I took the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Associate Cloud Engineer exam today – and passed.

Fairly difficult. 50 questions, two hours. All multiple choice (no multi-selects). The last question had a single diagram: four missing GCP components in an architecture diagram; pick which four belong where.

With the practice exams I'd taken, questions were often focused around a single concept, and you had to select the correct command line or GCP console sequence of steps to "make it happen". On the actual exam, they chained several requirements together – "do this, do that, and finally do this" – and you had to pick from a few options that may all "work", the goal being to pick the one which is most efficient and most in line with Google's best practices. This made it pretty difficult in and of itself. There was also a pretty heavy emphasis on "least privilege" with respect to assigning permissions to users.

I can only guess that the live exam has changed quite a bit over time. Reddit posts and YouTube dumps about earlier versions of the exam (100+ questions and four hours at the time) showed a much heavier emphasis on knowing the scope of products in the GCP family. There wasn't much of that here. Zero questions about Cloud Functions, DataStore, Firestore/Firebase, and many other products.

I don't know how often Google changes their exam and based on what factors, but the distribution of questions on the exam was very different than that on the practice exams (and these exams came from Google's official study guide).

On the Associate Cloud Engineer practice exams, there was a large focus on command line tools. Knowing the correct syntax of gcloud vs. kubectl vs. gsutil (and when to use one vs. another) could probably get you through a fair amount of the practice exams. There was less of that on the real exam, which was a shame – because I really beefed up in this area.

I can only guess that the live exam has changed quite a bit over time. Reddit posts and YouTube dumps from earlier versions of the exam (100+ questions and four hours at the time) showed a much heavier emphasis on knowing the scope of products in the GCP family. There wasn't much of that here. Zero questions about Cloud Functions, DataStore, Firestore/Firebase, and many other products.

There were several more networking questions (load balancer health checks, internal/external proxies, VPC subnet config) than on the practice exams, which I wasn't expecting.

Definitely some material you'd have to get either from a newer book/video or hands-on experience. Several questions about metadata, a question or two about scopes. Several more questions about IAM/roles than on the practice exams, and at a more detailed level. A few answers wanted the actual API role name (roles/storage.objectCreator) versus their friendly-name counterparts on the GCP console.

A few obscure questions. One specifically asked how to force the MIME type on a storage object to view inline vs. prompt to save.

Finished with plenty of time to spare, so went back and did a review. For the few questions where I obviously guessed, I didn't do too much re-deliberation, but there were a few where the choices were so tricky, I reviewed simply because they were driving me nuts! One question asked about the best way to verify the installation of a piece of software on a VM in the fewest number of steps. There were answers consisting of various permutations of installing additional components, opening network ports, setting credentials, etc. – and each one looked like it was either missing a step or had unnecessary steps. I've heard Google includes a few questions not actually factored into your final score. Maybe these were amongst them; maybe I just didn't know the correct answers (also a distinct possibility...)

As a whole, pretty difficult at least compared to the multiple practice exams I'd taken. Maybe there are better or more up-to-date study materials out there than those that I had. Even if there are, this is a test where no amount of textbook knowledge is going to beat hands-on experience with GCP.

I'll be taking the Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Cloud Developer exams next... so wish me luck!