Indeed, IT-related career opportunities remain at the top of the list in terms of career or skill transitions. Moreover, in this technological era, a certified professional is valued more by both IT and non-IT companies. Every organization requires highly skilled and certified professionals at work to increase efficiency and perfection. The Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (GCP) Exam is a top-rated certification exam that requires adequate preparation and learning resources to pass. It is currently regarded as the Best Cloud Engineer Certification.
To begin, it is critical to understand the certification in depth. Furthermore, when planning a career path in any specific field, consider the resources. That is to say, in this article, we will discuss the best approaches and resources for obtaining the position of Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer.
Let us begin by understanding more about the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam and Format
About Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (GCP)
The Google Professional Cloud Devops Engineer Certification exam is intended to assess technical skills relevant to the job role. Candidates who are preparing for the exam should have practical experience. The Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer exam evaluates candidates’ abilities to –
- To begin, apply principles of site reliability engineering to a service.
- Second, improve service performance.
- Thirdly, Put in place service monitoring strategies.
- Furthermore, Build and implement CI/CD pipelines for a service
- Finally, handle service incidents.
Who should take the exam?
Candidates interested in becoming a Google Cloud Platform Professional Cloud Devops Engineer will be in charge of running efficient development operations that balance service reliability and delivery speed. They should also be able to build software delivery pipelines, deploy and monitor services, and manage and learn from incidents using the Google Cloud Platform.
Average Salary
In the United Kingdom, the average Google devops engineer salary is £67,500 per year or £34.62 per hour. Starting salaries for entry-level positions start at £52,500 per year, with most experienced workers earning up to £90,000 per year.
Things you must know – The questions on the Google Professional Cloud Devops Engineer Certification Exam will be in multiple-choice and multiple-select format. These questions will be used to evaluate candidates. In addition, the exam will last 4 hours. In addition, an application fee of $200 (plus applicable taxes) is required to take the exam.
Let us now move to the meat of this article –
Start your career as a Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
Follow these steps given below to start a career as a Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer. Let us start with the planning part-
Step 1. Focusing on the important area of the exam
Above, we discussed the basic exam pattern and the details required to proceed with exam preparation. Moving on to the most important part of this blog, the exam topics. Because, aside from practice exams, the only area in which we must devote the majority of our study time is the exam guide.
The major domains that the Google Professional Cloud Devops Engineer Course covers are-
Topic 1: Bootstrapping a Google Cloud organization for DevOps (17%)
1.1 Designing the overall resource hierarchy for an organization. Considerations include:
- Projects and folders (Google Documentation: Creating and managing Folders)
- Shared networking (Google Documentation: Shared VPC)
- Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and organization-level policies (Google Documentation: IAM overview)
- Creating and managing service accounts (Google Documentation: Create a service account)
1.2 Managing infrastructure as code. Considerations include:
- Infrastructure as code tooling (e.g., Cloud Foundation Toolkit, Config Connector, Terraform, Helm) (Google Documentation: Config Connector overview, Infrastructure as Code on Google Cloud)
- Making infrastructure changes using Google-recommended practices and infrastructure as code blueprints (Google Documentation: Using Recommendations for Infrastructure as Code)
- Immutable architecture (Google Documentation: Best practices for operating containers)
1.3 Designing a CI/CD architecture stack in Google Cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Considerations include:
- CI with Cloud Build (Google Documentation: Cloud Build, Cloud Build documentation)
- CD with Google Cloud Deploy (Google Documentation: Cloud Build documentation)
- Widely used third-party tooling (e.g., Jenkins, Git, ArgoCD, Packer)
- Security of CI/CD tooling (Google Documentation: Building a secure CI/CD pipeline using Google Cloud built-in services)
