Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Exams & Study Guide

Setting up cloud projects and accounts including creating a resource hierarchy, applying organizational policies to the resource hierarchy, granting members Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles within a project, managing users and groups in Cloud Identity (manually and automated), enabling APIs within projects, provisioning and setting up products in Google Cloud Observability, assessing quotas and requesting increases. Managing billing configuration including creating one or more billing accounts, linking projects to a billing account, establishing billing budgets and alerts, and setting up billing exports.

Planning and configuring compute resources including selecting appropriate compute choices for a given workload (Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine/GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions), using Spot VM instances and custom machine types. Planning and configuring data storage options including selecting data products (Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Firestore, Spanner, Bigtable), choosing storage options (zonal Persistent Disk, regional Persistent Disk, Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive). Planning and configuring networking resources including load balancing, availability of resource locations in a network, and Network Service Tiers.

Deploying and implementing Compute Engine resources including launching a compute instance (assigning disks, availability policy, SSH keys), creating an autoscaled managed instance group using an instance template, configuring OS Login, and configuring VM Manager. Deploying and implementing Google Kubernetes Engine resources including installing and configuring the command-line interface (CLI) for Kubernetes (kubectl), deploying a GKE cluster with different configurations (Autopilot, regional clusters, private clusters, GKE Enterprise), and deploying a containerized application to GKE. Deploying and implementing Cloud Run and Cloud Functions resources including deploying an application, deploying an application to receive Google Cloud events (Pub/Sub events, Cloud Storage object change notification events, Eventarc), and deciding where to deploy an application using Cloud Run (fully managed), Cloud Run for Anthos, or Cloud Functions. Deploying and implementing data solutions including deploying data products (Cloud SQL, Firestore, BigQuery, Spanner, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Cloud Storage, AlloyDB) and loading data (command-line upload, load data from Cloud Storage, Storage Transfer Service). Deploying and implementing networking resources including creating a VPC with subnets (custom mode VPC, Shared VPC), creating ingress and egress firewall rules and policies (IP subnets, network tags, service accounts), and peering with external networks (VPC network peering, Cloud VPN). Implementing resources through infrastructure as code including infrastructure as code tooling (Cloud Foundation Toolkit, Config Connector, Terraform, Helm).

Managing Compute Engine resources including remotely connecting to an instance, viewing running VM inventory (instance IDs, details), working with snapshots (view, delete, schedule snapshots, create using a VM), and working with images (create, view, delete an image in a VM or snapshot). Managing Google Kubernetes Engine resources including viewing running cluster inventory (nodes, Pods, Services), configuring GKE access to Artifact Registry, working with node pools (add, edit, remove a node pool), working with Kubernetes resources (Pods, Services, StatefulSets), and managing horizontal and vertical autoscaling configurations. Managing Cloud Run resources including deploying new versions of an application, adjusting application traffic splitting parameters, and setting autoscaling parameters for autoscaling instances. Managing storage and database solutions including managing and securing objects in Cloud Storage buckets, setting object lifecycle management policies for Cloud Storage buckets, executing queries to retrieve data from data instances (Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Spanner, Firestore, AlloyDB), estimating costs of data storage resources, backing up and restoring database instances (Cloud SQL, Firestore), and reviewing job status (Dataflow, BigQuery). Managing networking resources including adding a subnet to a VPC, expanding a subnet to have more IP addresses, reserving static internal or external IP addresses, and working with Cloud DNS and Cloud NAT. Monitoring and logging including creating Cloud Monitoring alerts based on resource metrics, creating and ingesting Cloud Monitoring custom metrics (from applications or logs), exporting logs to external systems (on-premises, BigQuery), configuring log buckets, log routers, and log analytics, viewing and filtering logs in Cloud Logging, viewing specific log message details in Cloud Logging, using cloud diagnostics to research an application issue, viewing Google Cloud status, configuring and deploying Ops Agent, deploying Managed Service for Prometheus, and configuring audit logs.

Managing Identity and Access Management (IAM) including viewing and creating IAM policies, managing the various role types and defining custom IAM roles (basic, predefined, custom). Managing service accounts including creating service accounts, using service accounts in IAM policies with minimum permissions, assigning service accounts to resources, managing IAM permissions of a service account, managing service account impersonation, and creating and managing short-lived service account credentials.