Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer

Approximately 20% (Google publishes approximate section weights). Resource hierarchy, organization policies, project/account setup, project-level IAM, Cloud Identity, API enablement, quotas, and billing.

• Set up cloud projects and accounts (resource hierarchy, organization policies, project IAM, Cloud Identity, enable APIs, quotas)
• Manage billing configuration (billing accounts, link projects, budgets and alerts, billing exports)

Approximately 17.5% (weights approximate). Selecting and planning compute, storage, and network resources for a workload, weighing product choices and cost/performance trade-offs.

• Plan and configure compute resources (choose among Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions; Spot VMs; custom machine types)
• Plan and configure data storage (Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Firestore, Spanner, Bigtable; storage classes Standard/Nearline/Coldline/Archive)
• Plan and configure network resources (load balancing, resource locations, Network Service Tiers)

Approximately 25% (largest, most practical section; weights approximate). Hands-on deployment across compute, containers, serverless, data, and networking, including infrastructure as code.

• Deploy Compute Engine resources (instances, disks, SSH keys, autoscaled managed instance groups, OS Login)
• Deploy Google Kubernetes Engine resources (kubectl, Autopilot/regional/private clusters, containerized apps)
• Deploy Cloud Run and Cloud Functions resources, including event-driven apps (Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Eventarc)
• Deploy data and networking solutions and implement via IaC (Cloud SQL/BigQuery/Spanner/Pub/Sub, VPCs/subnets/firewalls, Terraform)

Approximately 20% (weights approximate). Operating and maintaining running resources: Compute Engine/GKE/Cloud Run, storage/database administration, networking upkeep, and monitoring and logging.

• Manage Compute Engine resources (remote connections, VM inventory, snapshots and images)
• Manage GKE and Cloud Run resources (clusters/node pools, Kubernetes objects, autoscaling, Artifact Registry, revisions, traffic splitting)
• Manage storage, database, and networking resources (Cloud Storage lifecycle, queries and backups, subnets, static IPs, Cloud DNS, Cloud NAT)
• Monitoring and logging (Cloud Monitoring alerts and custom metrics, view/filter/route logs, Ops Agent, audit logs)

Approximately 17.5% (weights approximate). Configuring identity, access, and security with IAM policies/roles and service accounts, applying least-privilege principles.

• Manage Identity and Access Management (view/create IAM policies; basic, predefined, and custom roles)
• Manage service accounts (create/assign, least privilege, impersonation and short-lived credentials, Workload Identity Federation)