Get 3 GCP Professional Certificates in 4 Months

A little bit about my background: I’ve been working in the Cloud Computing industry for 9 years, focusing on the private and public clouds implementation based on a popular open source cloud computing platform, OpenStack. As an active contributor and project lead in the OpenStack community, I was working as an architect or developer over the past 9 years. However, I don’t have much experience with either AWS, GCP or Azure. With that being said, the knowledge of cloud tech is transferable.

Enough about myself, now back to GCP.

I started working for a client 1 month after my onboarding to Sourced in late November last year, the client is a mature GCP customer which makes me feel urgent that I should arm myself with GCP knowledge as soon as possible. So I started learning GCP and took these exams. Don’t get me wrong, all the certificates are just accessories along with my learning, the goal is to make myself a GCP expert, not an exam specialist.

The materials I used and steps took:

1. The learning course in ACloudGuru. This is always my first step when I want to learn a new cloud platform, to have an overview of most of the cloud services, concepts, especially the networking part, which I think is the most important part when onboarding to a cloud computing platform.
2. For each service/concept/feature that I’ve never heard during my journey in open source, I will walk through its official documentation and do some hands-on by myself, until I understand why, when and how should the service be used.
3. Exam dumps. I do utilize the practice exams and find them very useful. For people taking a GCP exam for the first time, they help to become familiar with the format. Although currently almost all the GCP exam dumps online are not in good quality, most of the official answers are actually incorrect, you need to find the correct answer by yourself by discussing with people, reading and digesting docs in different places, then choose the right answer (hopefully) in the exam.

For me, I found the DevOps exam to be the easiest if you already have some experience with CICD. The hardest one for me is the Networking exam because I’m really not good at designing and implementing the network architecture and solutions with lack of practical experiences, especially when talking about hybrid connectivity scenarios related to VPN, BGP, DNS, etc. Some of the concepts and processes couldn’t be easily verified in the platform as it needs to set up the peer devices in on-prem.

So, to those of you considering taking up a GCP or any other cloud certification, I hope you find some of my sharing insightful, and enjoy the learning and even taking the exam. In the end, I want to clarify again that, I totally agree that certifications are no substitute for practical experience.