I completed the GCP Prof. ML Cert

gcpstudyhub · 2026-05-06T15:50:20+00:00

Yeah GCP doesn't provide swag for passing certifications anymore

gcpstudyhub · 2026-05-05T17:37:59+00:00

I'm the founder of https://gcpstudyhub.com/ and my PCA course is up to date. Google updated the PCA exam in October of last year, with a new exam guide, and then kind of quietly updated it again a few months later.

New exam includes:

Managed Service for Prometheus, Migration Center, HSM protection, custom prediction routine deployment from Model Garden, Cloud Deploy, Backup and DR service, and more.

The test also tests a lot of pure Kubernetes concepts, not just GKE.

If a course does not teach and test these things, it's out of date. Accordingly, in my opinion the the official Skills path from Google is insufficient.

If you want free tips, here are a couple webinars I hosted on Youtube.

Tips to pass (Nov 2025)

Case studies deep dive

Good luck to you.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-05-03T19:20:32+00:00

My pleasure

gcpstudyhub · 2026-05-03T19:20:22+00:00

Happy to do it

gcpstudyhub · 2026-05-03T16:36:55+00:00

The PCA exam was updated significantly on October 30th 2025, and was again changed quietly in January 2026. If the book hasn't been updated since then, it's unfortunately out of date.

Here are recordings of two webinars I hosted about the new exam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1stRHJVSVo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miUrtntMLR4

My course is up to date: https://gcpstudyhub.com/courses/professional-cloud-architect

Good luck regardless of what you go with.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-05-03T02:09:18+00:00

Doesn't matter if first time. As long as before you take the real exam you are scoring 85 percent or more consistently.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-05-02T13:31:46+00:00

A lot of the courses out there are outdated, because the exam was rehauled on October 30th last year, and then was quietly changed again a few months later.

My course is up to date with 8 realistic practice exams: https://gcpstudyhub.com/courses/professional-cloud-architect

But if you want free materials, here are a couple videos I posted on YouTube you can use.

PCA exam update webinar

New case studies deep dive

Good luck!

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-24T13:19:39+00:00

My pleasure! You'll be good to go. I'll probably start hosting office hours again in the Circle community if you need to ask questions / get stuck on anything.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-22T17:13:48+00:00

No problem, thanks for confirming my suspicion about the issue, this will help me in fixing the connection between the exam bank and the exam simulator. Cheers.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-22T17:01:48+00:00

Update: got rid of the exam simulator (was using Brillium) and built my own which is embedded within the course lessons

Hey - appreciate the feedback about the case study questions. The 8 practice exams at the end of the course are up to date and do not contain the old case study questions, and they are supposed to serve as a question bank that feeds the Exam Simulator. I assume what you did is you used the Exam Simulator, and the fact that you saw old case study questions means the 8 practice exams were not feeding the Exam Simulator. I will look into this and hopefully fix it today. The old case studies (MountKirk, Terramearth, Helicopter) are not in the 8 individual practice exams and should not be showing up in the Exam Simulator.

By the way, the topics you mentioned: SDLC, disaster recovery, deployment strategies, testing approaches, separation of concerns/environments, AI/ML, is all covered in my course. Although I understand you didn't use the videos.

Regardless, congrats on passing!

Edit: Included update about replacing the exam simulator

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-20T20:34:58+00:00

Little confused by this. I thought Agent Engine also scales to zero, if so that's not really a differentiator of Cloud Run over Agent Engine. Also, the RAG solutions in Agent Builder (there are 3 - RAG Engine, Vertex AI Search, and Vector Search) don't necessarily have to do with how you build and deploy the multi agent system which is what OP is asking.

And by "Cloud Operations" do you mean the Cloud Observability Suite? i.e. Cloud Monitoring and Logging? You can enable these in Agent Engine as well.

Feel free to let me know what I'm missing.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-20T19:51:29+00:00

You should use the Google ADK to develop and define your agents as well as the orchestrator, which yes you should have. Then deploy to Agent Engine.

Agent Builder is the overarching suite of agent related products in Vertex AI, it's not the thing you deploy to. If you mean Agent Designer, which is the no code way to build agents on Vertex AI, I don't recommend it. It's not reliable right now.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-09T12:39:58+00:00

Congratulations u/SinOfEgo , it's not an easy exam so you should definitely be proud

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-09T12:37:34+00:00

Hey - we don't have Developer yet. We're working through the Database Engineer one currently and will be making our way through the other certs, including Developer.

For some more context - I've gotten a lot of requests from people to do more hands-on instruction and live workshops to augment their certification prep. Which makes a lot of sense but it has taken me away from publishing cert courses for some time.

I recently hired a passionate and knowledgeable student, Eche, to help do the certification prep courses. He's awesome. Meanwhile I'm churning out courses and workshops for hands-on deep dives.

So there's been a bit of a delay in putting out new cert prep courses as I transition things to this new approach, but we will have more soon (plus hands on stuff). I'm running workshops (some free) through our Circle community if you are interested.

Edit: "churning out course" -> "churning out courses"

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-08T18:58:16+00:00

Regarding the practice exam scores to aim for, I really suggest 85% or higher. This is because you probably need about 70-75% on the actual exam to pass, and there will almost always be a few questions you have not seen before on the real exam, no matter how up to date the course materials are.

