnostics to research an application issue (e.g., viewing Cloud Trace data, using Cloud Debug to view an application point-in-time)
- Viewing Google Cloud Platform status
- Working with management interfaces (e.g., Cloud Console, Cloud Shell, Cloud SDK)
- 5.1 Managing identity and access management (IAM) ✅
- Viewing IAM role assignments
- Assigning IAM roles to accounts or Google Groups
- Defining custom IAM roles
- 5.2 Managing service accounts ✅
- Managing service accounts with limited privileges
- Assigning a service account to VM instances
- Granting access to a service account in another project
- 5.3 Viewing audit logs for project and managed services ✅
Planning and configuring data storage options: