Google Cloud Certifications: Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer and Professional Cloud Security Engineer

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Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (PCDOE)

What does a Cloud DevOps Engineer really do?

The following is the certification’s official overview:

When it comes to developing cloud services, a Cloud DevOps Engineer ensures that services are reliable and delivered quickly. With Google Cloud Platform skills, they can develop and manage deployment and monitoring pipelines for applications and learn from issues.”

Many folks simply tune out when they hear the phrase “operations.” Wrong move! Site Reliability Engineer, or SRE, as it’s more often known in Google’s world, isn’t the only job description for this position. It also uniquely conducts operations.

Ultimately, the SRE function allows the team to produce better software more quickly. That’s not going to happen if you spend all your time putting out flames and chasing your tail. Software development is used to amplify the value of your time.

It used to be that Operations staff would unbox gear, set up it, and install the software they received from the developers. However, this is no longer the case. Those days are gone.

In place of this, SREs construct declarative manifest files and procedural scripts to do all of the above tasks—complete with error handling, logging, version control, and all other things that software engineers employ to regulate chaos. SREs are software engineers—just internal ones that help the whole development team produce better software more quickly.

Intentional risk management is part of the framework, but it extends beyond the tools used by developers. We didn’t mention risk avoidance. This position is not afraid of taking risks; it welcomes them! Accept the risk of making mistakes since doing so improves the program and results in a reduced total effort timeframe. Although some people may be suspicious about this, it’s completely accurate.

How to become a Certified Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer 

When it comes to the GCP products that this position and certification concentrate on, they encompass everything from Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, Cloud Debugger, and Profiler to Stackdriver’s observability tools. You’ve also got CI/CD tools like the Artifact Registry and Cloud Build. In addition to things like TerraForm and Google Cloud Deployment Manager for Infrastructure as Code.

Although this position is typically seen as a liability, it can be a valuable asset to any team if given the proper resources and authority. 

Professional Cloud Security Engineer (PCSE)

We all know that everyone has a role to play in ensuring the community’s safety, don’t we? (RIGHT?) However, the Professional Cloud Security Engineer function deals with security issues daily, but in slightly different ways depending on the work at hand.

What is the job of a cloud security specialist?

In regards to this certification, here’s what Google says:

“This person designs, builds, and maintains a secure infrastructure using Google security technologies via an awareness of security best practices and industry security needs. All elements of cloud security, including identity and access management, organizational structure and policy definition, the use of Google technologies for data protection, network security defenses configuration, log collection and analysis, incident reactions management, and comprehension of regulatory considerations, should be mastered by the Cloud Security Professional.”

Concerns about “regulations.” This is a crowd-pleaser, are we right? Possibly not. However, it may be significant, and completing significant tasks can provide a certain level of joy. No matter how you slice it, that’s just a small fraction of the bigger picture here.

The most important factor is that this individual “plans, builds, and maintains a secure infrastructure” in its whole. However, this Security Professional is still in charge of the team’s security efforts. There is nothing further to add to the description.

How to Become a Professional Cloud Security Engineer

Google Cloud certification focuses on IAM and resource hierarchy to organize projects into folders and organizations, a major focal area for this certification. Then there are Service Accounts, Cloud Identity, and Groups.

The BeyondCorp zero-trust network paradigm and Identity-Aware Proxy are two of Google’s top priorities in networking. However, using network-based security as an extra defense is quite sensible. It’s a good idea to have several layers of defense, isn’t it? As a result, VPC architecture like firewalls, peering, and Cloud Interconnect must be set up to allow a secure connection.

Everything and everyone must have the least amount of privilege possible.

The data you keep should not require any rule to convince you that it’s a poor idea to gather too comprehensive information about your customers, store it insecurely, and then let this data slip into the wrong hands. Right? It’s terrible business since data leaks undermine public confidence and can result in the demise of whole organizations. Tokenize, encrypt and manage keys using Cloud Key Management (CKM), tokenize, encrypt, and manage keys with Object Lifecycle Policies (OLP). …and so on.

Finally, there’s more to security than mere precautions. You may also be required to react to security incidents such as a DDoS or a Zero-Day vulnerability.

We could go on, but we want to make sure that you understand what this position entails.

A quick word on Google’s Developer Perspective

The initial edition of Google’s Professional Cloud Architect certification was essentially an amalgamation of all the other certifications we’ve discussed. (Although we’ll cover some of the ones we’ll cover after this point, but mostly the ones before it.)

On the PCA test, one question had me troubleshoot a piece of computer code—I can’t remember which one—and it had nothing to do with Google at all.

Such questions have been shifted to the Professional Cloud Developer exam, which focuses on architectural considerations. Nonetheless, we believe it demonstrates how Google’s initial thinking was that all technical employees should have a basic understanding of software development.

To avoid being confused by information that isn’t relevant to your personal experience, I’d want you to familiarize yourself with Google’s unique perspective on a wide range of real-world professions. Please do not be concerned about learning the few additional items they need; We are certain that you can do so. You may be surprised by how often you use some of these products in the future.