Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cert: Associate Cloud Engineer

Trace the shift from traditional data centers to cloud computing, and explore the five core concepts, on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.

Explore cloud economics and scalability in GCP, including economies of scale, CapEx vs OpEx, and elastic, horizontal, and vertical scaling to match demand.

Explore cloud service models—from traditional data centers to IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—highlighting responsibility shifts and real-world examples like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Office 365.

Explore Google's data-driven cloud view and master regions, zones, edge locations, and zonal to multi-regional resources across compute, storage, big data, and machine learning.

Launch a quick look at the GCP console, create a test project, and explore identity and access management, billing, and core services like compute, storage, and networking.

Access Google Cloud Platform through four major tools: cloud platform console, cloud shell, SDK, and REST API. Use the mobile app for on the go access and verify environments anywhere.

Install and configure the Google Cloud SDK to manage GCP resources via the command line. Initialize, authenticate, set a project and region, and run gcloud, gsutil, and bq commands.

Explore types of cloud services—compute, storage, networking, and application services—covering virtual machines, containers, serverless options, and specialized machine learning and speech APIs for GCP.

Learn how Google projects underpin all GCP services, APIs, and billing, and organize resources via organizations, folders, and projects with permissions management.

Create a Google account, sign in to cloud.google.com, and set up billing for a free trial with $300 credit, then explore the Google Cloud Console.

Explore the organizational view in Google Cloud using a G Suite domain to select an organization and manage IAM and projects within skylines demo.com.

Create and organize a new Google Cloud project within an organization, understanding project ID constraints, naming, folder placement, and the delete/restore lifecycle.

Set budgets and alerts in GCP billing, assign budgets to all projects, configure alert thresholds, and review cost reports to avoid unexpected charges.

Explore Google Cloud IAM fundamentals: identify who can access which resources, authenticate users, apply least-privilege roles, and use primitive, predefined, and custom roles across organization, folders, and projects.

Assign roles in the Google Cloud Console to users or groups, granting folder admin and other resource management permissions at the organization level, then create folders and manage resources.

Create and manage GCP service accounts for secure service-to-service authentication by assigning IAM roles, granting users access, and generating keys for external use.

Learn GCP networking fundamentals, including global VPCs, zonal subnets, and routing. Understand shared VPC hub models, firewalls, flow logs, and hybrid connectivity to optimize security and communication.

Create and customize a VPC network with subnets in the Google Cloud Console, covering default vs. custom mode, address space, private Google access, flow logs, and dynamic routing.

Compare Google-provided DNS vs customer DNS in GCP, and summarize internal and external IP addressing with DHCP, static and ephemeral options, including internal DNS naming and external IP requirements.

Explore hybrid connectivity from on premises to GCP, including cloud VPN with dynamic BGP routing, static routing, and cloud interconnect options (dedicated or partner) for scalable, reliable links.

Define and enforce Google Cloud firewall rules at the network level to control ingress and egress traffic to and from virtual machines, using priority, targets, direction, and ports.

Explore Google Compute Engine virtual machines, machine types, GPU options, and scaling strategies, including public and custom images, shielded options, instance groups, and IAM roles.

Demonstrates creating a Windows VM on Google Compute Engine via the GCP console, covering project setup, billing, region and zone, machine type, boot disk, and RDP access.

Provision a Linux virtual machine on Google Cloud Platform using the Cloud SDK. Use gcloud compute instances create and SSH to set up and access the VM.

Learn to manage Google Cloud Compute Engine virtual machines, from provisioning, start/stop, and reset to disk, image, and snapshot handling with Stackdriver monitoring and alerts.

Explore Docker containers and the shift from monolithic applications to microservices, then see how Google Kubernetes Engine provides a managed environment to deploy, manage, and scale containerized apps.

Deploy a Go hello app on gke by building and pushing a container image to gcr, then expose via a load balancer and scale to three replicas.

Manage GKE clusters in the Google Cloud Console, upgrade master and node pools, enable auto upgrade, and configure Stackdriver monitoring and alerts for CPU utilization.

Explore GCP storage basics, comparing structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data; map to Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Bigtable, and BigQuery, plus IAM roles and bucket access.

Create a storage bucket in the GCP console, choose region or multi-region, storage class, fine-grained or uniform IAM, retention policy, and upload objects.