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Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Study Guide

Google Cloud Certified - Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer

Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer is Google Cloud's professional-level certification for engineers who implement processes and capabilities across the systems development lifecycle with Google-recommended methods and tools, balancing reliability with delivery speed. It covers organization and environment setup, CI/CD pipelines, site reliability engineering, observability and troubleshooting, and performance and cost optimization. Google recommends 3 or more years of industry experience, including 1 or more years designing and managing production systems on Google Cloud.

  • Professional level
  • 5 exam sections
  • 50 to 60 questions

This guide is free, with no sign-up. It explains every Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer exam topic in plain English, one chapter at a time. Read them in order or jump straight to the topic you need.

  • 5chapters
  • 21topics
  • 6diagrams and exhibits
  • 1 h 47 minfast track
Start with Bootstrapping and maintaining a Google Cloud organization
  • Every topic follows the same simple pattern: what it is, how it works, common mistakes
  • Diagrams and real command output where a picture explains it best
  • Exam tips and worked subnetting and IPv6 practice, with answers

How the exam is weighted

Each domain is worth this share of the exam, so spend your study time in proportion. Select a domain to open its chapter.

Chapters

Open a chapter to see its topics and how long each takes.

1Bootstrapping and maintaining a Google Cloud organization6 topics · 31 min fast trackResource hierarchy, Shared VPC, IaC, CI/CD design, environments and dev workstations.
  1. 1Resource Hierarchy, IAM, Organization Policies and Service Accounts5 min
  2. 2Shared VPC, Peering, Private Service Connect and Central Observability5 min
  3. 3Infrastructure as Code, Blueprints and Automation Scripts5 min
  4. 4CI/CD Architecture with Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy and Artifact Registry6 min
  5. 5Multiple Environments, GKE Fleets, Patching and Upgrades5 min
  6. 6Cloud Workstations, Cloud Shell and Gemini for Developers and Operators5 min
Read the chapter overview →
2Building and implementing CI/CD pipelines4 topics · 22 min fast trackTriggers, approvals, deployment strategies, troubleshooting, secrets and supply chain security.
  1. 1Designing CI/CD Pipelines for Apps, Infrastructure and ML5 min
  2. 2Deployment Strategies, Auditing Deployments and Troubleshooting6 min
  3. 3Cloud KMS, Secret Manager, Parameter Manager and Secret Injection5 min
  4. 4Artifact Analysis, Binary Authorization, SLSA and Pipeline IAM6 min
Read the chapter overview →
3Applying site reliability engineering practices3 topics · 15 min fast trackSLIs, SLOs, error budgets, service lifecycle, capacity, autoscaling and incidents.
  1. 1SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, Error Budgets and the Cost of Nines5 min
  2. 2Service Lifecycle, Toil, Capacity Planning and Autoscaling5 min
  3. 3Mitigating Incidents: Draining Traffic, Adding Capacity and Rollbacks5 min
Read the chapter overview →
4Implementing observability practices and troubleshooting issues6 topics · 30 min fast trackOps Agent, OpenTelemetry, Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, alerting, Cloud Trace and troubleshooting issues.
  1. 1Collecting Logs with Ops Agent and OpenTelemetry, and Cutting Log Cost5 min
  2. 2Collecting Metrics, Managed Prometheus, Synthetic Monitors and Custom Metrics5 min
  3. 3Logs Explorer, Log Routing and Retention, and Redacting Sensitive Data5 min
  4. 4Metrics Explorer, Dashboards, Alerting Policies and Notifications5 min
  5. 5Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry and Cloud Trace5 min
  6. 6Troubleshooting Infrastructure, Pipeline, App and Latency Issues5 min
Read the chapter overview →
5Optimizing performance and cost2 topics · 9 min fast trackAPM, Active Assist recommenders, Spot VMs, committed use discounts and workload costs.
  1. 1Application Performance Monitoring and Active Assist Recommendations4 min
  2. 2FinOps: Spot VMs, Discounts, Network Tiers and Workload Cost Tuning5 min
Read the chapter overview →

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The full Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer question bank has 751 questions, with timed practice exams and an explanation for every answer.

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