Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer
Validates ability to deploy and secure applications and infrastructure, monitor operations, and manage enterprise solutions on Google Cloud. Covers setting up cloud environments, planning and configuring solutions, deploying and implementing resources, ensuring operations, and configuring access and security. 50-60 questions in 2 hours. Recommended 6+ months hands-on experience; 3-year validity.
Exam domains
- Deploying and implementing a cloud solution25%
Deploying and implementing Compute Engine resources - launching a compute instance using gcloud and Console; creating an instance from a custom snapshot or image; creating a VM with persistent SSD or SSD persistent disk; creating an autoscaled managed instance group; generating/uploading custom SSH keys for compute instances; configuring a VM for Stackdriver monitoring and logging; assessing compute quotas and requesting increases; installing the Cloud Logging and Monitoring Agents. Deploying and implementing Google Kubernetes Engine resources - deploying a Kubernetes cluster (Standard, Autopilot); using kubectl; deploying a container application via Pods, Deployments, Services, Ingress; configuring Kubernetes autoscaling options (cluster autoscaler, HPA); working with Workload Identity. Deploying and implementing Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, App Engine. Deploying and implementing data solutions - initialize databases; load data; configure Cloud SQL replicas. Deploying and implementing networking resources - VPC subnets, firewall rules, Cloud Router, Cloud NAT, Cloud Interconnect.
- Setting up a cloud solution environment20%
Setting up cloud projects and accounts - create projects, assign users to predefined IAM roles within a project, manage users in Cloud Identity (manually and automated), enable APIs within projects, provision and set up products in Google Cloud's operations suite. Manage billing configuration - create one or more billing accounts, link projects to a billing account, establish billing budgets and alerts, set up billing exports to estimate daily/monthly charges, separate billing projects to track for spend. Install and configure the Google Cloud command line interface (gcloud) - SDK installation, configure auto-completion, configure profiles for active project/region/zone, manage interactive configuration (gcloud init, gcloud config, gcloud auth login).
Sources
Questions are grounded in 100 references from official and authoritative materials.