Considering your alternatives on the subject of Google Cloud certification (GCP) paths? This submission will communicate approximately the numerous GCP cloud certifications, what every cert covers, what it is able to suggest for your career, and the way you may set (and achieve) your personal private goals. We`ll begin with a few primary not unusual place questions around certifications after which dig into every cert one with the aid of using one. Ready? Let`s dive in!
What do Google Cloud certifications mean?
Google Cloud certification is some of the strongest certifications on the market. However, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) certification and Microsoft Azure certification, Google Cloud certification is not a magical golden ticket to guarantee success in your cloud carrier. However, if you want to use Google Cloud Platform (GCP) effectively in your role, these Google Cloud certification certifications can help. If you are wise.
How much experience do you need to get Google Cloud certified?
At the highest level, all Google certifications have a purpose. That is, according to Google, “verify your expertise and show your skills.” Google expects that interest in certification will begin after all skills have been mastered. But the vast majority of people probably won’t pass the exam just because they’re not ready-even those who have been using the platform for years! These certifications are far broader, deeper, and more diverse than most people’s actual experience. Therefore, people (and assuming you are someone including you) usually use certificates as a guide to learning the skills they lack because of their own background. The gap is pretty small, as some people start with a lot of great experiences. However, most people have a lot to learn in order to be fully competent to pass the exam and obtain a certificate. It doesn’t matter what Google intended. In my opinion, that is really the main value of certification.
What are the different Google Cloud certification roles?
As Google embarks on creating each credential, it takes a lot of work to perform job task analysis to discover and catalog important things that affect people in these different real-life roles. was.
roles such as cloud engineer, data engineer, DevOps engineer, network engineer, security engineer, machine learning engineer – of course, many engineers. But cloud developers too (although I’m not sure why they don’t just call it a cloud software engineer). Also, the coveted and especially lucrative cloud salary of cloud architects.
What are the different GCP certification levels?
Google buckets certifications into three levels:
Foundational
Currently, only digital cloud readers are the foundation. This certification level “verifies a broad knowledge of cloud concepts and Google Cloud products, services, tools, features, benefits, and use cases.” This certification benefits from learning the basics of understanding the cloud. Ideal for individuals with a technical role who can receive.
Associate
Cloud Engineer certificates are considered “Associate” certificates. This is an ideal starting point for getting a professional certification and covers “basic skills for deploying, monitoring and managing projects on Google Cloud”.
Professional
Each professional level certification corresponds to a particular advanced role. While the scope of all Google certifications is fairly wide, all professional certifications are much deeper than associate certifications and are deeply involved in both technology and the business realities surrounding those roles. Cloud Guru also offers some GCP learning paths that are perfect for beginners and anyone looking to take their skills to the next level:
- Architect Learning Path
- Data and Machine Learning Path
- DevOps Learning Path
- Developer Learning Path
- Security Learning Path
What do I need to know to get Google Cloud certified?
Before we move on, I would like to emphasize another important thing about Google’s cloud certification. It also requires non-Google knowledge to be certified by Google.
What I mean is that it’s likely that you’ll be asked an exam question that has nothing to do with Google. And even those that do so will include things other than Google. Remember that all certifications are based on actual job task analysis. And in the real world, there is no 100% Google-specific job. To be successful in any position, you need to be able to use relevant common industry technologies and best practices. You also need to be able to use existing technology, whether for migration or hybrid setup.
What are the different Google Cloud certifications?
So let`s take a look at each cert and hopefully give you a better sense of it and how each might be valuable to you.
Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE)
First, let’s take a look at ACE (Associate Cloud Engineer Certification). You should definitely start here, as it is arguably Google’s most important certification. (I’ll explain why soon.)
What does an Associate Cloud Engineer do?
Google defines Associate Cloud Engineers as “people who provide applications, oversee the operations of multiple projects, maintain enterprise solutions, and ensure they meet their targeted performance metrics.” This person has experience with public clouds and on-premises solutions. You can use the Google Cloud Console and command-line interface to perform common platform-based tasks and serve one or more deployed solutions that use Google-managed or self-managed services on Google Cloud.
