My travel load has been hovering between 50% and 95% for the past decade. Lacking travel, I’ve been on a certification adventure this year. I started with the HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate exam, followed closely by the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) exam. Recently, I sat and passed the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer exam – huzzah!
Exam Pondering
Google puts up a good challenge with this exam. The subject areas are nicely aligned to actual engineering activities that I have performed in the past. Tasks such as handling cross-account user role assignments, releasing applications into App Engine Standard, leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for container deployments, and day-to-day operations with the gcloud CLI. The exam’s focus is heavily centered on design, deployment, and lifecycle management scenarios in which an operations engineer is working with software engineers to release applications. It felt legit.
As stated in the Tweet above, making a public-facing mind map was one of my secondary objectives while studying. I felt this would be a nice way to introduce folks to mind maps while also helping provide study materials for future exam takers. My past mind maps were a bit too “messy” to be shared. Thus, this is my first public attempt – feedback is welcome – with all content being published as open source.
You can find my Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer mind map files in this repository. It contains two flavors of the mind map: a PDF image and a markdown outline. I hope the mind map is helpful for exam prep efforts.
Next Steps
Please accept a crisp high five for reaching this point in the post!
If you’d like to learn more about Cloud Architecture, or other modern technology approaches, head over to the Guided Learning page.
