Postmortem: Passing the Google Cloud Associate Engineer Exam — My Experience & Tips

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This article is going to be a ‘postmortem’ of my experience after passing the Google Cloud ACE exam and having time to reflect, things I would change regarding my preparation, and then some tips & thoughts to help others prepare and hopefully pass as well 🥳. (P.s — A link to my profile on the certified registry)

Disclaimer: All suggestions are purely my own and were used by me during my exam preparation. No one has paid me to promote a specific course(s) &/or product(s).

Overall Impression

I did a lot of research and general googling regarding people’s impressions towards the exam (just like maybe why you have come across this article!), I think the common consensus is that overall the ACE exam is quite tough… and I would agree.
Some of the questions on the exam threw me off-guard, some have a lot of noise to pad the question out and others are very direct.
It was indeed an interesting experience for me, as someone who has not sat an exam since my university days, going back & ‘hitting up the books’ (admittedly I didn’t hit up many books, more online resources but the analogy remains) felt at times a bit daunting.
I think the scope and broadness of the content available to be questioned via the exam guide might seem scary at first, BUT with dedicated time and hands-on experience using all the different services, it slowly all starts to bed in. Remember that it’s not a race and slowly gaining knowledge over time is in my opinion better than trying to cram everything into weeks or months of hyperactive learning.
Now moving on, let’s look at some of my own downfalls and items I would now change in hindsight.

Changing my Preparation — In Hindsight

• Time — Dedicating the right amount of time to your preparation is critical, for me I actually started well but then went a bit AWOL. Other things came up, general life gets in the way, and then getting back motivated to study was… hard. As this is my first foray into the cloud I would agree that 6+ months of GCP experience is a recommended amount of time to set up a solid foundation. But my biggest regret was not doing a study guide!
• Practice services together — In my day-to-day job, I spend most of my time interacting and using GCP to varying levels. It’s a privilege that probably a lot of people looking to take the exam may not have. I was confident in a lot of the products and services and had powered through a lot of content in the final week before the exam took place however most of the time I was looking at services one by one. I would spin up a VM, I would create a load balancer. Only in a few labs did I do this as part of a bigger deployment and piece them together. Understanding the flow is key but with hindsight, I would say to myself to not overlook connectivity, networking, and service flow.
• Reading the docs… Properly — I know, I know you’re probably thinking ‘duh, isn’t this obvious!?’, it is but let me be clear on this point. The Google Cloud docs are some of the best I have seen, they provide rich insights into each product, the underlying API, and relevant IAM roles. For me however the devil really is in the detail, and from this perspective making sure you deep dive into the docs will inform the edge case reasoning and understanding of whether to use X over Y OR why Z is the better approach under XY circumstances. Now, I understand that there’s a TON of information there, and I’m not saying you need to remember every edge case and minor detail about every GCP product but going back into the docs myself, I keep finding these ‘ah-ha’ moments of new information which in hindsight I probably should have known before.

Learning resources

Finally to wrap things up, here’s a list of handy links (with additional comments) on resources I used to help me prepare for the exam, I’m going to rate these out of 10 in terms of what I found most useful;

• Dan Sullivan Official Study Guide — It’s an OK book overall that highlights all of the core items on the exam guide. However, it’s slightly outdated now (GCP is a fast-moving platform after all!) and does not include things like Archive class storage, Cloud Marketplace is still referred to as Launcher, Cloud Run is non-existent and the practice exams although handy are far too simple & direct. It does include however a handy test bank when you register the book and it's nice using that to re-affirm your knowledge. 6/10
• Understand IAM roles (docs) — Documentation page for all IAM roles, be sure to give them all a look but focus on the ones relevant to that exam guide topics. 8/10
• Cloud cheat sheet — An important part is knowing the CLI and using the various gcloud commands available. Know the pattern and some of the most common components/entities and you are well on your way. 7/10

gcloud + release level (optional) + component + entity + operation + positional args + flags

• Google Cloud Youtube Channel — A must-have for everyone! Loads of great content, helpful videos on product overviews, deep dives, and always nice to have something visual instead of all this reading! 10/10
• Google Cloud Developer Cheat Sheet — A lovely, simple reference diagram with all the product documentation links presented for you. Again a nice way to re-affirm knowledge and find out new things! 9/10
• Cloud Guru ACE Certification Series — Another nice overview of the GCP ACE material, specifically this includes a lengthy section on Kubernetes which I found useful. Admittedly after the Kubernetes content, the rest of the series felt a bit rushed going over the content but its main advantage is the practice tests. Going from the Dan Sullivan questions to these was like chalk and cheese. They are a more accurate representation of the type of questions you are going to get. 7/10
• Exam Guide — Obvious one right? But seriously, refer back to this if you have any doubt on where you should be focusing your learning. Try to point out your own shortfalls and brush up on those and then frequently return to again ask whether you understand X point fully now? Rinse and repeat the process until you feel confident. 8/10

Final thoughts

I just wanted to leave some final thoughts and miscellaneous points regarding the final prep before taking the exam; if like me you currently are not able to do any of these exams in a real test center and have to do this remotely, remember to have a quiet room/area to sit for the exam, clean up your area of all items and importantly the minimum resolution of any webcam you use must be 720p.
Two hours I felt was plenty of time to finish all 50 questions and remember that you can mark questions for review to come back to later (don't stay stuck on one question!). If I remember correctly, I finished the exam in just over an hour then spent a few minutes going over some of my marked for review questions before submitting.

Finally, I hope that you find my experience helpful and thanks for taking your time to read my article, I appreciate the support 😁!