How to pass the Associate Cloud Engineer certification
ACE aims to enable you to use the Google Cloud Platform through both the web user interface and the command line.
This certificate focuses on GCP’s core fundamentals. It contains all the important components of the system (data processing, storage, transmission).
- Processing- When it comes to how the system does things, it’s like a Compute Engine for running and managing as many virtual machines as you need. It also uses the Kubernetes Engine to run and manage its own cluster. In addition, App Engine has the advantage of having a light continuous operational load.
- Remember– Of course, the system also needs to remember the data. This means that you can properly handle Google Cloud Storage for objects and persistent disks for VM block storage. However, this also includes the use of CloudSQL to hand over database management to Google. Or you can destroy big data by having BigQuery save and process all terabytes, petabytes, or exabytes. A video of a cat? meow. (Disclaimer: We do not recommend saving cat videos to BigQuery. Please process these cat videos properly and save them to cloud storage.)
- Moving — But what does it mean for cat videos to stay on Google’s servers? You need to move them to where you and your billions of users around the world want to see them! Therefore, you need to understand VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) and how VPC connects each part of the system globally and makes it safe for users.
- Security– Speaking of Google Cloud security, this also applies very much to how you set up and manage your system internally. You need to understand how projects and IAM (Identity and Access Management) can help you organize everything and make it accessible to the right people.
- Management- And, of course, you also need to manage using cloud monitoring, cloud alerts, and other operational features originally provided by Stackdriver to ensure that all parts of your system are functioning properly. You also need to monitor and analyze your spending to manage costs over time using billing alerts and exports.
Huh! But everything I’ve just listed is still scratching the surface! ACE is a really round foundation! It can also be used for all professional certifications, not just for using GCP. All-Pro certificates are very difficult, so it’s important to have a solid foundation before getting a certificate.
Why is Google’s Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) certification the most important GCP certification?
For this reason, we are confident that Google’s ACE certification is the most important GCP certification. This is a combination of the following two. Brings people the ability to use GCP in their daily lives. This certification is achievable. In other words, you can learn the way to this certification. And I’m not just saying that as a hypothesis. Because I have taught this to tens of thousands of learners from different backgrounds. Of course, some people are easier than others, but you can do it with care. If they can do it, you can do it too!
Professional Cloud Architect (PCA)
The first professional role we cover is Professional Cloud Architect Google Cloud Certification. This is because it is the most common, highly sought after, and a great way to provide context for all other certificates and roles.
What does a Professional Cloud Architect do?
Everything we’re talking about, building with GCP, is a software system. Manage the flow of some data to serve a specific purpose. And the architecture of the system is to optimize the system across a set of trade-offs in order to add value while reducing costs and risks. Do you want to get better with it? Then this Professional Cloud Architect certificate is perfect for you. As Google says, this individual can “design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business goals.”
How to pass the Professional Cloud Architect certification?
Google’s Professional CloudArchitect exam aims to determine if you can actually become a successful CloudArchitect. And that’s a lot different from determining if you just understand GCP. This is not primarily a tool test. It’s a role test. And it has a big impact. For one thing, this certification makes it more valuable. If you achieve that, you will know what you are actually doing. I think it’s a good indicator of whether you’re a good cloud architect on Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure.
You don’t really know these tools, but you do understand how to use the cloud in a professional environment. Weigh the trade-offs, manage GCP costs, keep them safe, and make them maintainable. yadda, yadda, yadda. The thinking process applies everywhere, but of course, Google wants to use GCP. So it might be strange to read this in a blog post about Google Cloud certification, but I think it’s a very valuable certificate even if you’ve never used GCP.
Professional Cloud Architect certification exam pro-tips
The exam consists of a series of questions based on realistic case studies. Now, read and examine these descriptions of the fictional company and its cloud projects before the exam. That way, don’t waste your limited test time. This certificate covers all GCP products and services. Fortunately, you don’t need to know more about each. The actual focus of the PCA is on business and architecture, so the technical depth is significantly lower than all other professional qualifications.
