I passed the Google Cloud Associate Exam 6 months ago
GCP6 months ago, I was certified Google Cloud Associate Exam. This is a quick feedback.
If you read this post, it might be because you are not decided to take the exam, and if it worth it.
Short answer, for me it does worth the effort. (3 years later note: yeap totally worth the effort, help in my carrer path)
I guess the answer depends on your path to learning clouds. I didn’t have much knowledge on azure or AWS. The exam helps me to stay focus on learning every aspect on the products.
As I mention last week, I setup a [Swarm Cluster] with Traefik and google cloud load balancers. The certifications help me for the setup. An architecture that can become complex is much easier to setup if you already know the GCP, not waste efforts to solves platform related problem, focus more on architectures problem. This is a real cloud migration work, not just an exercise.
My boss let me do the stuff, I would probably done none of this without the exam, for both lack of knowledge and agreement from superiors.
I setup two servers to work like remote desktop for personal uses. I wrote about Headless Linux with Google Compute Engine Desktop this allow me to have a linux computer that I connect from my chromebook, and even from work.
The second computer is a windows, with a GPU, Photoshop & Lightroom. I had some issues with my windows laptop, the GPU made Photoshop crash often, I was thinking about buying a new PC with a nice CPU, GPU, and RAM. I might just keep a compute engine for this.
Update: I now passed the next level exam, 3 years later, the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect