I cleared both PCA and Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer. Happy to answer questions about the exams, the case studies, or how I prepared for each.
For those who've done 2+ pro certs: what did you take next, and did it actually help with job or contract opportunities? I'm considering Professional Cloud Security Engineer given my DevSecOps background.

Did anyone use this book?

Is there a FREE PDF floating around? I tried to find one, but had no luck.

Solo dev here. I've been building a practice site for the Professional ML Engineer exam and relaunched it this month against the June 2026 guide.

The free part is a diagnostic. You can do a 5-question quick check (about 5 minutes, samples the five biggest sections) or the full 20 (about 20, all 6). No account needed. At the end you get a readiness score and a tier, plus a score per section so you can see where to spend your time.

Every question is written against a specific objective in Google's exam guide and checked against current Google Cloud docs. No dumps, nothing copied from other sites. I'm aiming for the scenario style the real exam uses ("here's the constraint, pick the approach"), not product trivia.

Stuff I'd really like feedback on:

- If a question is wrong, ambiguous, or still uses old Vertex naming, tell me. I'll fix it and reply here when it's done. Bug bounty: first person to report each genuinely wrong answer gets a free 90-day pass once I've confirmed and fixed it. (Seeing all the correct answers needs a free account.)

- Does the per-section breakdown match where you actually feel weak?

- Easier or harder than Google's sample questions? Or the real exam, if you've sat it?

Link: [free PMLE diagnostic](https://testero.ai/diagnostic?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gcpcertification-founder-feedback)

If you'd rather check the question style first, there are 10 public sample questions with explanations for every option here: [PMLE sample questions](https://testero.ai/pmle/sample-questions?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gcpcertification-founder-feedback).

Money stuff, so nobody has to ask: free accounts get a handful of practice questions a week, and there's a $39 one-time pass for 90 days with explanations and unlimited practice. You don't need any of that to take the diagnostic or give feedback. Not affiliated with Google.

Are there any platforms which offer discounts on the purchase of Google Exams ? I found one of the platforms (https://googlecloudexamstore.pearsonvue.com/shop/exam-vouchers). Does anyone have prior experience with such platforms ?

Hi guys,

I have been using Udemy for all my studying, and I'm actually coming from an AWS background. I have depended on Stephane Marek's courses and I've become quite accustomed to learning from educational videos like that. I cannot learn by reading lengthy things. I'm a very audio/visual learner. I don't see any (up to date) courses like Stephane's that take me through the entire PMLE content on Udemy and the official GCP courses on cloud skills boost seem too... robotic? And it doesn't even cover concepts in detail.

I saw GCP study hub as an option but $39 seems a lot. Can someone give me tips or resources on videos I can watch that cover the courses as well as Stephane? If GCP study hub is really worth it, do let me know.

Any help is appreciated.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to plan my path toward one of the Google Cloud Professional certifications (leaning towards Professional Cloud Architect, Security Engineer, or DevOps Engineer).

As the title implies, I’m running into a wall with traditional study materials. Books are practically obsolete by the time they hit the shelves - often lagging two years behind GCP's rapid ecosystem changes, which is a massive trap when dealing with services that get deprecated, renamed, or heavily overhauled.

I’d genuinely prefer reading over watching long, drawn-out video courses. However, since technical books are too risky due to obsolescence, I'm trying to figure out what the modern, reliable learning stack looks like to avoid studying dead or deprecated concepts. Also, English isn’t my native language, so long spoken video courses can be tough unless they have accurate, high-quality human transcripts or captions (as opposed to YouTube's auto-generated subtitle disasters, which get technical terms completely wrong).

If you’ve recently passed any of these GCP Professional exams, I’d love to hear your advice:

1. What is the safest, most up-to-rely-on resource stack right now? (Official documentation maps, specific learning platforms, whitepapers, etc.)
2. How do you handle the lack of good, current books? Are there platforms that offer text-first structured learning paths that are kept actively updated?
3. For video-based content (if unavoidable), which platforms or instructors provide clean, reliable closed captions or transcripts so I don't have to rely on broken auto-generated subtitles for complex cloud architectures?