Professional Cloud Developer (PCD)
For all Google Cloud certifications, let’s move on to the Professional Cloud Developer certification. I think this is Google’s last general certification. Everything else is more focused.
Well, part of the reason I say this Professional Cloud Developer certification is common is that Google as a company is very developer-centric. From Google’s point of view, almost everyone who works in technology is a developer. Only some people work with code more than others. I admit that they’re starting to realize that not all organizations are as structured as Google, but Google still sees development as the core of everything. For Google Cloud certification, an architect is an advanced developer who doesn’t write too much code on his own. Operations personnel, including DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers, are developers who create software to manage operational activities. The data engineer is a developer and I’m a little ahead here. Let’s refocus on the Professional Cloud Developer certificate.
What does a Professional Cloud Developer do?
Here`s what Google has to mention approximately the PCD:
“A Professional Cloud Developer builds scalable and tremendously to be had programs with the use of Google-endorsed practices and tools. This man or woman has reveled in cloud-local programs, developer tools, controlled services, and next-era databases. A Professional Cloud Developer additionally has scalability with as a minimum one general-cause programming language and is professional at generating significant metrics and logs to debug and hint code.”
How to pass the Professional Cloud Developer certification
There’s a lot to unpack in the above part, but I think the simplest rough summary is that the PCD makes things-the systems people actually use. This definitely includes writing code in a programming language. One of the areas of this certificate is a secure call to the service API, writing your own service API, and so on. But I think one of the most important calls here is about managed services. Just as a powerful programming language means you have to write a bit of code to get the job done, managed services take this to the next level that is, the next level of abstraction. It is an abstraction. Effective use of managed services (for example, Cloud Storage, Cloud Pub / Sub, Cloud Run, etc.) can make a big difference to your software project. Indeed, as Fred Brooks wrote in his influential work, there is no silver bullet.
“The most fundamental solution to building software is not to build software at all. This will be easier every day. The evolution of the mass market is, in my opinion, the most serious of software engineering. It’s a long-term trend. ” In the next section of his article, he correctly predicted the need for what we now call. There is a very good reason to consider agile software development methodologies and his advice. With the creation of a public cloud with such great services, his predictions go far beyond the packages within an application to large chunks of the entire system.
As you can see, the Google Cloud certification for the Professional Cloud Developer role overlaps with the Professional Cloud Architect role. Developers don’t just need to understand the cloud-native architecture. You also need to be able to create these system designs yourself-at least to some extent. Being a professional cloud developer also means learning the tools of the industry. A tool for building and testing applications in your system. Continuous Delivery Tools-CI and CD. And a tool for managing performance over time. All of this now includes related best practices, as well as features in siled tools and DevOps team environments. Therefore, this professional cloud developer is also expected to understand most of what a professional cloud DevOps engineer does. This is a more general level than the DevOps certificate described below.
Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (PCDOE)
What does a Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer do?
The official Blurb for the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certificate is:
“Professional CloudDevOps Engineer is responsible for an efficient development flow that can balance service reliability and delivery speed. They build a software delivery pipeline, deploy and monitor services, and Google Cloud Platform. You will be able to manage and learn about incidents using. ” Many people hear the word “manipulation” and ignore the rest. Bad idea! This role (also known as a site reliability engineer, especially in the Google world) handles it in a very different way, not only in terms of operations.
Basically, the whole role of this SRE is to enable the whole team to build better software faster. And if you spend all your time just putting out the fire and chasing the tail, that won’t happen. Therefore, harnessing the power of software development increases the impact of time. Prior to this, operations staff unzipped the hardware, set it up and configured it, set up application dependencies, and installed the apps they received from the developers. I can not bear it anymore.
