I thought of writing my experience so it will help others who are aspiring to take this google certification. First and foremost thing is that never depend just on the practice questions that is available online. Hands on experience is very important because google had created the question pattern is such a way that you may get confused with the options if you don’t have hands on experience. You won’t find the similar set of questions asked in the exam anywhere online. So spend more time for hands on lab and make sure you are thorough with each and every command and its use cases.

The Associate Cloud Engineer exam checks mainly below expertise:

• Set up a cloud solution environment
• Plan and configure a cloud solution
• Deploy and implement a cloud solution
• Ensure the successful operation of a cloud solution
• Configure access and security

Exam Details:

• Number of Questions: 50
• Exam Duration: 120 min (2 Hrs)
• Exam Format: Multiple choice and Multiple select.
• Registration Fee: $125 USD
• Exam Language: English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German

Preparation for the exam:

I work on google cloud but still I have gone through the course in linux academy which I find very useful and helped me passing this certification exam. Linuxacademy have a very good course for google cloud associate exam and also there is a practice exam at the end of linux academy course which is very useful. I will say that you might be ready if you get more than 95 % in that practice test. Google also have some practice test https://cloud.google.com/certification/practice-exam/cloud-engineer

I have also gone through the practice questions in braincert and whizlabs which I feel helped me in increasing my confidence.

You should have a proper understanding of the below topics, in order to pass the Google Cloud Certified Associate Engineer exam.

BILLING

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets

IAM

Lot of questions from IAM, least privilege principle, filter roles, billing roles,compute engine roles,storage account roles etc

https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/service-accounts

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/access/service-accounts#computeenginedefaultserviceaccount

https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/understanding-roles

https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/understanding-roles#primitive_roles

https://cloud.google.com/iam/reference/rest/v1/Policy

APPENGINE

Split traffic between diff versions, Deploy applications using CLI, region, zone.

https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/app/deploy

https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/deployment-manager/deployments/list

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/php/an-overview-of-app-engine#limits

COMPUTE ENGINE

how to set idle max nodes, autoscaling, gcloud commands, provisioning VM instances, deployment manager

https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/config/set

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/startupscript

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/storing-retrieving-metadata

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/scheduled-snapshots

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instance-groups/#autohealing

VPC

Configure firewall, expand IP rance, subnet, CIDR

https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/using-vpc

https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/firewalls

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/ip-addresses/

https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/

https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/choosing-load-balancer

https://cloud.google.com/router/docs/

PROJECTS

creating projects, linking projects with billing account, create and manage projects using cli, describe existing configurations and activate configurations

CLOUD STORAGE

Diff storage levels, commands like gsutil, automatic deletion of objects, lifecycle policies

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/storage-classes

KUBERNETES ENGINE

Deployment process of docker file, activating configuration and describe configuration, kubectl commands, autoscaling, clusternodes and services, understanding container registry

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/replicaset/

https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/statefulset

https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/pod

https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/daemonset

https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/container/clusters/create

BIGDATA

dataproc,pub/sub,data analytics

STACKDRIVER

logging and monitoring metrics, export to bigquery

I wish good luck to everyone who is preparing for this certification.