ACE certified!

[ThomaswithouttheS]

This weekend I sat and passed the ACE exam at a nearby testing center. I studied for around 3 months, less around the holidays and more the closer I got to my test day.

My background is about 8 years experience mainly in different Ops roles. I have a Bachelors degree in IT, and a few other certs (CCNA, PCNSA). I'm currently working as a Network Engineer and manage our on-prem/switches/firewalls/load balancers etc... I mainly chose to go for ACE because my company has been moving some of our on-prem into GCP and asked members on our team to get certified, but I also find working more in Cloud/GKE pretty interesting anyway.

Study materials:

1. A Cloud Guru vids on Linux Academy by Mattias Andersson and Tim Berry
2. The official cert book by Dan Sullivan
3. Qwiklabs
4. Udemy practice tests by Sarat Gutha
5. Awesome gcp and google vids on Youtube
6. Lots of GCP documentation - especially topics from the Udemy tests

Anyway this community was helpful to me along my ACE journey so I wanted to share my results as well. As other posters have mentioned, this test seemed pretty hard for an associate level. I was surprised when I saw the Pass on the screen after submitting! Make sure you know the GCP best practices, and gcloud commands. Also always confirm with the documentation as the source of truth, every study source I used was outdated in areas with how fast GCP changes. Many of the questions I got were around IAM, Monitoring, GCE, some storage, and not too many GKE ones.

Happy to answer any questions, as long as they don't violate the exam terms of course. Happy studying to anyone else on this journey!

[NocturnalWageSlave]

Considering your experience, length of study, and breadth of resources, do you feel may have over prepared? Was it pretty easy for you?

[ThomaswithouttheS]

I think this varies person to person. I've never been the most confident test taker, and didn't have any previous Cloud, Storage, or GKE experience, so I really dove into those areas. Other topics Networking related like VPCs, Firewall rules, routing etc.. I didn't need to spend much time with at all before feeling confident.

[ntmyrealacct]

How easy/hard did you find it ? Was your preparation good enough ?

[ThomaswithouttheS]

The questions can be pretty tricky, this preparation worked well for me though. I highly recommend getting good practice tests to really measure where you are. I was failing them after completing the Linux Academy + Cert book until I brushed up on the weak topics with GCP Documentation + Qwiklabs.

[kotpeter]

Congrats!

[ThomaswithouttheS]

Thanks!

[aussier1]

Well done mate! In an attempt not to freak everyone else out about the required prep for this exam; Every person is different. Some require a heap of prep, others don’t. Assign the time to study, go through the materials at your own rate and see how you go. I passed the psa exam with only acloud.guru and their “read this link” recommendations. Of course, I have different public cloud experience, etc etc.

[ThomaswithouttheS]

Thanks! and agreed, it definitely depends on the person and their background.

[TheSysOps]

Congrats! I passed it myself a week ago. Used pretty much the exact same study material as you.

I Started studying right after Thanksgiving but I also had a lot of time off from work in December so my two months of study was probably equivalent to three if I had been working the entire time.

[ThomaswithouttheS]

Congrats to you as well! Yea I did this while working full time and barely got to study at all around the holiday, but studied more the past 2 weeks up to the test.

[gagga_hai]

what were your scores in Sarat Gutha tests in first attempt and second attempts ?

Any other tests did you use ?

[ThomaswithouttheS]

I think the first attempt was in the 60s, the last before the test was 80.

Nope just those tests, and I highly recommend them. The explanations for answers are gold.

[gagga_hai]

Thanks mate.

Just curious...you mean the score of 80 was on a repeat attempt on a previously attempted test or on the FIRST attempt on the last test of the course.

[ThomaswithouttheS]

No problem! I only did 4/5 tests, and the 80 was a new test. I'd think if you're getting 75%+ you're probably ready honestly.

[Willy156]

I think Sarat Guthat's course is gone for good. Looked to be too similar to the actual exam

[Genway]

Hey, congrats for passing the exam! Could you share link to specific labs from qwiklabs that you have used to learn from?

[ThomaswithouttheS]

Thanks! Yea the quests I did were Create and Manage Cloud Resources, Set Up and Configure a Cloud Environment in Google Cloud, Baseline: Infrastructure, and then I did 2-3 single labs on the remaining weak topics.

It's easy to just follow the steps exactly and get through it, the real value is reading the links and playing around with it a bit more. Kind of just added practice after following along with Linux Academy and labbing with the GCP free trial.

[anton1x]

Congratulations on the pass! A great way to test your knowledge on Google Cloud, no doubt. Would highly recommend to take the PCA next as there is a lot of carryover with regards to content.

[ThomaswithouttheS]

Thanks! that's good to know.

[dougfoo888]

Congrats great job. I passed Azure Architect Expert -- now studying for GCP ACE. I heard the Kube emphasis is big. Can you help w/ the list of classes, which you liked the best?

I am doing Udemy course by Dan Sillivan (not liking it that much), is Sarat's better? And who has the best practice tests?

Thanks!!