Google Cloud Data Engineer Professional certified!

One more GCP certification on the list! This one was by far the most interesting one in a while as it gave me a chance to review topics that I don’t work with every day: Machine learning and Big data.

Let’s dive right in, here is the preparation I followed.

To begin with the online classes:

Read Google official documentation about the services in the scope of this exam:

Cloud Storage, Google Transfer appliance
Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Bigquery, Datastore
Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Dataprep, Datastudio, Datalab
Stackdriver, KMS, Machine Learning and its API

Then jump on the Google Next videos:

Bigquery data modeling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj6ksosHdhw
Bigtable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaRbKdMInuc
Datastore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZDk0NZGqHs
Dataflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxHijHZd0oM
Processing data at scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcSeF51HP3U

You can review case studies but don’t spend too much time on them. There is now a practice exam for the Data Engineer, quite similar to the type of questions you can find in the real exam:

https://cloud.google.com/certification/practice-exam/data-engineer

My feedback on the exam:

Check the scope of this exam, be prepared for design questions on database models, optimization and troubleshooting
Know Bigquery VS Bigtable VS Datastore VS Cloud SQL
Dataflow and how to deal with batch and stream processing
Read as much as you can and play with machine learning!
- https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/docs/tensorflow/ml-solutions-overview
- https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/docs/tensorflow/training-overview
- Supervised Learning VS Unsupervised Learning VS Semi-Supervised Learning VS Reinforcement Learning
- Review some ML algorithms for each (Clustering, Regression, Classification, Association Analysis, etc)
How to share datasets, queries, reports is really something that comes often, don’t underestimate security aspects
Understand Hadoop ecosystem, learn about the typical big data lifecycle on GCP

Good luck to everyone taking this exam!