Getting the Google Cloud Associate Certification
A while ago I decided to get certified on Google Cloud, and I kept all the materials I gathered along the way in a public repo: ovimihai/google-cloud-associate-training.
If you are thinking about doing the same, here is the short version of how it went.
The learning paths
I didn’t jump straight into the exam. I went through three stages, each building on the previous one:
- Google Cloud Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure – the gentle introduction. I got Cloud Skills Boost free for 7 days and only had to finish 3 labs to unlock the next step.
- Associate Cloud Engineer Journey – the actual target. This time the free Cloud Skills Boost access lasted 2 months, and finishing two badges got me a free exam voucher. The official references worth bookmarking are the Exam Details and the Exam Topics.
- Professional Cloud Architect Journey – the next level up, once the Associate was done. See the Exam details and Exam topics.
The single most useful tip: the free Cloud Skills Boost access and the free exam voucher are real. Finish the required badges and you basically get the exam paid for.
Where you learn
Everything happens on Google’s own Cloud Skills Boost platform. It mixes short courses with hands-on labs that spin up real (temporary) GCP projects, so you practice on the actual console and gcloud CLI instead of just reading slides.
Cheat sheets I kept open
These were the tabs I always had open while studying:
- GCP Services cheat sheet
- Compute products
- Databases
- gcloud CLI cheat sheet (PDF)
- kubectl cheat sheet
Worth it?
Definitely. Like any certification it helps you stand out, but more importantly the labs force you to actually use the services rather than just memorize them. By the time you sit the exam you’ve already built networks, deployed instances and broken a few things in a safe sandbox.
If you want my full notes, learning plans and the lab breakdowns, grab them from the repo: google-cloud-associate-training.