Instead, SRE writes declarative manifest files and procedural scripts to do all of this. It has error handling and logging, version control, and everything else software engineers use to control confusion. Because SREs are software engineers, they are internal only and enable the entire development team to build better software faster. But it also goes beyond what developers use because it involves conscious risk management. Note that I didn’t say anything about risk aversion. This role is not afraid of risk, she takes it! Yes, the risks are worth the rewards, so be willing to make mistakes from time to time. It makes the software better and the overall effort is actually less time in the end. People may be skeptical of this, but it’s absolutely true.
How to pass the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification
For GCP products that this role and certificate focus on, it includes all the observable ones previously called Stack drivers (Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, Cloud Debugger, Cloud Profiler, etc.). It will be. There are also CI / CD-related items such as Cloud Source Repositories, Artifact Registry, and Cloud Build. There are also Infrastructure-as-Code ones such as Google Cloud Deployment Manager and TerraForm. This role is often really misunderstood, but if empowered to actually succeed, she can definitely be a great member of the team. If you dig deeper into this and are curious about how it can help you and your team, I encourage you to take a look at the Google Professional CloudDevOps Engineer Certification Pass referral course I have created. This is a quick course that goes into more detail on both the role itself and the context of the role. And if you’re interested, it’s also a great first step towards this Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification.
Professional Cloud Security Engineer (PCSE)
Everyone knows that everyone is responsible for the security and has to play their part, right? (Is that so?) That’s true, but the role of the Professional Cloud Security Engineer is to delve into different types of security every day for each job, digging into security-related stuff all day long.
What does a Professional Cloud Security Engineer do?
What Google says about this certification: “Based on our understanding of security best practices and industry security requirements, this individual designs develops and maintains a secure infrastructure that leverages Google’s security technology. Cloud security experts manage identity and access controls, define organizational structures and policies, provide data protection using Google technology, configure network security defenses, collect and analyze Google Cloud Platform logs, and manage incidents. You must be familiar with all aspects of cloud security, such as responding to and understanding regulatory concerns. ”
Hmm … “Regulatory concerns” is Everyone’s favorite. It may not be. However, it can be important and there is a lot of satisfaction in completing important tasks. Anyway, that’s just part of that much bigger role. It’s important that this person “designs, develops, and maintains a secure infrastructure.” That is all. But again, they still don’t work on their own, as this security expert leads the team on security issues. The rest of the description is for the purpose of providing details only.
How to pass the Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification
In terms of focus areas, this Google Cloud certification has a heavy emphasis on IAM, of course, and using the resource hierarchy to put projects into folders and organizations. And also Service Accounts, Cloud Identity, Groups, and Directory Sync get involved. For networking, Google is very big on the BeyondCorp zero-trust network model and using IdentityAware Proxy to achieve that. But it`s still quite reasonable to use network-based security as an additional layer of protection. Defense-in-depth, right? Therefore, you need to configure VPC structures such as firewalls, peering, and cloud interconnects to enable secure connections.
In all of this, everyone needs to have the minimum privileges they need. With respect to the data we store, we don’t need to regulate that it’s a bad idea to collect unnecessarily detailed information about our customers, store it in an unsafe location, and pass that data on to malicious people. right? Data breaches destroy trust and often kill businesses — it’s also a bad deal. Therefore, use the DLP API to edit sensitive information. You tokenize things. Use CloudKey Management to encrypt and manage your keys. Then use the object lifecycle policy to expire the data. etc. Finally, it’s not just about passive or preparatory security. You may also need to take action to respond to security events such as DDoS and ZeroDay. We can move on, but we hope you feel comfortable understanding this role.
A side note about Google’s Developer Perspective
Here are some interesting facts. The first version of Google Cloud certification Google’s Professional Cloud Architect certification was a mashup of all the other certifications mentioned above. (Well, I’ll cover it after this point, but most of it is older.)-I can’t remember if it’s Python or Java, but it had nothing to do with Google. This was after the transition to the Professional Cloud Developer exam, and the PCA is now more architecturally focused. But I think it shows what Google’s original idea really was. This means that all technical professionals need to have at least some background in software development. Well, don’t let it put you off! I want you to understand that Google plays many real roles so you don’t hesitate to think that it’s unrelated to you your background. Don’t feel stressed, as you are sure you can learn some extra things waiting for you too! And to be honest, I think most of these things are very valuable in the future.