1.4 Managing multiple environments (e.g., staging, production). Considerations include:
- Determining the number of environments and their purpose (Google Documentation: Create Cloud Composer environments)
- Creating environments dynamically for each feature branch with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Terraform (Google Documentation: Create a GKE cluster and deploy a workload using Terraform, Modern CI/CD with GKE: Build a CI/CD system)
- Config Management (Google Documentation: Configurations Overview)
Topic 2: Building and implementing CI/CD pipelines for a service (23%)
2.1 Designing and managing CI/CD pipelines. Considerations include:
- Artifact management with Artifact Registry (Google Documentation: Artifact Registry overview)
- Deployment to hybrid and multi-cloud environments (e.g., Anthos, GKE) (Google Documentation: GKE Multi-Cloud documentation, Anthos)
- CI/CD pipeline triggers (Google Documentation: Cloud Build triggers)
- Testing a new application version in the pipeline (Google Documentation: Test and deploy your application)
- Configuring deployment processes (e.g., approval flows) (Google Documentation: Setting up a CI/CD pipeline for your data-processing workflow)
- CI/CD of serverless applications (Google Documentation: Cloud Build)
2.2 Implement CI/CD pipelines:
- Auditing and tracking deployments (e.g., Artifact Registry, Cloud Build, Google Cloud Deploy, Cloud Audit Logs) (Google Documentation: Artifact Registry audit logging, Cloud Audit Logs overview)
- Deployment strategies (e.g., canary, blue/green, rolling, traffic splitting)
- Rollback strategies (Google Documentation: Rollbacks, gradual rollouts, and traffic migration)
- Troubleshooting deployment issues (Google Documentation: Troubleshooting deployments)
2.3 Managing CI/CD configuration and secrets. Considerations include:
- Secure storage methods and key rotation services (e.g., Cloud Key Management Service, Secret Manager) (Google Documentation: Secret Manager)
- Secret management (Google Documentation: Secret Manager)
- Build versus runtime secret injection (Google Documentation: Configure secrets, Use secrets from Secret Manager)
2.4 Securing the CI/CD deployment pipeline. Considerations include:
- Vulnerability analysis with Artifact Registry Artifact analysis and vulnerability scanning)
- Binary Authorization (Google Documentation: Binary Authorization)
- IAM policies per environment
Section 3: Applying site reliability engineering practices to a service (23%)
3.1 Balancing change, velocity, and reliability of the service. Considerations include:
- Discovering SLIs (e.g., availability, latency) (Google Documentation: Choose your service level indicators (SLIs))
- Defining SLOs and understanding SLAs (Google Documentation: SRE fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs)
- Error budgets (Google Documentation: Concepts in service monitoring)
- Toil automation
- Opportunity cost of risk and reliability (e.g., number of “nines”)
3.2 Managing service lifecycle. Considerations include:
- Service management (e.g., introduction of a new service by using a pre-service onboarding checklist, launch plan, or deployment plan, deployment, maintenance, and retirement) (Google Documentation: Google Cloud setup checklist)
- Capacity planning (e.g., quotas and limits management) (Google Documentation: Quotas & limits)
- Autoscaling using managed instance groups, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, or GKE (Google Documentation: Autoscaling groups of instances)
- Implementing feedback loops to improve a service (Google Documentation: Feedback prebuilt component)
3.3 Ensuring healthy communication and collaboration for operations. Considerations include:
- Preventing burnout (e.g., setting up automation processes to prevent burnout)
- Fostering a culture of learning and blamelessness (Google Documentation: Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure)
- Establishing joint ownership of services to eliminate team silos (Google Documentation: Guide to Cloud Billing Resource Organization & Access Management)
3.4 Mitigating incident impact on users. Considerations include:
- Communicating during an incident (Google Documentation: Data incident response process)
- Draining/redirecting traffic (Google Documentation: Enable connection draining)
- Adding capacity (Google Documentation: Scale capacity)
3.5 Conducting a postmortem. Considerations include:
- Documenting root causes (Google Documentation: Error Reporting)
- Creating and prioritizing action items
- Communicating the postmortem to stakeholders (Google Documentation: Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure)
Topic 4: Implementing service monitoring strategies (21%)
4.1 Managing logs:
- Collecting structured and unstructured logs from Compute Engine, GKE, and serverless platforms using Cloud Logging (Google Documentation: About GKE logs, Structured Logging)