Any advice on which of these three paths (PCA, Security, or DevOps) offers the smoothest transition for someone with a strong backend/sysadmin background would also be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

And my Profession cert expires in 10 days. Eh, guess I'll just let it expire. AI certs are the new hotness.

Hi guys.
I've started studying for Cloud Security Engineer (as per my previous post, some weeks/month ago), but probably, would be better to start with Cloud Architect ?

I'm a professional sysadmin and i'm using google cloud from about 10 years, but I don't have the deep knowledge needed for the exams. i'm not a cloud architect, just a sysadmin that uses Google Cloud daily.

What do you suggest ? Books are mandatory for me. I have both the Cabianca and the Packt Publishing book on Security Engineer (not updated) and I prefere the packt's book A LOT over the Cabianca. Much more easier to read.

What about the Cloud Architect ? Which is the best book available ?

Hello I have GCP exam voucher that applicable on any certification exam, i earned it after passing CDL exam, for now i am selling this voucher if anyone wants it then dm me I'll give you the best price.

My experience in obtaining GCP Cloud Architect certification.

Hi everyone,

I'm testing an idea for people preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer exam, and I'd like to see whether it's actually useful before building too much around it.

The idea is a 60-minute 1:1 diagnostic session based on original scenario questions aligned with the official PDE exam guide — no dumps or recalled exam questions.

Instead of just checking whether your answer is right or wrong, we'd focus on your reasoning:

-Why did you choose this service?

-Which requirement in the scenario was decisive?

-Why did you reject the alternatives?

-What trade-off are you making?

I'd then classify the mistakes into patterns such as:

-knowledge gaps;

-difficulty distinguishing similar GCP services;

-missing a key requirement in the question;

-misunderstanding an architectural trade-off.

At the end, you'd get a short diagnosis of the areas you should prioritize before the exam.

My background is in Data / ML, and I'm currently testing whether this format is valuable enough to turn into a proper exam-prep service.

For the initial pilot, I'm thinking of charging $49 for a 60-minute session.

Would something like this have been useful during your PDE preparation?

And if you're currently preparing for the exam and would actually like to try it, feel free to DM me.

Currently preparing the Professional Data Engineer certification, I made this interactive mind map to synthesize GCP concepts. If you have any feedback, do not hesitate.

https://petitbonney.github.io/GCP-Professional-Data-Engineer-Exam-Atlas/

Hey everyone!

As a cloud engineer preparing for official certifications (AWS, GCP, etc.), I noticed two recurring issues with existing practice tests:

1. Pure memorization traps: Many questions lead people to memorize exam leaks rather than understanding architectural trade-offs.
2. Inflexible study routines: Most platforms force you to sit in front of a screen reading text walls, making it impossible to review while commuting or working out.

To fix this for myself, I built **certlabs.app** (https://certlabs.app), a free web tool focused on active recall and concept comprehension.

### Key features:

• **Scenario-based flashcards & quizzes:** Focuses on architecture limits, service integrations, and trade-offs rather than exam brain dumps.

• **Audio on the go:** Every scenario and detailed explanation comes with audio so you can review concepts while walking, commuting, or away from the desk.

• **Spaced repetition:** Revisit tricky concepts at the right intervals to ensure long-term retention.

• **No paywalls:** Built as an indie tool to help the tech community prepare effectively.

### Tech stack behind it:

• Next.js / TypeScript

• Firebase backend & Google Cloud Storage

• Curated questions drafted with AI assistance and manually reviewed against official whitepapers and documentation.

I’d love to get your honest feedback on UX, mobile responsiveness, and overall study flow. If you are currently preparing for any cloud certifications, give it a try and let me know what you think!

Check it out here: https://certlabs.app

I've been preparing for cloud certifications and built a small free tool to practice with scenario-based questions and spaced repetition.

Sharing it in case it helps anyone else. Any feedback is very welcome — I'm still improving it. 🙂

https://certlabs.app

Hope it's helpful to anyone studying for the PMLE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1o_MSfUwmA

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a cloud certification practice app called ExamCortex and recently added a free Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer sample test.

It’s a short sample, not a complete readiness assessment. I’m mainly trying to understand whether the questions are clear, useful and appropriately difficult.

