I took my Associate Cloud Engineering exam recently and I passed on my first try. I prepared for three months and before that, I have never seen how Google Cloud Platform looks like. Even, my academic background is in Civil and Environmental Engineering, not Electrical or Computer Engineering. Now I am very excited that it’s over and I passed the test. I want to share my own experience, preparation, study materials, and some tips here. I hope it will help some of the readers, whoever is interested in taking the test soon.
The scariest part for me was the fact that there is no information on the passing marks. Nobody knew how many questions I needed to get right to pass the test. Even when I took the test, I just got to know if I passed or failed, not even the score or any other information. As the exam is over, I know you now that you don’t have to be an expert in Google Cloud Platform to pass the Associate Cloud Engineering exam. You just need good preparation and basic understanding. I am trying to share whatever information I have on the test after taking the test.
Preparation
I prepared for three months as I mentioned earlier. I took one specialization from Coursera named ‘Cloud Engineering with GCP Professional Certificate’. This specialization has five courses. They are constantly upgrading this specialization. The courses I got were:
1. Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure
2. Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Foundation
3. Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Core Services
4. Elastic Cloud Infrastructure: Scaling and Automation
5. Preparing for the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Exam
You can audit those courses for free. You can audit them as many times as you want. I did not pay a penny for those courses. I read about other people’s experiences and looks like they prepare with several other courses. But these five courses were enough for me to pass. Besides, there are a lot of practice exercises available in Quicklab. It is recommended to practice those as well. I didn’t do any extra Quicklab exercises. Because this specialization in Coursera comes with Quicklab exercises. The first course is an overview of the infrastructure. It was overwhelming. But later courses are on specific topics and concept based. With each concept, there is a Quicklab exercise. So, you learn a topic and then practice the Quicklab exercise after that. I thought that was enough practice. After finishing all the courses and quizzes, I started doing some practice tests. Practice tests helped me a lot. There are some practice tests available in Udemy. But I choose Whizlabs. I got quite a lot of similar types of questions. It was really helpful. I got some questions on different topics that I didn’t learn from the above-mentioned courses or the Whizlabs. I anyway answered them on my very little understanding of them. I am sure I got some questions wrong. But still, I passed. It is clear that you don’t have to get all the questions right to pass but this is not clear how many questions you are allowed to get wrong. The good news is, there is no grading like A, B, C. You either pass or fail.
Exam Strategy
The next good news is, there is no real work to do in Google Cloud Platform. It’s all about multiple-choice questions. There were fifty multiple-choice questions in the exam. The total time was two hours. But one of my coworkers who took several tests before told me, I should finish the test by an hour and thirty minutes. That means at least half an hour before the exam end time. Finishing early might help you pass even if you get some answers wrong. But I am not sure about that. I finished in one hour and forty minutes. Some questions are so big, it takes a few minutes to only read the question. There were lots of questions where 2/3 questions seem right. Please don’t stay stuck in one question for too long. You can keep moving and will be able to come back to those few questions at the end.
Conclusion
That’s all I could remember to share. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I will answer if I know about it. Though I am not m expert in Google Cloud Platform. I can only talk about the Associate Cloud Engineering exam.
#cloud #DataScience #GCP #CloudEngineering
