Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Study Guide

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Google Cloud Platform has established itself as one of the most well-known cloud platforms. It has effectively managed to deliver high competency to the previously existing cloud platform giants – Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure – in a short period of time. The Google Cloud platform has attained the greatest level of recognition, and the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification is highly recommended for its applications in analytics, machine learning, and cloud-native computing. It is now regarded as the Best Cloud Engineer Certification.

Key skills to become Google Professional Cloud Devops Engineer (GCP):

The key skills that this exam focuses on are –

  • Firstly, applying site reliability engineering principles to any service
  • Secondly, optimizing service performance
  • Then, implementing service monitoring strategies
  • Also, building and implementing CI/CD pipelines for a service
  • Laslty, managing service incidents

Exam Target Audience:

The Google Cloud Platform Professional Cloud Devops Engineer will be in charge of ensuring that development operations are efficient and that service dependability and delivery speed are balanced. As a result, you should be able to construct software delivery pipelines, deploy and monitor services, and manage and learn from issues using Google Cloud Platform. This exam is aimed mostly at these individuals :

  • To begin with, On-premises IT system administrators
  • Then, Cloud solution architects and application developers
  • Subsequently, DevOps professionals with industry experience
  • Further, Aspiring DevOps professionals with limited GCP experience
  • Also, On-premise system engineers

Study Guide For Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam

To pass any certification test, you must choose the finest exam preparation method. When it comes to the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam, making the proper decision is critical if you want to have a successful and satisfying career on the Google cloud platform. So let’s get started with the planning.

Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (GCP) Preparation Guide

1. Review the exam guide

Before you start studying for the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam, you should familiarise yourself with the exam’s primary objectives. GCP gives a well-structured test guide to applicants pursuing certification. Knowing the exam objectives is critical for gaining an understanding of the exam. To have a better understanding of the test guide, go to the Official website of GCP. A careful examination of the test guide will enable you to better align yourself with the exam’s main objectives. As a result, you will be able to achieve the necessary command to obtain your desired certification. The Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Course covers the following primary domains:

Topic 1: Bootstrapping a Google Cloud organization for DevOps   

 1.1 Designing the overall resource hierarchy for an organization. Considerations include:

  • Projects and folders
  • Shared networking
  • Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and organization-level policies
  • Creating and managing service accounts

  1.2 Managing infrastructure as code. Considerations include:

  • Infrastructure as code tooling (e.g., Cloud Foundation Toolkit, Config Connector, Terraform, Helm)
  • Making infrastructure changes using Google-recommended practices and infrastructure as code blueprints
  • Immutable architecture

  1.3 Designing a CI/CD architecture stack in Google Cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Considerations include:

  • CI with Cloud Build
  • CD with Google Cloud Deploy
  • Widely used third-party tooling (e.g., Jenkins, Git, ArgoCD, Packer)
  • Security of CI/CD tooling

  1.4 Managing multiple environments (e.g., staging, production). Considerations include:

  • Determining the number of environments and their purpose
  • Creating environments dynamically for each feature branch with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Terraform
  • Anthos Config Management
Topic 2: Building and implementing CI/CD pipelines for a service

2.1 Designing and managing CI/CD pipelines. Considerations include:

2.2 Implement CI/CD pipelines:

  • Auditing and tracking deployments (e.g., Artifact Registry, Cloud Build, Google Cloud Deploy, Cloud Audit Logs)
  • Deployment strategies (e.g., canary, blue/green, rolling, traffic splitting)
  • Rollback strategies
  • Troubleshooting deployment issues

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: Cloud storage)
  • Secret management
  • Build versus runtime secret injection

2.4 Secure the deployment pipeline:

Section 3: Applying site reliability engineering practices to a service

   3.1 Balancing change, velocity, and reliability of the service. Considerations include:

  • Discovering SLIs (e.g., availability, latency)
  • Defining SLOs and understanding SLAs
  • Error budgets
  • 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)
  • Capacity planning (e.g., quotas and limits management)
  • Autoscaling using managed instance groups, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, or GKE
  • Implementing feedback loops to improve a service

   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
  • Establishing joint ownership of services to eliminate team silos

   3.4 Mitigating incident impact on users. Considerations include:

  • Communicating during an incident
  • Draining/redirecting traffic
  • Adding capacity

   3.5 Conducting a postmortem. Considerations include:

  • Documenting root causes
  • Creating and prioritizing action items
  • Communicating the postmortem to stakeholders
Topic 4: Implementing service monitoring strategies

4.1 Manage logs:

  • Collecting structured and unstructured logs from Compute Engine, GKE, and serverless platforms using Cloud Logging
  • Configuring the Cloud Logging agent
  • Collecting logs from outside Google Cloud
  • Sending application logs directly to the Cloud Logging API
  • Log levels (e.g., info, error, debug, fatal)
  • Optimizing logs (e.g., multiline logging, exceptions, size, cost)

4.2 Managing metrics with Cloud Monitoring. Considerations include:

  • Collecting and analyzing application and platform metrics
  • Collecting networking and service mesh metrics
  • Use metric explorer for ad hoc metric analysis (Google Documentation: Metrics Explorer)
  • Creating custom metrics from logs

