Looking back at my study for the Google Professional Cloud Developer exam
I recently passed Google's Professional Cloud Developer certification exam.
This is a review of what I did to pass the exam.
What is Professional Cloud Developer (PCD)?
Professional Cloud Developer is a certification that proves you have the knowledge to build scalable, highly available applications using Google's recommended tools (mainly GCP) and best practices.
The exam tests the following skills:
- Designing cloud-native applications with high scalability, availability, and reliability
- Building and testing applications
- Deploying applications
- Integrating Google Cloud services
- Managing deployed applications
Why I took the exam
I was invited to join a company program called G.I.G, which helps engineers build technical skills with Google Cloud. As part of completing this program, I needed to get a Google Cloud certification.
I had been wanting to study GCP properly for a while, so I took this as a good opportunity to take the certification exam.
My development experience
Implementation and design experience
- Server-side development: 2.5 years
- Frontend development: 3 years
Infrastructure experience
- Built and operated infrastructure using Terraform + AWS Fargate for running Next.js in production
- There was an existing base, so I copied it and built it while consulting with people who knew it
- Built APIs using Node.js + Lambda
- Familiar with basic AWS services
- Had little experience with GCP and was a bit afraid of it — couldn't even navigate the GCP console
How I studied
Study time and duration
Study time: about 60 hours
Study period: 2 months
The total study time was about 60 hours, but about 1/4 of that was spent on hands-on labs required to complete the Coursera courses. So the actual time spent on pure studying was about 45 hours.
Coursera
I took and completed 5 Coursera courses for PCD exam candidates, provided for G.I.G program participants. The content was video-based learning about GCP and hands-on practice with Qwiklabs.
Just watching the videos wasn't enough for me to remember things, so while watching the videos I wrote notes about the important points. When I encountered words or service names I didn't understand, I looked them up in the documentation or other people's blog posts. This approach felt much more effective than just watching the videos.
You can find my notes in Study Notes for the Professional Cloud Developer Exam.
I took the following courses. They are also open to the public, so anyone can take them.
- Google Cloud Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure (Japanese)
- Application Deployment, Debug, Performance (Japanese)
- Securing and Integrating Components of your Application (Japanese)
- Getting Started with Application Development (Japanese)
- Getting Started with Google Kubernetes Engine (Japanese)
Practice exam
After finishing all the Coursera courses, I worked through the official practice exam. For every service name or word I didn't know, I looked it up and made sure I understood it. After that, I kept taking the practice exam until I could explain each answer from memory.
Difficulty and impressions
Since it is a multiple-choice exam, I thought that if I just learned the GCP services, I could answer the system design questions using common sense from experience — and that was pretty much how it went.
My impression was that the exam is not that hard if you have a reasonable amount of server-side development experience, including design. In particular, if you use GCP at work, I think you can pass just by taking the practice exam to get a feel for the test style and doing a bit of studying.