Professional Cloud Network Engineer (PCNE)
Next, let’s dive into one of the truest specialty roles: the Professional Cloud Network Engineer.
What does a Professional Cloud Network Engineer do?
Google says that this person “implements and manages network architectures in Google Cloud certification Platform… [and] may work on networking or cloud teams with architects who design the infrastructure. By leveraging experience implementing VPCs, hybrid connectivity, network services, and security for established network architectures, this individual ensures successful cloud implementations using the command line interface or the Google Cloud Platform Console.” Before we move on to the rest of the stuff, I want to make one comment about that very last phrase. Sure, it`s important to note that the role and exam expect the ability to work via both the command line and the web console UI. But the thing I want to point out is what`s missing: Unlike networking specialist roles of the past, this one never interacts with any hardware. This is all about software-defined networking. You’re a cloud network engineer.
How to pass the Professional Cloud Network Engineer
This general description of Google Cloud certification is a lot more like the kind of person who “gets your hands dirty” rather than “sit down and look up”, but this role is to design, plan, and plan your network on GCP. Includes prototyping. .. In fact, this is the first domain listed in the exam guide. But all other domains are about day-to-day implementation and management.
Configuring and managing the Virtual Private Cloud (or VPC) network that connects everything together. Doing the same for the network aspects of many of the things that connect to that VPC—like the VMs, GKE clusters, corporate data centers, and whatnot. We talked a bit about the networking stuff involved in the Cloud Security Engineer role, and those are all included here, too—but this Cloud Network Engineer turns it up to eleven. DNS, BGP, TCP/IP, SSL, HTTPS, GKE IPs, NAT, VLAN, IPSec, VPN, SSH, CDN, BBQ, LOL. (OK, I added those last two. But seriously, there are a lot of details to handle.) And because those details aren’t limited to network services, their role is also relevant to IAM-related stuff. Keep in mind that these are software-defined networks, so all access controls are centrally managed. This is extremely powerful and many veteran network personnel migrating to Google Cloud certification are looking forward to working with these cool new toys that will amplify their impact.
Professional Data Engineer (PDE)
Next, we’ll dive into what makes a Professional Data Engineer, or PDE.
What does a Professional Data Engineer do?
Well, first of all, it’s data, right? That’s clearly the focus, but the question to ask is “why?”. Why are we so interested in all this data? Let’s listen to Google again. “Professional data engineers enable data-driven decision making by collecting, transforming, and publishing data.” It says “Data-driven decision making.” As an industry, we have learned that data has a lot of business value. Its role is to extract the data and deploy it throughout the organization. “Data engineers need to be able to design, build, operate, protect, and monitor data processing systems with a particular focus on security and compliance. Scalability and efficiency. Reliability and loyalty. And flexibility and portability.” It’s a lot of” misfortune “. Compromise is central to all IT roles, and arguably so.
Of course, this overlaps a bit with the role of a security engineer, as we need to respect the privacy and security concerns that come with it when working with data. But, as mentioned earlier, safety is really the responsibility of everyone. The professional data engineer also covers the architecture of all big data systems throughout the data life cycle (ingestion, storage, processing, analysis, exploration, visualization), so there is a lot of overlap with the role of the architecture. I have.
How to pass the Professional Data Engineer certification
Some of DataFlow, DataProc, BigTable, and BigQuery really stand out when it comes to the core Google Cloud certification GCP products associated with this role. This does not mean that nothing else is important either. DataPrep, DataLab, Data Studio, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Cloud Pub / Sub, etc. In fact, everything that stores and processes data. But it’s not just about setting these things. This role also includes monitoring, maintenance, troubleshooting, and long-term improvement of these pipelines. An additional caveat here is that this role should also be able to use something other than industry-standard Google (such as Hadoop for MapReduce processing on large datasets or SQL for creating data queries of any kind).
