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
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:
- Immutable artifacts with Container Registry (Google Documentation: Help secure software supply chains on Google Kubernetes Engine, Managing images)
- Artifact management with Artifact Registry
- Deployment to hybrid and multi-cloud environments (e.g., Anthos, GKE)
- CI/CD pipeline triggers
- Testing a new application version in the pipeline
- 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
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:
- Vulnerability analysis with Container Registry (Google Documentation: Getting vulnerabilities and metadata for images)
- Binary Authorization (Google Documentation: Binary Authorization)
- IAM policies per environment (Google Documentation: Policy)
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 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
- 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
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.
