GCP ACE study plan

Create a Google Cloud project under a folder in an organization and switch between them with gcloud config set project

Configure billing budgets and alerts on the new project and confirm the alert fires on a threshold breach

Assign predefined IAM roles to two test users and verify effective permissions with the IAM policy troubleshooter

Install and configure the Cloud SDK and Cloud Code, then authenticate with both user credentials and a service account

Request a quota increase for a compute region and identify which quotas are project-level versus region-level

Choose a compute option (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, App Engine) for three stated workloads and justify each choice in writing

Design a VPC with two subnets in different regions and document the CIDR ranges without overlap

Select storage classes and lifecycle rules for three data access patterns and estimate monthly cost for each

Size a Cloud SQL instance and choose between Cloud SQL, Spanner, and Firestore for two given schemas

Produce a cost estimate in the pricing calculator for a three-tier web app and export the result

Deploy a Compute Engine instance from a custom instance template using gcloud compute instances create-from-template

Create a managed instance group with an autoscaler tied to a CPU target and drive load until it scales past two instances

Deploy a containerized workload to Cloud Run and to a GKE Autopilot cluster, then expose both on HTTPS

Write a startup script and a metadata key that the instance reads at boot, and confirm the output in the serial console

Attach a persistent disk to an instance, format and mount it, and remount it after a stop and start

Create Cloud Storage buckets with uniform bucket-level access, versioning, and a lifecycle rule that deletes objects after 30 days

Load a CSV into BigQuery with a defined schema and run three queries including one that joins two tables

Deploy a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance, connect from Compute Engine over the private IP, and import a dump

Publish and consume messages on a Pub/Sub topic with a pull subscription and verify message retention

Configure a Cloud Storage bucket as a static website origin behind Cloud CDN

Create a custom-mode VPC with two subnets, firewall rules scoped by service account, and a Cloud NAT gateway for egress

Deploy an external HTTP(S) load balancer with a managed certificate across two instance groups in different regions

Restrict a Cloud Storage bucket to a single service account using IAM conditions and prove that a second account is denied

Create a service account, grant it least-privilege roles, and attach it to an instance instead of using a downloaded key

Apply an organization policy that disables service account key creation and confirm a key creation attempt fails

Create a Cloud Monitoring dashboard with CPU, latency, and error-rate charts for the load-balanced service from week 5

Define alerting policies with notification channels for uptime checks and error-rate thresholds

Write three Cloud Logging queries using filters and severity, then export a log sink to Cloud Storage

Perform a rolling update on the managed instance group with a surge setting and roll it back

Enable audit logs and KMS-encrypted disks, then verify the encryption key usage in Cloud Audit Logs

Build a custom IAM role with only the permissions needed for a read-only analyst and test it against two denied actions

Configure Workload Identity Federation so an external identity can impersonate a service account without a key

Store an application secret in Secret Manager and retrieve it from a Cloud Run service via the runtime service account

Back up a Compute Engine disk with a snapshot schedule and restore it into a new disk

Diagnose a simulated failure where a service account lacks storage.objects.get and document the fix

Take three full-length timed practice exams and log every missed question by domain

Re-teach the two lowest-scoring domains by rebuilding the specific labs those questions tested

Rewrite your one-page cheat sheet for gcloud commands, IAM role names, and pricing decision rules from memory

Re-run the week 3 deployment script end to end from an empty project to prove recall under time pressure