Configuring Security & Access

• Manage Service Account: the candidates should know how to manage service accounts with restricted privileges; grant access to service accounts within another project; assign service accounts to virtual machine instances;
• Manage IAM: this domain involves your ability to view IAM role allocations; assign IAM roles to Google Groups or accounts; define custom IAM duties;
• View audit logs or managed services and projects.

Ensuring Operation Success of a Cloud Solution

• Manage network resources: this part requires the capability to add subnets to existing VPCs; expand subnets to include more IP addresses; reserve static internal or external IP address; work with management interfaces;
• Monitor and log: this subject includes the examinees’ ability to create Stackdriver custom metrics and Stackdriver alerts according to resource metrics; use Cloud diagnostics to analyze application issues; check and filter logs within Stackdriver; configure log sinks for the exportation of logs into external systems; view the status of Google Cloud Platform.
• Manage database and storage solutions: this area requires your competence in setting object lifecycle management policies for Cloud Storage buckets; moving different objects between Cloud Storage buckets; estimating costs for BigQuery; executing queries for the retrieval of data from data instances. It also requires your capability to backup and restores data instances; review a job status in BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, or Cloud Dataproc; work with management interfaces;
• Manage App Engine and Cloud Run resources: the individuals should be able to adjust application traffic splitting parameters; set scaling parameters for auto-scaling instances; work with management interfaces;
• Manage Google Kubernetes Engine resources: this requires one’s competence in viewing on-going running cluster inventory; browsing container image depository and viewing the details of container images; working with pods, node pools, services, stateful applications, and management interfaces;
• Manage Compute Engine resources: the test takers should demonstrate their capability to manage single VM instances; RDP/SSH to instance; attack GPU to new instances and install CUDA libraries; view on-going running virtual machine inventory; work with snapshots, images, management interfaces, and instance groups;

Reference: https://cloud.google.com/certification/cloud-engineer

Exam highlights

The Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification exam is 2 hours long and covers mostly two question formats, which are multiple choice and multiple select. The applicants can take the test as an online proctored option (remotely) or as an onsite proctored exam at one of the centers across the world. You can go through the official website for details of the test-taking process. To register for this exam, the individuals must pay the fee of $125. This fee applies to a single try. If you do not pass your Google exam at the first attempt, you have to try again and pay another fee for registration. The test is available in the English, Spanish, Japanese, and Indonesian languages.

The Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification is designed to measure the candidates’ fundamental skills required to perform the deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of projects on Google Cloud. This certificate is a good starting point for those individuals who are new to Cloud and can be used as a stepping stone to the professional-level certifications of this vendor. To get certified, the applicants are required to complete one exam. The qualifying test measures the ability of the specialists to perform the following tasks: setting up the Cloud solution environment; planning and configuring Cloud solutions; deploying and implementing Cloud solutions; ensuring the effective operation of Cloud solutions; and configuring access & security.