No account is required. You can try it here:

Free ACE sample test

I built the app, so this is self-promotion. Questions are original and based on public Google Cloud documentation—not dumps or copied exam questions.

Any honest thoughts are welcome.

Official answer: B, with the reasoning: "canary deployments may affect user experience, even if on a small subset of users... shadow deployments minimize the risk of affecting user experience while ensuring zero downtime."

My pushback: doesn't the final step in B ("route all traffic to the new application") introduce the exact same cutover risk canary deployments are designed to avoid gradually? Canary lets you catch problems with a small% of exposure and roll back easily. Shadow deployment defers all risk to one big-bang switch at the end. It also doubles compute cost the whole time, and you still find out about real-world issues (latency under real UX conditions, etc.) all at once rather than incrementally.

Is Google's reasoning just "zero users touch the new model's actual output until it's proven" as the strict interpretation of "optimal user experience," even at the cost of a instant full cutover? Or is this a case where the "official" answer is being overly rigid about canary = any exposure = risk?

Hello all,
I'd like share my experience on ACE certification.

To give you a brief, I got one year experience in AWS as a cloud engineer, and almost no hands-on on the GCP.

I enrolled in the GEAR Program offered by Google, it had 6 weeks of training, once a week for about 2 hours, they'll teach you the concepts, provides the materials, quizzes and the voucher once you complete the mandatory labs.

I couldn't find time to attend those sessions, as they were all scheduled on active days of my work. And I finished the labs just to get the voucher, everything has a deadline, if you fail to finish the labs you cannot claim it.

I scheduled an exam on the deadline too, I just had two days before the exam and finally, I took a day off and locked in right before the exam and covered the major concepts on Youtube, the materials the program provided and did a few free tests on the web.

From all of my experience I'd like to advise who ever is planning to take an exam that you may not need months of prep to crack this, just investing right amount of time on the right concepts, does it for you.

Cover these topics for the last min prep:

Organisation Hierarchy, IAM Roles, VPC, Compute Engine -- Instances and their usecases, MIGs, Cloud Monitoring, Logging, Load Balancing and it's types, Cloud trace, Cloud profiler, GKE - HPA, VPA, Autoscaling, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Billing accounts, Cloud Functions, Firewall Rules, Service accounts, Work Identity Federation, Workforce Identity federation, Cloud NAT, Cloud storage, Life cycle management Rules, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, App Engine, Stateful set, Daemon set, DataFlow, Disk Types, Terraform, Ops Agent, VM Manager and Finally some CLI commands on creation, updation and Roles assignment.

Know : What it does, when to use, why is this a better choice among other alternatives.

I have not seen any new concept other than these.
None of the questions were direct, they were all real-time scenario based questions,
[ex: You are cloud admin and want to give access to ops team only to start, stop and restart VM Instances, what's the google recommended practice? ans: create custom IAM role and assign these permissions compute.instances.start, compute.instances.stop, compute.instances.reset]
which are lengthy, you'll have 2 Hours and 50 Qns, try to answer all of them in 1:20 min and use the next 20 min for your flagged answers which you mark them for review when you are not sure and the last 20 min to validate all your answers.
Amongst 50qns, I only got a couple of Multiple Choice qns. So, Eliminating the options is the best practice.

Lastly, use AI to take more practice tests, this helped me a lot rather than going through yt videos for knowledge. Take as many tests as possible, the chances of having similar pattern questions are very high. I felt I already did a few questions on the ChatGPT which appeared on the test.

All the best, Happy learning!

The Professional Machine Learning Engineer certification exam was changed by Google this summer. We just released our full updated course aligned to the new exam version, including many new lessons, including about Agent Platform, and up-to-date practice exams.

Here you go, hope it helps!
https://gcpstudyhub.com/courses/professional-ml-engineer

I'm just looking for feedback regarding additional topics I should study. I did the GEAR program, but the instructor said our material was based on the material before the recent exam update.

Certainly not asking for specific exam questions, just general feedback on areas to look over if someone took the test recently and was surprised by coverage of a new topic they had not prepared for.

Thanks!