Google Cloud Certified - Professional Cloud Developer exam

I have successfully passed another Google exam, "Professional Cloud Developer". My certificate is available here.

The exam was as usual 2 hours and contained 60 questions. Overall the exam was not complex, but it took a bit of time to read the questions and the answers, understand the context and choose the right answer.

Notes on preparing for the exam. This time I have decided to use completely different approach and not to use Google Skills Boost or any other large book or course to prepare for the exam, but rather approach the exam from questions and answers perspective, basically initially preparing a list of questions that I wanted to find answers to, and list of topics to cover and then finding the answers to these questions and covering the topics.

1. I took a sample test available here. To my surprise the test contained around 40 questions, even though usually example test sets for Google exams contain around 20 questions. For me it was good to have more questions than usual because it allowed to me see more topics and more questions and see which areas I need to refresh and learn.
2. After taking the test, I reviewed my results and saved them for future reference along with the information about the date of the example test and statistics about number of questions, number or correctly and incorrectly answered questions.
3. Then I analyzed my correct and incorrect answers (I suggest doing both analyzes since some of the answers could have be simply guessed) and came up with a list of questions that I wanted to get clear answers and topics that I wanted to refresh. In my case it was around 60 questions and 10 wider topics I wanted to cover. Example questions: "What is JWT ecosystem and what are different entities, such as JWT, JWS, JWE, JWK?", "What is the purpose of OAuth 2.0, what is OIDC and how are both integrated?" and example topics: "What is the GKE overall product offering and how to secure GKE setup?".
4. Then I checked the "Professional Cloud Developer exam topics" and expanded the list of questions and topics that I need to work on.
5. For each question I searched answers in the documentation and prepared a list of bookmarks pointing to the information that I searched for. These bookmarks could be used for example to share learning materials or for quick access and refresh later before the exam. Technical documentation of Google related to GCP products and services is very good, but it needs a bit of getting used to, so doing this exercise while preparing for the exam will prepare you well for the actual work using GCP products and services since you will know how to navigate GCP documentation well. Besides, using any book or course for the test preparation is prone to errors, since Cloud technologies develop fast and such books and courses could easily provide outdated information. An example of a link with a large topic overview (Pub/Sub) from Google documentation is here and an example of a link that addresses only a specific question (GKE Autopilot mode) is here.
6. I also took brief notes in the digital format for each question and topic that I have written down. These notes are very good for example to prepare customized flash cards for tailored review sessions. Bard or ChatGPT (LLM API servers) could be used for example to automate flash card creation. Overall in my case I got a document that is around 70 pages long.
7. I also like the book: "The Kubernetes Book" since it describes the topic of Kubernetes briefly but extremely well, so I did read the book and took notes as needed. It takes only 1-2 days to read the book if you are novice and even shorter if you are experienced in this area.
8. After answering all the questions and covering all the topics, I scheduled an exam and read the notes just before the exam to remember missing details.

Overall this approach is much faster than reading the whole book or taking a whole course because it is tailored to your needs and covers topics that you do not understand or do not know. I would estimate that I saved around 50% on my preparation time using this approach.

In case you want to see an example tailored document with questions and answers or topics covered or exported bookmarks, please contact me and I can share mine.

In terms of questions and topics covered in the exam, please see description here, however I would highlight that some of the topics are very important and you are very likely to get many questions about these topics:

1. Containerization and GKE, some questions are related to overall Deployment configuration, autoscaling, etc.
2. Serverless: Cloud Functions and Cloud Run, when do use which, how to integrate one to another, etc.
3. Application security: including container security. Topics such as Artifact Analysis, etc.
4. Pub/Sub as a glue between different architectural components.
5. Storage, including Cloud Storage, SQL, etc.
6. Cloud Logging and Monitoring.

So summarize: a very good exam and I believe it makes sense to prepare and take the test. It covers a number of important topics in Cloud and prepares you well for the actual work as an architect or engineer focusing on SW development projects. I would also recommend using tailored approach as described above since it is faster and makes you a better professional by covering in needed depth only the topics that you need.