To keep your position, you must be excellent at displaying your skills. Clearly, the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (GCP) exam will not only help you to enhance your profile but will also demonstrate your dedication to your work. It is currently the Best Cloud Engineer Certification. Exam preparation, on the other hand, is no child’s play. While preparing, you must exert all of your determination and remain consistent.
Let us know How to become a Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer!
About Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
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.
- Following that, put in place service monitoring strategies.
- Additionally, create and implement CI/CD pipelines for a service.
- Finally, handle service incidents.
Who should take the exam?
Candidates who plan to take the Google Cloud Platform Professional Cloud Devops Engineer exam will be in charge of 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.
Let us now move towards the main aim of this article –
How to become a Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer?
When it comes to the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam, it is critical that you make the right decision and embark on a successful and rewarding career in the Google cloud platform. So let’s get started with the planning.
Step 1 – Know in-depth about the exam syllabus
Below mentioned is the detailed course outline for the exam along with the documentation and whitepapers offered by google –
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 – Know about the Exam Format
Another thing that the candidate should be aware of is the fundamentals of the exam. The Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer exam will include approximately 102 multiple-choice and multiple-select questions. These questions will be used to evaluate candidates. This exam will last 4 hours in total. To take the exam, a $200 application fee (plus applicable taxes) is required.
| 1. Exam Name Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer | 2. Exam Code GCP |
| 3. Exam Duration 2 hours | 4. Exam Format Multiple Choice and Multi-Response Questions |
| 5. Exam Type Proctored Exam | 6. Passing Score NA |
| 7. Eligibility/Pre-Requisite None | 8. Exam Fee $200 USD* |
| 9. Exam Language English | 10. Recommended Experience Three+ years of industry experience including one+ years managing solutions on GCP |
Step 3 – Gather all other important details about the exam
These are some policies of which you should be aware of when you will be taking this exam –
Certification/Revocation
The disclosure of Confidential Information is clearly a violation of Google’s Terms. A reported violation like this can jeopardize the security and integrity of Google’s certification programs. The exams are provided to candidates solely for the purpose of demonstrating their skills and competency in that specific area. Any violation of these Terms will result in your inability to take any Google Certification Exam. Furthermore, Google reserves the right to decertify you and, at its sole discretion, terminate any business relationship with you, preventing you from accessing its exam services.
Certification Renewal / Recertification
For the sake of maintaining your certification status, you must be recertified. Unless otherwise stated in the exam descriptions, Google Cloud certifications are only valid for two years. Recertification attempts are permitted up to 60 days before the expiration date of your certification.
Step 4 – Refer to the best Resources
Various resources have different sets of knowledge and understandings. However, in academic life, revision should be done on a case-by-case basis. As a result, matching the type of revision you are performing on your resource material is critical.
Official Exam Guide
Before you begin your preparation, you should familiarise yourself with the main objectives of the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam. GCP provides a well-structured exam guide to candidates pursuing certification. Knowing the exam objectives is critical for gaining an understanding of the exam. So, to get a better understanding of the exam guide, go to the GCP’s official website.
Google Cloud Platform Documentation
This is the second most important thing to study after the exam guide. It will help you understand all aspects of the Google Cloud Platform from the perspective of a developer. It is a term that refers to detailed documentation, guides, and resources for Google Cloud Platform products and services. Furthermore, once your certification is complete, it can be used to help you decide which real-world application to use based on GCP.
Online classes and instructor-led training courses
To begin, the Google Professional Cloud Devops Engineer Training is available in both online and instructor-led formats. They are one of the most engaging methods of exam preparation. Many reputable websites offer very nice instructors as well as excellent preparation content. Because we are all accustomed to classroom instruction, these classes can serve as close substitutes with the added benefit of being able to attend the class from anywhere.
Evaluate with Practice Test
The quality of your practice will have a significant impact on how well you pass the exam. Participate in as many Google Professional Cloud Devops Engineer Practice Exams and test series as you can. They will assist you in determining the level of your preparation, identifying your gaps, and identifying the weak areas that require additional work. There are numerous reputable educational websites that offer excellent content and assist you in achieving success. Try a free practice test now!
Step 5 – Take the exam in accordance with the Expert’s Advice
It is critical to develop your own 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 on a regular basis. Always stick to your plan and carry it out as planned. It is critical to successfully implement your strategy in order 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.
