Perhaps one of the hottest certifications in 2021 will be the Google Cloud Digital Leader Certification. The Google Cloud Digital Leader Exam was released last month after completing its beta process.

The interest in this certification is clear and finally Google Cloud has a completive certification to AWS’s Cloud Practitioner Exam.

I had taken the beta exam in May and received my certificate of passing.

The main goal I understand of this certification is to focus on transforming your enterprise environment from a legacy or Web 2.0 deployment to more of a Cloud Native environment on GCP.

Effectively, its about transformation of your enterprise around application modernization utilizing Google Cloud and best practices.

Joe Holbrook

In the mean time I also developed a live course that is hosted on O’Reilly Media as well as my own course hosted on TechCommanders.com and Udemy.

Google Cloud Digital Leader Certification Course

The demand for the content is absolutely amazing and the feedback I am getting has been positive.

When your preparing for the Cloud Digital Certification I would recommend you focus on specific areas to help you maximize both your learning aptitude and your passing potential.

Below are the Top Ten Concept areas for preparing the Google Cloud Digital Leader Exam!

Concept 1. Understanding what Return on Investment (ROI)/ Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is about and why its important from an organizations cloud spending.

An ROI calculation quantifies both the costs and the expected benefits of a specific project over a specific timeframe. (3-5 years)

ROI has both tangible and intangible components

TCO, on the other hand, includes just costs.

Goal is obtaining a solid ROI and LOW TCO

Concept 2. – Knowing the full Cloud Hierarchy and the use cases possible.

Understanding Google Cloud Hierarchy is critical for the exam. Does your organization use a top level domain or you do you just use a project? What is an organization and what is a project

Complementary Test Tips and Practice Questions included in All TechCommanders courses…

Concept 4 – Learn the Google Cloud Paid and Free Support Options

We do need to get up to speed on Google Cloud’s Support Options so take a few minutes to review the support page.

Support Options in Google Cloud Platform

•Basic Support (Billing, Free support)

•Standard Support

•Enhanced

•Premium (Assigned a Technical Account Manager)

https://cloud.google.com/support

Concept 5 – Google Cloud Framework – What is the Google Cloud Adoption Framework and its pieces?

The Adoption Framework helps you identify key cloud adoption activities and objectives to accelerate your journey to the cloud.

•Four Themes

•Whitepaper

You must review this whitepaper and learn the concepts here for the exam!!

•The Adoption Framework provides a Cloud Maturity Assessment that can be used to gauge your enterprises readiness for migrating to the cloud.

•Helps you identify where you are in your cloud journey and recommended next steps to move forward.

You must review this Assessment and learn the steps/concepts here before the exam.

To become a “cloud-first organization”, there are four foundational themes your organization will need to excel around.

” The Cloud Maturity Assessment provides a structured approach for using the Google Cloud Adoption Framework to assess your organization’s readiness for the cloud and what you can do to fill in the gaps and develop new competencies.” – Google Cloud

Figure 3 – Cloud First Foundational Themes

Take the Google Cloud Digital Leader Certification Crash Course on TechCommanders! Use CODE: GCPDIGITALLEADER at Checkout for both Monthly and Annual Plans!

Concept 6 – Google Cloud Infrastructure

Google Cloud Platform resources are organized by Regions and Zones.

Regions – Collection of Zones

•Specific location to run resources

•Connected by Googles global and meshed backbone

Zones – Isolated deployment areas in a region. (Failure Domains)

•Resource can be zonal, regional or multi regional

Choose your choosing your regions and zones you should consider these decisions based on the following.

•Compliance Requirements

•Costs

•Services Available

•Application Latency

•Customer Location

Concept 7 – Get to know your Compute Services!

Google has a a variety of compute services just like any other cloud provider. Whether it is for deploying an IaaS based solution or its for deploying cloud native applications Google has you covered.

You must know the use case and high level concepts of the following compute services.

App Engine

Compute ENgine

Cloud Functions

Cloud Run

Cloud Run or Cloud Functions?

Cloud Run uses containers and makes them invocable via HTTP requests while Cloud Functions is Google’s event-driven serverless platform that does not use containers.

Which Service do I use?

