ExamPrep Google ACE

Section 1: Setting up a cloud solution environment (~23% of the exam)

1.1 Setting up cloud projects and accounts

Considerations include:

• Creating a resource hierarchy
• Applying organizational policies to the resource hierarchy
• Granting members Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles within a project
• Managing users and groups in Cloud Identity (manually and automated)
• Enabling APIs within projects
• Provisioning and setting up products in Google Cloud Observability
• Assessing quotas and requesting increases
• Setting up standalone organizations
• Setting up cloud networking
• Confirming availability of products in geographical locations (e.g., regional, global)
• Configuring Cloud Asset Inventory and using Gemini Cloud Assist to analyze resources

1.2 Managing billing configuration

Considerations include:

• Creating one or more billing accounts
• Linking projects to a billing account
• Establishing billing budgets and alerts
• Setting up billing exports

Section 2: Planning and implementing a cloud solution (~30% of the exam)

2.1 Planning and implementing compute resources

Considerations include:

• Selecting appropriate compute choices for a given workload (e.g., Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run, Cloud Run functions, Knative serving)
• Launching a compute instance (e.g., availability policy, SSH keys)
• Choosing the appropriate storage for Compute Engine (e.g., zonal Persistent Disk, regional Persistent Disk, Google Cloud Hyperdisk)
• Creating an autoscaled managed instance group by using an instance template
• Configuring OS Login
• Configuring VM Manager
• Using Spot VM instances and custom machine types
• Installing and configuring the command-line interface (CLI) for Kubernetes (kubectl)
• Deploying a GKE cluster with different configurations (e.g., GKE Autopilot, regional clusters, private clusters)
• Deploying a containerized application to GKE
• Deploying an application to serverless compute platforms, including for the processing of Google Cloud events (e.g., Pub/Sub events, Cloud Storage object change notification events, Eventarc)

2.2 Planning and implementing storage and data solutions

Considerations include:

• Choosing and deploying data products (e.g., Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Firestore, Spanner, Bigtable, AlloyDB, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Managed Service for Apache Kafka, Memorystore)
• Choosing and deploying storage products (e.g., Cloud Storage, Filestore, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes) and Cloud Storage options (e.g., Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive)
• Loading data (e.g., command-line upload, load data from Cloud Storage, Storage Transfer Service)
• Maintaining multi-region redundancy across data solutions

2.3 Planning and implementing networking resources

Considerations include:

• Creating a VPC with subnets (e.g., custom mode VPC, Shared VPC)
• Creating and applying Cloud Next Generation Firewall (Cloud NGFW) policies with ingress and egress rules and attributes (e.g., action, source, destination, targets, protocols, ports)
• Using Tags (e.g., secure Tags) and service accounts in Cloud NGFW policy rules
• Establishing network connectivity (e.g., Cloud VPN, VPC Network Peering, Cloud Interconnect)
• Choosing and deploying load balancers
• Differentiating Network Service Tiers

2.4 Planning and implementing resources through infrastructure as code

Considerations include:

• Infrastructure as code tooling (e.g., Fabric FAST, Config Connector, Terraform, Helm)
• Planning and executing infrastructure as code deployments, including versioning, state management, and updates

Section 3: Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution (~27% of the exam)

3.1 Managing compute resources

Considerations include:

• Remotely connecting to a Compute Engine instance
• Viewing current running Compute Engine instances
• Working with snapshots and images (e.g., create, view, and delete images or snapshots; schedule a snapshot)
• Viewing current running GKE cluster inventory (e.g., nodes, Pods, Services)
• Configuring GKE to access Artifact Registry
• Working with GKE node pools (e.g., add, edit, or remove a node pool; autoscaling node pool)
• Working with Kubernetes resources (e.g., Pods, Services, StatefulSets)
• Managing horizontal and vertical Pod autoscaling configurations
• Managing GKE Autopilot Pod resource requests
• Deploying new versions of a Cloud Run application
• Adjusting application traffic splitting parameters (e.g., Cloud Run, Cloud Run functions, GKE)
• Configuring autoscaling for a Cloud Run application

3.2 Managing storage and data solutions

Considerations include:

• Managing and securing objects in Cloud Storage buckets
• Setting object lifecycle management policies for Cloud Storage buckets
• Executing queries to retrieve data from data instances (e.g., Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Bigtable, Spanner, Firestore, AlloyDB)
• Estimating costs of data storage resources
• Backing up and restoring database instances (e.g., Cloud SQL, Firestore, Spanner, AlloyDB, Bigtable)
• Reviewing job status (e.g., Dataflow, BigQuery)
• Using Database Center to manage the Google Cloud database fleet

3.3 Managing networking resources

Considerations include:

• Adding a subnet to an existing VPC
• Expanding a subnet to have more IP addresses
• Reserving static external or internal IP addresses
• Adding custom static routes in a VPC
• Working with Cloud DNS and Cloud NAT

3.4 Monitoring and logging

Considerations include:

• Creating Cloud Monitoring alerts based on resource metrics
• Creating and ingesting Cloud Monitoring custom metrics (e.g., from applications or logs)
• Exporting logs to external systems (e.g., on-premises, BigQuery)
• Configuring log buckets, log analytics, and log routers
• Viewing and filtering logs in Cloud Logging
• Viewing specific log message details in Cloud Logging
• Using cloud diagnostics to research an application issue (e.g., Cloud Trace, Cloud Profiler, Query Insights, index advisor)
• Viewing the Personalized Service Health dashboard
• Configuring and deploying Ops Agent
• Deploying Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus
• Configuring audit logs
• Using Gemini Cloud Assist for Cloud Monitoring
• Using Active Assist to optimize resource utilization

Section 4: Configuring access and security (~20% of the exam)

4.1 Managing Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Considerations include:

• Viewing and creating IAM policies
• Managing the various role types and defining custom IAM roles (e.g., basic, predefined, custom)

4.2 Managing service accounts

Considerations include:

• Creating service accounts
• Using service accounts in IAM policies with minimum permissions
• Assigning service accounts to resources
• Managing IAM permissions of a service account
• Managing service account impersonation
• Creating and managing short-lived service account credentials
• Using a Google Cloud service account with a GKE application