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
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 – 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.