4.3 Managing dashboards and alerts in Cloud Monitoring. Considerations include:

  • Creating a monitoring dashboard
  • Filtering and sharing dashboards
  • Configuring alerting
  • Defining alerting policies based on SLOs and SLIs
  • Automating alerting policy definition using Terraform
  • Using Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus to collect metrics and set up monitoring and alerting

   4.4 Managing Cloud Logging platform. Considerations include:

  • Enabling data access logs (e.g., Cloud Audit Logs)
  • Enabling VPC Flow Logs
  • Viewing logs in the Google Cloud console
  • Using basic versus advanced log filters
  • Logs exclusion versus logs export
  • Project-level versus organization-level export
  • Managing and viewing log exports
  • Sending logs to an external logging platform
  • Filtering and redacting sensitive data (e.g., personally identifiable information [PII], protected health information [PHI])

   4.5 Implementing logging and monitoring access controls. Considerations include:

  • Restricting access to audit logs and VPC Flow Logs with Cloud Logging
  • Restricting export configuration with Cloud Logging
  • Allowing metric and log writing with Cloud Monitoring
Topic 5: Optimizing service performance

5.1 Identify service performance issues:

  • Using Google Cloud’s operations suite to identify cloud resource utilization
  • Interpret service mesh telemetry (Google Documentation: The service mesh era)
  • Troubleshooting issues with compute resources
  • Troubleshooting deploy time and runtime issues with applications
  • Troubleshooting network issues (e.g., VPC Flow Logs, firewall logs, latency, network details (Google Documentation: VPC Flow Logs overviewUsing VPC Flow LogsUsing Firewall Rules Logging)

5.2 Implementing debugging tools in Google Cloud. Considerations include:

  • Application instrumentation (Google Documentation: Cloud Monitoring)
  • Cloud Logging
  • Cloud Trace
  • Error Reporting
  • Cloud Profiler
  • Cloud Monitoring

5.3 Optimize resource utilization and costs:

  • Preemptible/Spot virtual machines (VMs)
  • Committed-use discounts (e.g., flexible, resource-based)
  • Sustained-use discounts
  • Network tiers
  • Sizing recommendations

2. Refer Official Google Exam Training

– Site Reliability Engineering: Measuring and Managing Reliability

This course explains the concepts of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and is offered by Google Cloud Platform. You will be taught how to describe and measure the intended level of service dependability. These ideas will be applied in the development of the initial SLOs for services. Furthermore, applicants will be guided through the usage of Service Level Indicators (SLIs) to measure dependability and Error Budgets in this course. This will be helpful in making more reliable business judgments. The course will also teach you how to design SLIs and SLOs for a service, as well as the components of SLI.

After the completion of this course, you will learn the following skills

  • Firstly, how to make systems reliable
  • Then, understanding SLIs, SLOs and SLAs
  • Also, quantifying risks to and consequences of SLOs

3. Review and learn from Books

GCP provides a set of books on Site Reliability Engineering books, which will help sharpen your skills.

 Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam Books

1. Building Secure & Reliable Systems – Various Google professionals have contributed their best practices in this book, which may assist any firm in developing scalable and dependable systems. A roadmap to developing fundamentally secure strategies for an organisation is also included in the book.

2. The Site Reliability Workbook – This book elegantly illustrates the approach for applying SRE ideas as well as their practical applications. The book also includes various case studies and practical examples of Google’s experiences from GCP clients.

The Site Reliability Workbook
Site Reliability Engineering

3. Site Reliability Engineering – The members of the SRE team have discussed their involvement with the full software lifecycle in this book. Also, how Google has been able to design, deploy, monitor, and manage the world’s largest software systems as a result of this.

4. Explore Learning Options

Hands-On Practice:

Getting practical experience is the best method to pass any certification exam. GCP encourages participating in hands-on labs accessible on Qwiklabs, as well as the GCP free tier, to improve your cloud platform expertise, just like the GCP DevOps Engineer Exam.

DevOps Essentials – This quest will help you have a better grasp of how to use Google Cloud. You will be able to improve your software delivery capabilities in terms of speed, stability, availability, and security with the support of Google Cloud.

Google Cloud Free Tier – GCP provides you with free materials to help you develop a deeper understanding of Google Cloud services by allowing you to experiment. The Google Cloud Free Tier meets the needs of professionals at all levels, including novices and seasoned experts. The Google Cloud Free Tier is divided into two sections:

  • 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
Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer  Online Tutorials
Join the Community/ Online Forum:

A healthy debate is always useful, regardless of where it takes place. The same may be said of internet discussion boards. This is a great opportunity for students to talk about their problems and see how their peers are preparing for examinations. One advantage of anything that is available online is the number of individuals who can participate. A small group of individuals can participate in an offline conversation, but online platforms can reach a larger audience. When a large number of individuals get involved in a problem, the chances of finding a solution grow dramatically. In addition, having different points of view makes the structure more lively.

Step 4 – Self-evaluation Time – Practice Test

A practise run or two, regardless of how you prepare for the test, might aid you in more ways than you would think. Taking a Google Professional Cloud Devops Engineer Practice Exam is a terrific way to mix up your study routine and guarantee that you get the best results on the real thing. You may learn about the pattern of questions asked by taking practise tests. Analyzing your answers will help you find areas where you need to focus your efforts and will also reveal if you are on track to meet the exam goals. Start Practising Now!

Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer   Practice Tests
Upgrade your skills by Qualifying the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam. Start your Preparations Now!
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