Some examples for choosing what service to transform with

•Already using Docker containers >>>>>>>>> Cloud Run

•Responding to a webhook >>>>>>>>Cloud Functions

•Want multiple facets of capacity and capabilities >>>>>>>>App Engine

Concept 7 – Bare Metal or VMWare Engine?

Google Cloud VMware Engine is a native, first party VMware Cloud Foundation solution sold and supported by Google. A fully managed service hosted on Google Cloud.

•Migrate or extend on-premises environment to Google Cloud by connecting to a native VMware environment directly from the Google Cloud Console in just minutes.

•Allows customers to migrate to the cloud without refactoring their applications and run workloads the same way as they have been on-premises.

Bare Metal Solution on GCP allows you to bring your specialized workloads to Google Cloud, allowing you access and integration with GCP services with minimal latency.

●Is a managed service from GCP

.●Makes it easier for enterprises with specialized workloads that can’t easily be migrated to the cloud to still benefit from the cloud-based services that need access to the data from these systems

●Workloads such requires specialized licenses, support and performance.

Concept 8 – Data Services (Selecting the right service for the solution)

Get to know the Data Services in Google Cloud. A lot to cover here so you will need to invest some time….

Cloud DataStore

Cloud SQL

Cloud Spanner

BigTable

BigQuery

TABLE 1 – Comparing Storage Services and Data Services.

Here is another tip to help!

Google Cloud Digital Leader Certification Course

For the exam preparation I would highly advise you to review this awesome Google Cloud Decision workflow.

Concept 9 – Kubernetes and Cloud Native/Pipeline Services

Perhaps one area that would catch some folks off would be the focus of deploying pipelines on GCP and what could be use for a cloud native service. Clearly, more discussion is needed if your new to this area.

Below are a summary of just a few concepts and GCP services.

Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE) is a managed environment for deploying containerized applications. Some benefits of using this service are Fast Efficient Docker format container deployment and portability for example. One purpose of GKE is to enable you to manage applications, not machines.

Google Container Registry (GCR) provides secure, private Docker image storage on Google Cloud Platform. GCR provides a single place for teams to manage Docker images, perform vulnerability analysis, and decide who can access what with fine-grained access control.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) enables teams to adopt automation in building, testing, and deploying software and this can be enable on GCP with the Container Registry.

CI/CD practices enables your enterprise to proactively resolve bugs, issues, and other problems at a much earlier stage.

This should result in a significant reduction in the overall costs and a better ROI.

Concept 10 – Scaling to Zero(What the heck?)

Scaling to zero allows containers to be run only when there is demand.

For certain workloads, this can provide lower baseline resource usage and lets you scale down instances when in the public cloud to cost less.

•Mitigates Cloud Spending (Overspending)

•Provides a balance between availability and reliability without the overhead cost.

•Works well with applications that are NOT latency sensitive.

•Cloud Run can be used for scale down applications.

Minimize Cold Starts with Cloud Run… •You can configure a set of minimum number of Cloud Run instances that are on standby and ready to serve traffic. Service can start serving requests with minimal cold starts.

•Cloud Run Feature – “min instances feature”

That sums up some of the most important concepts and areas to study. There is a lot more of course so make sure you study the exam objectives.

Google Cloud Digital Leader Certification Course

For more information on the exam please visit TechCommanders.com or TheGCPGurus.com

Watch out for my Youtube and Faun.dev posts as well

Coming in August 2021. Cloud InterviewACE.

The best way to pass the Cloud Computing interviews. Period.

Cloud InterviewACE is an online training program & professional community mentored by industry veteran Joseph Holbrook (“The Cloud Tech Guy“), a pre/post sales guru in cloud.  Learn to pass the technical and even soft skills interviews from the starting basics to advanced topics covering presales, post sales focused objectives such cloud deployment, cloud architecting, cloud engineering, migrations and more. resume tips, preparation strategy, common mistakes, mock interviews, technical deep-dives, must-know tips, offer negotiation, and more. AWS, GCP and Azure will be covered. 

https://www.techcommanders.com/cloudinterviewace

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TechCommanders is an online training platform for both aspiring and veteran IT professionals interested in next generation IT Skills.
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