Preparing for Google’s Professional Cloud Security Engineer Certification
I recently sat for (and passed) Google’s Professional Cloud Security Engineer exam. I wanted to write a brief blog, share my experience, and as always maybe even help some others along the way.
Overview:
Google allocates 2 hrs to complete a 50 question exam. There are no prerequisites to test, so anyone wanting to take it can sign up; however, Google recommends you have 3+ years of industry experience including 1+ year(s) designing and managing solutions using GCP.
My approach:
By the time I had decided to tackle this exam I had about 1.5 years of daily hands on experience in GCP. I gave myself a month and a half to prepare for this exam after reading the the exam guide.
Since I had experience with the GCP platform already I decided to dive into the GCP practice test to get a good baseline on my abilities. Going through their sample practice test I saw there were certain subject I needed to formally brush up on. To my surprise, I passed the practice test on the first try. I documented all the questions I got wrong and also noted the question I was on the fence about but still got right.
Great, now I had a decent baseline (so I thought) and started looking for materials to help guide me on this journey. When reaching out to the GCP community everyone directed me to A Cloud Guru’s (ACG)course. Based on my past experience taking the Associate Cloud Engineer course from ACG, it wasn’t the most engaging material. However, I felt a little more comfortable knowing the course facilitator was the one and only Antoni Tzavelas. I launched the ACG course and started with the topics I was less familiar with, (KMS, Kubernetes Security).
After watching all the ACG lectures I dove right into their provided practice test, I passed and was feeling good. I don’t like relying on single piece of material when it comes to studying. I looked around and found more practice tests on Udemy and immediately took one, and, FAILED was what popped up on my screen. How could this have been the case? I had been pretty confident and was surprised when I saw the results. I stuck to my studying tactics and noted the questions I got wrong, read up on GCP native documentation on the subject, then re-watched the ACG topics related.
By exam time I had watched all ACG lectures 3x and had re-read the vendor documentation. During the actual exam I felt adequately prepared with the resources I used to help bring a passing grade.
Tips:
- Utilize the free tier of GCP — Google offers a free tier of their cloud platform products and for all new users gives a $300 credit.
- Read and understand the exam guide — It really helped me to look at this every day when I was sandboxing stuff in GCP. It kept me on track.
- Take the free practice exam — Google offers a 25 question sample test. Take it.
- Read actual GCP documentation — These resources are good, and I recommend you check them out, but reading the GCP documentation really helps too!
*Disclaimer: These are the tips that helped me pass the Professional Cloud Security Engineer exam. They don’t guarantee a passing score.*
Resources that I used:
- A Cloud guru GCP course
- Udemy practice tests
- Official GCP documentation
Topics to be familiar with:
- DLP
- Encryption
- Load balancers
- KMS
- PCI,HIPAA (Compliance)
- GCS
- IAM (at every hierarchy)
- Kubernets
- GCP networking concepts
- GCP security best practices
Final thoughts:
This was my 3rd GCP exam and 2nd professional level exam with Google. I relied a lot on my prior GCP knowledge and ACG to get me across the finish line. I would not recommend someone to start their GCP certification path with this certification unless they had hands on knowledge and worked with GCP on a daily basis.
Bio: Jake has been in IT for 5 years and is currently a Cloud Security Engineer. He currently holds CompTIA S+, Google’s ACE , Google’s PCA, Google’s PCSE, and Terraform associate certifications!
