GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Certification Guide

The Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) validates your ability to deploy, monitor, and maintain projects on Google Cloud. It's the next logical step after Cloud Digital Leader.

Exam Overview

Detail	Value
Exam Code	ACE
Provider	Google Cloud
Questions	50–60 (multiple choice + multiple select)
Length	2 hours
Passing Score	~70%
Price	~$125 USD

Domain Breakdown

Domain	Weight
Setting Up a Cloud Solution Environment	15%
Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution	30%
Deploying and Implementing a Cloud Solution	25%
Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution	20%
Configuring Access and Security	10%

Key Services

Compute

• Compute Engine — VMs, machine families (E2, N2, C2, M2), preemptible/spot, custom images
• GKE — Clusters, node pools, workloads, autoscaling
• Cloud Run — Serverless containers, revisions, traffic splitting
• Cloud Functions — Event-driven functions (Gen 2)
• App Engine — Standard vs Flexible, versions, traffic splitting

Storage

• Cloud Storage — Buckets, storage classes (Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive), lifecycle, versioning, IAM
• Persistent Disk — Block storage (pd-standard, pd-balanced, pd-ssd, pd-extreme), snapshots
• Filestore — NFS for GCE and GKE
• Cloud SQL — MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server

Networking

• VPC — Subnets, firewall rules, routes, VPC peering
• Cloud Load Balancing — HTTP(S), TCP/UDP, SSL proxy, internal
• Cloud CDN — Content delivery
• Cloud NAT — Outbound internet for private instances
• Cloud VPN — Site-to-site IPSec

Operations

• Cloud Monitoring — Metrics, dashboards, alerts
• Cloud Logging — Logs, log-based metrics, exclusions
• Error Reporting — Application error tracking
• Cloud Trace — Latency analysis

Practice Questions

Test your knowledge with our ACE practice questions — 50+ questions covering all domains.

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