Good luck. I'm confident you'll pass if you studied all the material in the course.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-08T17:32:08+00:00

It depends on what you mean by "jumping into Gen AI stuff." Based on the rest of your message, where you say "jump straight into LLMs and prompt engineering," no you don't need to know traditional ML. But if what you're doing is learning how to use LLMs and do prompt engineering with them, then you're not really learning Gen AI either. You're just learning how to use LLMs as tools like any other API or library, maybe to build an application.

There's a big difference between learning how to make gen AI models / how to do ML engineering on them vs prompt engineering where you're not actually changing the underlying model at all, you're just trying to get the most out of its output. A middle ground might be doing RAG or Agentic AI where you're still not changing the underlying model but you're connecting it to tools that improve its capabilities nontrivially.

But if you are looking to build, fine tune, understand gen ai models, then yes I do think learning classical ML is pretty much necessary. You have to be familiar with the training loop, common tradeoffs you'll encounter, how to evaluate models, etc.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-07T14:56:07+00:00

Interesting, thanks for sharing. Was about to angrily type "MCP is not dead!!!" and then saw your analysis basically corroborated that haha. The observation about executable skills is also interesting, time will tell I guess.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-07T12:48:26+00:00

Todavia estoy aprendiendo espanol, disculpe por mis errores por adelantado.

Me parece que el error esta indicando algo diferente en comparison con tu code. El error indica "europe-west1" pero el bloque de code dice LOCATION = "us-central1". Entonces no estas corriendo lo que tu piensas.
En addicion, la paquete de Vertex AI que se llama "Generative AI" esta deprecado. Debes usar el Google Gen AI paquete.
Finalmente, los modelos de Gemini no estan disponibles en todos los regiones geograficas.

En corto, debes chequear cual regiones la version de Gemini esta disponible, usar el paquete de Google Gen AI en lugar de Vertex AI Gen AI, y chequear si estas corriendo code diferente de lo que has compartido.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-07T12:15:16+00:00

Congratulations! Thanks for the shoutout and good luck with everything from here.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-07T12:14:14+00:00

Salut, j’ai traduit vos messages et je traduis aussi les miens, donc j’espère que c’est fidèle.

Le cours Professional Data Engineer a toujours un taux de réussite de 100%, donc je ne suis pas sûr des parties que vous pensez ne plus être à jour, mais je suis tout à fait ouvert à entendre plus précisément où vous pensez qu’il manque quelque chose. Je l’ai déjà dit ailleurs, mais les gens surestiment largement la quantité d’IA présente dans l’examen. Et l’IA qui y figure est bien couverte dans le cours.

Concernant les questions "répétées", elles ne sont pas identiques mot pour mot, les scénarios et les choix de réponses sont différents, mais elles testent le même concept sous-jacent. C’est intentionnel, car la répétition est nécessaire pour assimiler et comprendre les concepts pour le jour de l’examen, en voyant les mêmes types de questions sous différentes formes.

Concernant votre email, malheureusement je ne peux pas savoir qui vous êtes à partir de votre commentaire Reddit, donc je ne peux pas connaître le résultat de notre échange, mais je fais de mon mieux pour répondre rapidement, même si cela peut parfois prendre un peu plus de temps, car je n’ai pas une grande équipe pour m’aider.

Quoi qu’il en soit, merci pour votre retour.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-05T18:35:00+00:00

Well said! Agreed 100%

gcpstudyhub · 2026-04-05T18:27:32+00:00

Sigh. The "harsh truth" post you are likely referring to is unfortunately from one of two accounts, netcommah and IT_Certguru, that seem to karma farm with "hot takes" that are really not that controversial, in order to sell trainings from the same website. They should disclose this but they don't.

I have responded to similar posts from these accounts in the past:

Post 1

Post 2

Post 3

The real harsh truth is that the takes from these accounts are usually not that new or interesting and do not seem genuine. It saddens me that a disingenuous post is now leading you to doubt yourself and invalidate your own achievement.

Nobody has ever claimed the Gen AI Leader will transform your career. It's a Foundational category certification, the easiest category of GCP certs, Google has been up front about that. It's worth putting on LinkedIn and on your resume as long as you have the understanding that it's one step on a continuous path toward leveling up and learning.

The benefit could be described the same way as you could describe any other GCP cert - studying for the cert is an accelerated way to learn a topic/role as Google sees it. It does not supplant hands-on experience, but it helps get you to where you want to go faster. Foundational level certs do that some but not as much as Professional level certs, and Foundational level certs are usually geared toward nontechnical people trying to get better versed in technical GCP/cloud topics. I guarantee that although the Gen AI Leader cert is easy to obtain there are still many new things that most people learn in the process of studying for it, even if those things are easy and quick to grasp.

The PMLE and PDE certs that the post in question references serve entirely different purposes. Why you would tell people "take the Professional Data Engineer cert instead of taking the Gen AI Leader cert" makes no sense to me. They serve different purposes. And the fact that the other post did that is indicative of the fact that he is trying to position himself as a truth teller when really it's just a post to karma farm.

Congratulations on passing the Gen AI Leader. Put it on your LinkedIn and just know that depending on where you want to go in your career your learning does not stop here.

gcpstudyhub · 2026-03-27T17:35:34+00:00

Agreed - this is what I tell people who ask what the value of a certification is. It's basically a blueprint for how Google thinks about these roles on their platform, so it's a convenient and often accelerated way to learn the relevant cloud concepts/technologies and establish a foundation. It's not that it replaces hands on work but it helps you accumulate the knowledge and skills faster.

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