- Configuring the Cloud Logging agent (Google Documentation: Configure the Logging agent)
- Collecting logs from outside Google Cloud (Google Documentation: Route logs to supported destinations)
- Sending application logs directly to the Cloud Logging API (Google Documentation: Cloud Logging API)
- Log levels (e.g., info, error, debug, fatal) (Google Documentation: View and write Cloud Function logs)
- Optimizing logs (e.g., multiline logging, exceptions, size, cost) (Google Documentation: Logging query language)
4.2 Managing metrics with Cloud Monitoring. Considerations include:
- Collecting and analyzing application and platform metrics (Google Documentation: Collect metrics overview)
- Collecting networking and service mesh metrics (Google Documentation: Observability overview, Cloud Service Mesh overview)
- Use metric explorer for ad hoc metric analysis (Google Documentation: Metrics Explorer)
- Creating custom metrics from logs (Google Documentation: Log-based metrics overview)
4.3 Managing dashboards and alerts in Cloud Monitoring. Considerations include:
- Creating a monitoring dashboard (Google Documentation: Create and manage custom dashboards)
- Filtering and sharing dashboards (Google Documentation: Share a custom dashboard)
- Configuring alerting
- Defining alerting policies based on SLOs and SLIs (Google Documentation: Creating an alerting policy)
- Automating alerting policy definition using Terraform (Google Documentation: Create alerting policies with Terraform, Manage alerting policies with Terraform)
- Using Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus to collect metrics and set up monitoring and alerting (Google Documentation: Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus)
4.4 Managing Cloud Logging platform. Considerations include:
- Enabling data access logs (e.g., Cloud Audit Logs) (Google Documentation: Enable Data Access audit logs)
- Enabling VPC Flow Logs (Google Documentation: Use VPC Flow Logs)
- Viewing logs in the Google Cloud console
- Using basic versus advanced log filters (Google Documentation: Logging query language)
- Logs exclusion versus logs export
- Project-level versus organization-level export
- Managing and viewing log exports (Google Documentation: Viewing activity logs)
- Sending logs to an external logging platform (Google Documentation: Route logs to supported destinations)
- Filtering and redacting sensitive data (e.g., personally identifiable information [PII], protected health information [PHI]) (Google Documentation: De-identifying sensitive data)
4.5 Implementing logging and monitoring access controls. Considerations include:
- Restricting access to audit logs and VPC Flow Logs with Cloud Logging (Google Documentation: VPC audit logging information)
- Restricting export configuration with Cloud Logging (Google Documentation: Scenarios for exporting Cloud Logging: Compliance requirements)
- Allowing metric and log writing with Cloud Monitoring (Google Documentation: Log-based metrics overview)
Topic 5: Optimizing service performance (16%)
5.1 Identify service performance issues:
- Using Google Cloud’s operations suite to identify cloud resource utilization (Google Documentation: Observability in Google Cloud)
- Interpret service mesh telemetry (Google Documentation: The service mesh era)
- Troubleshooting issues with compute resources (Google Documentation: Troubleshooting resource availability errors)
- Troubleshooting deploy time and runtime issues with applications (Google Documentation: Troubleshoot Cloud Run issues, Troubleshoot Cloud Functions)
- Troubleshooting network issues (e.g., VPC Flow Logs, firewall logs, latency, network details (Google Documentation: VPC Flow Logs overview, Using VPC Flow Logs, Using Firewall Rules Logging)
5.2 Implementing debugging tools in Google Cloud. Considerations include:
- Application instrumentation (Google Documentation: Cloud Monitoring)
- Cloud Logging (Google Documentation: Cloud Logging)
- Cloud Trace (Google Documentation: Cloud Trace overview)
- Error Reporting (Google Documentation: Error Reporting)
- Cloud Profiler (Google Documentation: Cloud Profiler)
- Cloud Monitoring (Google Documentation: Cloud Monitoring)
5.3 Optimize resource utilization and costs:
- Preemptible/Spot virtual machines (VMs) (Google Documentation: Preemptible VM instances, Spot VMs)
- Committed-use discounts (e.g., flexible, resource-based) (Google Documentation: Resource-based committed use discounts, Committed use discounts)
- Sustained-use discounts (Google Documentation: Sustained use discounts for Compute Engine)
- Network tiers (Google Documentation: Network Service Tiers overview)
- Sizing recommendations
Step 2 – Refer to Best Resources for Preparation
Books –
GCP provides a set of books on Site Reliability Engineering books, which will help sharpen your skills.
