Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer Certification Preparation guide by Kiran Vasadi

I’m Kiran Kumar Vasadi, a BigData Analyst, Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery, Azure HDInsight, Hadoop (HDFS, Sqoop, Hive, HBase, Spark), Tableau, Talend, MS Business Intelligence(SSIS, SSRS), Powe BI, IBM Cognos





Here I am sharing my Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer Preparation Guide.

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

Data Engineer
Goal: Assess tradeoffs revolving around processing, analyzing, and storing data on Google Cloud Platform.

– Focus on using Dataflow vs Dataproc
– Focus on different data retention strategies and trade-offs
– Focus on Big data processing workflows
– Focus on the underlying the cases to use BigTable and BigQuery and their trade-offs
– Some case studies for choosing data sources

• https://www.coursera.org/learn/gcp-big-data-ml-fundamentals
• https://www.udemy.com/gcp-data-engineer-and-cloud-architect
• 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:
  • Big query 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
• 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

Final Thoughts

The exam was great but do not beat real-world experience with the platform. I felt like I was in high school again studying. General good test taking and studying practices was the key. These exams are a great starting point for your journey to the Cloud. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to drop me a line on any of my social media or email channels.

Good luck to everyone taking this exam!