Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer

About the Associate Cloud Engineer exam

Google Cloud's Associate Cloud Engineer is the hands-on associate certification: it checks that you can set up projects, deploy workloads, keep them running and lock them down, mostly from the console and the gcloud command line. Google recommends at least six months of hands-on experience with Google Cloud, and there are no prerequisites.

Where an architect exam asks what you should design, this one usually asks what you should do next. A typical question describes a team that needs to give a contractor read access to one bucket, grow a subnet that ran out of addresses, or roll a new image across a managed instance group, and the options are commands or console steps. Several will look plausible; the right one is usually the least privilege, the least disruptive or the one that uses a managed feature instead of a hand-built workaround.

Exam format

• Questions: 50 to 60, multiple choice and multiple select.
• Time: 2 hours.
• Passing score: Google reports pass or fail only and doesn't publish a cut score.
• Cost: 125 USD plus tax, taken online with a remote proctor or at a testing center.
• Languages: English, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese.
• Validity: 3 years. You can renew with the full exam, a shorter one-hour renewal exam (75 USD), or designated courses and skill badges in the last year of your certification.

What the exam covers

The exam guide has four sections. It was recently updated for Google's product renaming, so you'll see Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform names (Agent Runtime, formerly Vertex AI Agent Engine) alongside the familiar ones.

• Setting up a cloud solution environment (about 20%). The resource hierarchy and organization policies, granting IAM roles, Cloud Identity users and groups, enabling APIs, quotas, billing accounts, budgets, alerts and billing export.
• Planning and implementing a cloud solution (about 30%). Choosing between Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run and Cloud Run functions; instance templates, managed instance groups and Spot VMs; GKE Autopilot and private clusters; Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Spanner, Firestore and Cloud Storage classes; VPCs, firewall rules, Cloud VPN and load balancers; and Terraform or other infrastructure as code.
• Ensuring the successful operation of a cloud solution (about 30%). Snapshots and images, node pools and Pod autoscaling, new Cloud Run revisions and traffic splitting, object lifecycle rules, database backups, resizing subnets, Cloud DNS and Cloud NAT, and Cloud Monitoring alerts, log routing and audit logs.
• Configuring access and security (about 20%). IAM policies and inheritance, predefined and custom roles, service accounts with minimal permissions, impersonation, short-lived credentials, and Workload Identity Federation.

How the practice questions here are organised

There are 10 practice tests of 10 questions each. Rather than one test per section, each test mixes topics from all four, so IAM, networking, Compute Engine, GKE and Cloud Storage turn up throughout, with billing, logging and monitoring, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub and BigQuery spread across them. Every question explains why the right answer works and why each wrong option doesn't, with a link to the Google Cloud documentation it is based on.

The full practice exam has 55 questions in 120 minutes, the middle of Google's range, weighted by section the same way as the real exam, with answers hidden until you submit. Since Google doesn't publish a cut score, the mock passes you at 70%.

A study plan that works

• Take Test 1 before you study anything to find your weak sections.
• Open a free-tier project and do the tasks yourself: create a VPC and firewall rule, a managed instance group, a GKE Autopilot cluster and a Cloud Run service, then tear them down. The exam rewards knowing which command or setting does what.
• Learn the IAM model well. Inheritance down the hierarchy and choosing the narrowest role come up in almost every section.
• Read the explanation of every question you got wrong or guessed, then retake that test a few days later.
• When most tests pass comfortably, sit the full practice exam timed and in one sitting.

These questions are original, written from the public Google Cloud documentation and the official exam guide. They are not real exam questions, and this site is not affiliated with Google.