Is that there is. Now, the final sentence that Google uses to explain this role is, “Data engineers need to be able to leverage, deploy, and continuously train existing machine learning models.”
But specific For machine learning if you have a certificate, this definitely includes that too. In short, you need to understand GCP pre-trained models such as Vision API and Translation API. However, you can also train your own model using something like the AI
Professional Machine Learning Engineer (PMLE)
Speaking of ML engineers. .. .. Professional Machine Learning Engineer may be one of Google’s latest certifications, but I think it could be one of the most valuable. Perhaps it may even be of interest to people who don’t plan to use GCP. (Anyway, not yet.) The Professional Machine Learning Engineer role contains all the machine learning content in the Data Engineer role, plus much more. Let’s take a closer look.
What does a Professional Machine Learning Engineer do?
According to Google, “Professional machine learning engineers design, build and create ML models and use Google Cloud technology and knowledge of proven ML models and techniques to solve business challenges. ML engineers should be familiar with all aspects of model architecture, data pipeline interactions, and metric interpretation, and should be familiar with application development, infrastructure management, data engineering, and security. ” “Production” is interesting, but the key here is not just to train and use it like a PDE, but to design and build an ML model.
And, as it is said, this professional ML engineer is “familiar with every aspect of machine learning.” All sides. It’s not just about Google Cloud. This is the most important thing you need to know about this certificate. Of course, this is a certification and requires GCP skills. But it also tests you on many things, not just Google Cloud-specific ones. This machine learning engineer is probably the Google certificate with the most non-Google content. It also delivers superior reach beyond GCP when you need to move to multi-cloud or hybrid.
How to pass the Professional Machine Learning Engineer certification
The first section of the exam guide is about assembling business problems and data in the ways that ML can provide. Therefore, this has nothing to do with Google, except for the AI
It’s also important to make sure that using a fully automated pre-trained model such as Speech to Text or Recommendations AI is the right decision, or that the AutoML version offers the best compromise. Designing an ML solution is a big part of the test because it is an important part of the role. From now on, it’s important to be able to explore and cleanse your data using Cloud Dataprep. It is also important to be able to use all the data engineering tools covered to process the data. Of course, there is less depth and emphasis here than in Professional Data. Engineer certificate. For clarity, it means BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, DataStudio, etc. To make all your machine learning dreams come true, you need to do everything. And that means implementing your architecture, but it also means automating and monitoring things. In an ideal world, not only is there no manual training to update the model, but there is also a CI / CD system (MLOps) for automatically testing and deploying new models. So all DevOps tools (such as CloudBuild and CloudMonitoring) are interesting here as well. Everything I mentioned is infused with the generous support of open-source TensorFlow.
Cloud Digital Leader
This basic certification is probably the most important thing Google has ever done to get people involved in the GCP ecosystem. You probably think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.
Azure has AZ900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals, AWS has Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP), and Google Cloud currently has a beta version of Cloud Digital Leader. Few people use such certifications to demonstrate their skills. Instead, most people use them as a learning guide. People are interested in learning whether it’s because they need it for their work, or because they’re just curious-and such entry-level non- Technical certification is a great place to start! It’s achievable, focused, valuable, and not a threat. It’s pure goodness! Unless you’re an
engineer, such a credential can provide a very valuable framework for understanding how the cloud works. Both the general public cloud and especially Google Cloud. You need to understand how to reduce overall costs and significantly improve your business agility.
What does a Cloud Digital Leader do?
As Google states, “Cloud Digital Readers can articulate the capabilities and business value of Google Cloud’s core products and services. Cloud Digital Readers are organized by common business use cases and cloud solutions. You can also explain how to support it. ” Google also needs to understand some important trade-offs, such as” between cost and responsibility “and” between “in the exam guide.” I point out that there is. Management level and flexibility when comparing cloud services. ” We also manage the security and other aspects of the systems we build as a shared responsibility between Google and us.
If you are tech-savvy, why do you care about this certification? Imagine that everyone in your job really understood the basics of the cloud. They could spend less time and energy explaining the same thing again and correcting misunderstandings based on assumptions about how the technology worked. Being able to speak “the same language” helps teams understand the technology and communicate intelligently about it.