1. Building Secure & Reliable Systems – Throughout this book, various Google experts have shared their best practices that can assist any organization in designing scalable and reliable systems. In addition, the book includes a guide to developing fundamentally secure strategies for an organization.
2. The Site Reliability Workbook – This book beautifully demonstrates the methodology of applying SRE principles as well as its practical applications. The book also includes several practical examples of Google’s experiences and case studies from GCP customers.
Join the Community/ Online Forum
A healthy debate is always beneficial, regardless of where it takes place. The same is true for online discussion boards. This is a good opportunity for students to discuss their concerns and gain insight into how their competitors are preparing for the exams. One advantage of anything that goes online is the number of people who can join it. An offline discussion is limited to a small group of people, whereas online platforms can reach a much larger audience.
Practice Test
A practice run or two, regardless of how you prepare for the exam, can help you in more ways than you might think. Taking a Google Professional Cloud Devops Engineer Practice Exam is an excellent way to broaden your study strategy and ensure the best possible results on the real thing. Practice tests allow you to gain an understanding of the pattern of questions asked. Analyzing your answers will assist you in identifying areas where you need to focus more attention, as well as determining your alignment with the exam objectives. Begin practicing right away!
Step 3 – Gain Hands-on Practice
Getting hands-on experience is an excellent way to pass any certification exam. As with the GCP DevOps Engineer Exam, GCP recommends participating in hands-on labs available on Qwiklabs as well as the GCP free tier to improve your cloud platform proficiency.
DevOps Essentials – This quest will give you an understanding of how to use Google Cloud. You will be able to improve your software delivery capability with the help of Google Cloud in areas such as speed, stability, availability, and security.
Google Cloud Free Tier – GCP provides you with free resources to gain a deeper understanding of Google Cloud services through this platform, allowing you to get enough practice. Google Cloud Free Tier meets the needs of professionals at various levels, including beginners and experienced professionals. The Google Cloud Free Tier is divided into two parts –
- 12-month free trial plus a credit of $300 that may be used with Google Cloud services
- Always Free – It provides limited access to Google Cloud resources, without charging money
Step 4 – Gain hands-on experience
This is a critical step in obtaining a good job in the market. That is to say, if you have the necessary experience as well as the certification, no organization will turn you down! This is a proven fact. And the best way to do so is to begin working on a project. Start working on your project using the skills and knowledge you gained while passing the cloud practitioner exam. Furthermore, this can be used as a task to test your skills as well as an advantage during the interview to showcase your skills to the employer.
Step 5 – Crack the job interview
After passing the exam and gaining hands-on experience, the next step is to get a top job in the market. When it comes to the interview process, the first and most important thing to remember is to stay confident throughout. Second, you must review the theoretical portion as well as the project you worked on to prepare.
Step 6 – Maintaining the Credential
To keep their certification status, candidates must recertify. All Google Cloud certifications are valid for two years from the date of certification, unless otherwise stated in the detailed exam descriptions. Recertification is accomplished by retaking the exam and achieving a passing score during the recertification eligibility period. Recertification can be attempted beginning 60 days before your certification expiration date.
Final Words
It is critical to developing your study strategy. Furthermore, divide the topics into those that require conceptual understanding and those that must deal with theoretical aspects. You can also concentrate on practical experience. To deal with the difficult parts of the exam, try to use a variety of reading resources.
As a result, always set aside time for study and try to avoid distractions as much as possible. Make revision notes and schedule your tests regularly. Always stick to your plan and carry it out as planned. It is critical to successfully implement your strategy to pass the exam. The Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (GCP) Exam is worthwhile to attempt. If you pass the exam, you will be able to gain global recognition. This is a step closer to landing the dream job. You will undoubtedly pass the exam if you have the right resources.
