A realistic eight-week plan at roughly 6 hours per week. Practise everything in the console and the gcloud CLI in a free account.
| Week | Focus | Checkpoint |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Projects, billing, resource hierarchy | You can create and structure projects |
| 2 | IAM, service accounts, gcloud and Cloud Shell | You can grant least-privilege access |
| 3 | Compute Engine (VMs) | You can deploy and manage a VM |
| 4 | GKE, Cloud Run, App Engine | You can choose the right compute option |
| 5 | Cloud Storage and databases | You can pick a storage class and database |
| 6 | Networking (VPC, firewall, load balancing) | You can design a basic network |
| 7 | Monitoring, logging, operations | You can set up alerts and dashboards |
| 8 | Full-length timed reviews | You consistently pass timed reviews |
Final tips
Be fluent with the gcloud CLI, and make sure you can distinguish the compute options. Avoid “exam dump” sites - they breach Google policy and copyright.