Google Cloud Certification Paths
This may all seem like a lot, but don’t worry if you try to remember them all. More importantly, you can use this understanding to shape your own path to progress. Remember, this is about helping you succeed in your work. Certificates are just a tool to make this easier and faster.
So what is your goal? What are you driving
Getting started
- I know nothing about cloud or tech. Don’t you know what the cloud is? Everyone has to start somewhere. ACG is there to guide you as you take the first step into the world of technology. Get familiar with the basics and concepts of the cloud and Google Cloud in courses such as Cloud Computing Overview and Google Cloud Concepts. These courses are short enough to watch over your lunch break (and it’s completely free cloud training). From there, you should be ready to dive into the CloudDigitalLeader and GCPAssociateCloudEngineer courses.
- I’m just breaking in. If you’re just trying to break into the cloud, you’ll need to start with a cloud digital reader and then get an Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) certification. If you do that, you need to get a very comprehensive foundation on how the cloud works in general, especially how GCP works. It’s not easy, but it’s possible and rewarding.
- I’m starting with some tech experience. If you already have some experience—be it GCP, AWS, Azure, or just IT in general—you should start with the Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) cert. It will identify and fill the holes in your foundation for all of this GCP stuff. And if you’re already a good bit of the way there, it’ll go more quickly for you than for someone without your background. But it really is still worth your time and energy to take care of this before moving on to any Professional-level role. Tons of well-meaning and super-smart people have blind spots (unknown unknowns) that really sabotage their effectiveness until they address them. Don’t let pride take you down.
- I’m ready to move up in my cloud career. Do you already know GCP and are ready to advance your career, or are you ready to decline a particular career path? Check the certification paths listed below. (However, there is no problem just taking the Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) certification exam. You can also take the cloud certification exam remotely, so you don’t have to go to the exam center.)
Architect
Whether you’re looking at payroll reports because you want fame or just like building great systems, many want to be professional cloud architects. So the next obvious target here is the professional cloud architect, right? Perhaps.
- PCA with more experience. This can work if you already have a strong background in designing and building software systems. PCA is so widespread and common that backgrounds in architectures other than GCP are still very helpful. I’ve heard that people in this group report that Google’s PCA exam felt easier than other comparable clouds because it wasn’t technical.
- PCA with less experience. This can work if you already have a strong background in designing and building software systems. PCA is so widespread and common that backgrounds in architectures other than GCP are still very helpful. I’ve heard that people in this group report that Google’s PCA exam felt easier than other comparable clouds because it wasn’t technical.
- Going beyond PCA. Anyway, once you’ve got Professional Cloud Architect certification, there are good cases to continue developing your GCP skills. Specifically, (1) Follow up with the Professional Cloud Security Engineer to make sure you have these important skills comprehensively. 2) Take a look at the Professional Data Engineer to get a real idea of
how your organization can get the most out of all your data.
Developer
Next, let`s recollect the position of a developer. Like I`ve mentioned, you virtually ought, to begin with, ACE, however what subsequent? Well, the maximum precious subsequent cert for a developer goes to be the Professional Cloud Developer one or PCD. Surprise, surprise, right? If you need to, you can do the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer cert earlier than PCD, however, it`s simply nice if you`d alternatively do it after. But I really do advise that each developer research and virtually recognize DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering. Seriously, in this day and age, a developer who doesn`t grok DevOps and SRE is absolutely restricting their career.
Now, after these more core developer certs, you can definitely still get value from continuing forward. A good next option is the Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification because an insufficient appreciation of security is one of the biggest and riskiest problems for developers. After that, because the role of a developer, in particular, gets magnified by adding new tools to the toolbox, I would suggest looking at the Professional Data Engineer and Professional Cloud Architect certs. At a minimum, a better understanding of those broad sets of tools would mean that you could confidently bring them to the table in team collaboration. But the truly amazing thing about the developer role is that it is becoming more independent! Because of the magnifying effect of this higher abstraction technology, a single developer can now often accomplish what used to require a whole team of people. And if you can put yourself in that position, you can go. I think this is the most positive of all the roles I mentioned.
