Google Cloud · Associate · Intermediate
Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer exam objectives
Google Cloud publishes 5 exam domains with official weightings. The weight tells you where your marks come from, so your study time should roughly follow it.
1. Setting up a cloud solution environment
20%- Build the resource hierarchy: organisation, folders, projects, and what each level is for
- Enable APIs, set up billing accounts, and link projects to the right one
- Configure billing budgets, alerts and exports, and know who can see them
- Install and configure the Cloud SDK, and manage gcloud configurations and accounts
2. Planning and configuring a cloud solution
17.5%- Size compute to the workload and use the pricing calculator before committing
- Choose between Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run and Cloud Functions on operational overhead
- Match the storage product to the access pattern: Cloud Storage classes, Cloud SQL, Spanner, Bigtable, Firestore, BigQuery
- Plan VPC layout, subnets and IP ranges, and know what cannot be changed later
3. Deploying and implementing a cloud solution
25%- Launch and manage Compute Engine instances, templates, managed instance groups and autoscaling
- Create GKE clusters and node pools, and deploy workloads with kubectl
- Deploy revisions to Cloud Run and Cloud Functions, and wire up their triggers
- Load data into storage and database products, and stand up Pub/Sub and Dataflow paths
- Create VPCs, firewall rules, load balancers and Cloud DNS records
- Deploy the same resources through infrastructure as code with Terraform
4. Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution
20%- Manage instance lifecycle, disks, snapshots and images, and resize live resources
- Operate GKE: scale node pools and workloads, roll out updates, read pod state
- Manage storage lifecycle rules, database backups and restores
- Use Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Error Reporting and Cloud Trace to find what broke
- Build alerting policies and log sinks, and know where each signal lands
5. Configuring access and security
17.5%- Apply IAM roles at the right level: primitive, predefined and custom, and why custom is a last resort
- Grant least privilege, and understand how policies inherit down the hierarchy
- Create and manage service accounts, keys and impersonation
- Assign service accounts to resources, and view audit logs to answer who did what
Our practice exam spreads its questions across these exact domains at these weightings, so your score in each one tells you precisely where you stand.
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