This article is specifically targeted at people with little to no experience with GCP. Though that wasn’t the case with me since I have been working on GCP products for the past year, I shall do my best to make this guide as rudimentary as possible. So you finally decide to do something with all the time you have! With more and more people taking the Google Certification exams, you can’t help but notice the hype and become a part of it. All you need now is a quick hack to get through the test. Well, I got you covered there!
What’s and Why’s of the Certification
The Certification is not a requirement. You don’t have to be a Professional Data Engineer to get a job nor is it a pre-requisite. But I would be lying if I told you that GCP Data Engineers aren’t recognized across the globe. For someone new to the cloud space, you will need to spend some additional time to grasp these fundamentals. Either way, preparing for the certification will open up avenues for up-skilling yourself in different dimensions of Data Engineering and a possible career transition. Anyone working with Data(Data analysts, Scientists, etc) should ideally breeze through the exam as it tests you on the fundamentals.
The examination are below:
Number of attempts: NA
Cost of the Exam: 200$
Validity: 2 years
Pre-requisites: NA (Though Google suggests an experience of 3+ years, it’s not a hard and fast rule)
Resources to prepare for the Certification
The resources are provided in the order of importance and I have also provided a metric below to gauge the effort vs duration of each of the resources. Now that you are equipped with the basics of the certification, let’s jump right into the courses and the ideal resources you will require for the examination.
1. Google Cloud Data Engineering on Coursera
Cost: 49$
Though the Coursera membership will set you back a 50$, you can use the 7-day trial to finish the course for free (this approach is not recommended but it’s still an option). Post that, you can refer to the GCP Documentation to reaffirm the concepts.
Recommended by Google itself, this set of 6 courses will give you a thorough understanding of the GCP platform. It provides hands-on sessions that are quite helpful in grilling the much-needed concepts and the Course-end evaluation is decent.
You will need to spend upwards of 10 hours a week to finish this course within a month. But I have seen people finish this in under 2 weeks using the scaled video speed option. Overall, if you do have the time, this resource could be all that you need to ace the test(minus the practice tests). The course covers a lot of concepts and services that are generally not tested in the examination. The majority of the hands-on sessions are ‘good to know’ but not required for the main test.
2. A CloudGuru
Cost: 49$
For every service, you are provided with the depth and breadth of the service along with the key concepts tested on the exam. This helps you stay abridged with the services GCP has to offer while not losing the intent for taking the test. Hence, this resource cannot be used alone. You will need to club this with parts of GCP Documentation (links to which are provided in the course itself).
This resource is the fastest way to learn the fundamentals required for the certification. This course does include hands-on sessions but they aren’t as comprehensive as the first course. The course is focused on getting you through the examination and the narratives are designed accordingly.
Most of the lectures go in tandem with the Google Cloud Documentation and also highlight the best practices. I would recommend this course to anyone comfortable with going into the examination with a little grey area since some GCP tools are left out of this course(for instance GKE). But on the flip side, these tools are rarely tested individually.
3. Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Exam Dumps
The best resource for GCP exam dumps is https://www.gcp-examquestions.com
You should spent your time with exam dumps before go to the real exam if you want to pass the exam at first try. This site is highly recommended.
You should refer this source and understand what kind of questions you should expect.
4. Google Cloud Platform Documentation
Cost: Free
If you could, however, complete this resource, you will not require anything else for the examination. But the sheer depth of the information can overwhelm and intimidate anyone. Hence, its recommended not to take on this resource alone but use the links provided by the previous course and only refer to those pages of the documentation. This resource is by far the most extensive and the most time-consuming. It covers every tool/service in the way Google has designed it to be used and will expose you to a wide array of concepts that are rarely tested on.
How to prepare?
The exam contains 50 questions with at least 35 questions required to ace it. You will have to follow and complete the following :
Note: The amount of time required per day is subjective to an individual. The time given is the minimum required by an average person to completely grasp that section)
Now let’s say you have one month to prepare for the test. You have never worked with GCP but you want to give the test and ace it. This is a foolproof guide to do just that. Now before I go ahead with the approach, follow this if you have no other option! The GCP Professional Certification is quite flexible and you can always reschedule it for a small fee.
1. BigQuery
Start with BigQuery. Do either of the courses or the documentation but cover this tool extensively. BigQuery also has a Machine Learning service called BigQueryML. This should also introduce you to the concepts of ML and give you enough to answer a couple of questions in the test. BigQuery is heavily tested since it’s one of GCP’s flagship services. Read and learn about how BigQuery handles replications, availability, and resource allocations (flexbytes vs fixed).
2. Security and IAM
Use the documentation and outline the best practices or just refer to the resources provided above. With less than 2 weeks left, go through this section, and understand the different predefined roles.
3. Machine Learning APIs
In most GCP solutions, using a pre-trained API is beneficial since it saves time and doesn’t require a Data Science team. Use this time to understand the various APIs GCP has to offer and the use cases.
4. Data Flow and Pub/Sub
Read about how these services work together and why Pub/Sub is a better alternative to Kafka.
5. Storage options
You will have to refer to this throughout the month to ensure maximum retention. Spend an entire day understanding the differences between the storage options and which solution is ideal for a given scenario.
6. Hadoop Alternatives
You should have a fundamental understanding of the different Hadoop tools and their equivalent services by the end of the week. Spend a good week on this with special emphasis on BigTable and DataProc.
7. Refer gcp-examquestions.com
Refer exam dumps before take the real exam. This way to ensure you can pass the exam at the first attempt in safe and easiest way.