DevOps
One of the things I was involved with was the importance of DevOps. right? And there is a reason for that. Software development as an industry has learned for decades how to do things and how to not. And one of the most important lessons is agility. If you haven’t read the Agile Software Development Manifest yet, you should. (Seriously, it takes less than a minute, even if the reader is slow.) But the important thing is that successful software development requires a short feedback loop, which is all about DevOps. A software development team without
DevOps expertise is like a hockey team playing without a goalkeeper. Sure, it’s possible, but it suffers serious disadvantages. (Note to hockey fans: this is not to pull the goalkeeper, but to play without the goalkeeper.)
Therefore, to fulfill your DevOps engineer role, start with ACE as usual and then dive directly into the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certificate. That alone is great. But …
Then, to dig deeper, I think you can get a lot of value by looking at the DevOps developers and targeting professional cloud developers. Some of this may seem like an effort at first, especially if you haven’t programmed it before, but I’m sure you can do it. And there is great value in driving development. This is definitely done as a DevOps engineer. After that, Professional Cloud Architect is a great way to explore the entire cloud world. DevOps and site reliability engineering is all about risk management, so it’s very helpful to have a better understanding of how cloud systems work.
Security
Targeting a Security role is another useful option. Unsurprisingly, here, my recommendation is to start with ACE and then beeline for Professional Cloud Security Engineer. Done and dusted, right? Well, maybe not. Sure, this is absolutely a solid achievement! No question! But Security roles can also have areas of specialization! One option for going deeper than PCSE is to dig into the Professional Cloud Network Engineer. This is a certificate that we definitely recommend depending on the situation. If you already have a network background or are working in an organization that makes heavy use of network-based security, this can be a great addition. Use your background to increase your value as a safety engineer in general or build a relevant skillset.
Another great addition to security engineers is Professional Cloud Architect. Safety comes not from performing certain activities or checking boxes, but from using the brain with a good understanding (right?). Therefore, driving to a PCA is a great way to correctly understand the range of products and services displayed in your system that need to be backed up.
Data / Machine Learning
If you want to focus on your data (I’m not talking about Brent Spiner), Google Cloud is for you. The data is where GCP really excels. If I think I’ll start over from ACE, you’re wrong! Of course! ACE has always been an important foundation. But when it comes to data, I think the next step must be a professional data engineer. Next, a professional machine learning engineer. Now, if you’re in a situation where you’re only doing machine learning, or not doing machine learning at all, it’s a good idea to optimize it. But if you’re really unsure about a better plan, or even if you do, this is a very wise plan. PDE ensures that you have a very good understanding of the broader data lifecycle and its usage. PMLE will deepen this is perhaps the most important way to use the data in the future. When you’re done with your data-centric work, it’s a good idea to focus on using Professional Cloud Developer to complete the developer side or use Professional Cloud Architect to gain a broader understanding of the architecture. In any case, you can learn more about how to make the right compromises in two key areas of data engineering: system design and implementation.
Next steps
Now, what kind of advice would you be if you stopped providing ideas on how to personally advance all this information about Google Cloud certification? Cloud Guru has put together a large number of training materials and support systems to assist you. Teaching the World Cloud is our mission! And above all, we want to teach you! There are training courses for certification, other courses, stand-alone videos, practice exams, guides, official ACG discord servers, discussion forums, yadda, yadda, and yadda. But what I find most useful to you is the link between all these things, the learning path. For each of most of the roles above, our platform displays an ordered path that includes all the different things you can use to learn them, including courses, certifications, and many options. Oh, and because it’s important to get your hands dirty and actually use the cloud, A Cloud Guru membership has a lot of hands-on practice that allows you to dive into the cloud and do real things without real risk. It contains. These labs appear in the courses and these learning paths. Alternatively, you can walk through it individually.
