Certification is a debatable topic. There are multiple opinions on certificates’ value. But sometimes, you can “kill a few birds” with just one certificate. For example if your company is trying to gain a better partnership with Google, it would be beneficial for employees to go through the certification. Not only will your company get better ‘deals’, but engineers will learn a trick or two during exam preparation process.

I went through Google Cloud Developer certification just a few days ago. And through Oracle’s OCI Cloud Developer back in 2023.

Experience with OCI (as of 2023):

• Learning path is organized into a list. Clear and easy to follow.
• Learning materials are almost exclusively video lectures and demonstrations; they cover most if not all questions from the exam.
• Labs are hard to follow and not very helpful (but demos are good, so I was ignoring labs).
• The practice exam is to the point and closely represents what to expect from a real one.
• Exam is just a Zoom meeting inside a lockdown browser; you show your ID and go to exam questions. The verification process takes 5 minutes.
• Overall impression: everything you need is accessible from the learning path page, the exam feels manageable and almost stress-free.

Experience with GCP (as of 2025):

• Learning path is organized into a set of cards, a bit clumsy in my opinion, but still easy to follow.
• Learning materials are a mix of video lectures and reading (unvoiced presentations). Though they don’t cover all questions from the exam.
• Labs are easy to follow and feels magical (when step checks work).
• The practice exam is “hidden” on the certification landing page as a Google form (while all the materials are located on an entirely different portal).
• Exam is held on yet another portal; setup and verification process is quite involved (wasted about 40 minutes because mobile check-in was broken).
• Overall impression: all the bits and pieces are dispersed between multiple portals, exam feels stressful and exhausting.

In total, preparation for GCP Cloud Developer certification took 22 hours. And I would give below recommendations to make certification slightly easier:

• Review sample questions in advance; find your weak spots to strengthen them.
• Review the basics of GKE networking, Load Balancer, and traffic splitting options in different products (GKE vs. Cloud Run vs. Cloud Engine)
• Try to find questions from the previous year exam.
• Get a Google Developer Program subscription (the annual one); it gives a voucher and access to all the labs

This is just my experience. Your mileage may vary. But be calm, dedicated, and prepared. Good luck ;)

Tue Apr 1, 2025 / 432 words /