Pass the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Network Engineer Exam (2023)

4 min readDec 21, 2022

--

Hey everyone, I hope you all are doing well. Recently, I passed the very toughest Google Cloud Professional Cloud Network Engineer certification exam. This is in fact, the hardest among all the Google Cloud certifications. In this article, I will share the strategy and resources that helped me crack the exam, along with my learnings from failing the previous attempt.

For a career in tech, subscribe to The Cloud Pilot

About the exam

The Professional Cloud Network Engineer exam assesses your ability to:

Design, plan, and prototype a Google Cloud network
Implement Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) instances
Configure network services
Implement hybrid interconnectivity
Manage, monitor, and optimize network operations

The price of the exam is $200 and the duration is 2 hours. You can expect 50 questions to be answered within the given time.

My Background

I have been tinkering around Google Cloud services for the past 2 years and am working as a Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps Engineer. This ensured that my work experience also contributed to the knowledge base I possess which helped me with understanding Google Cloud at a detailed level. Since I hadn’t been working on hybrid networking services and advanced networking topics, I had to make an extra effort to learn about them.

Preparation Strategy

I can’t emphasize the level of difficulty of the questions I faced on the first attempt at the exam. I initially took the exam with the confidence of passing the Security Engineer certification but once I was in the exam, it destroyed me like anything. My confidence was shattered and dusted to the ground. I couldn’t believe that I failed at my first attempt. This time I took my time to prepare well enough for it.

Visit the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Network Engineer page on Google. This will give you an overview of the exam and what is required to complete the certification.
Understand what the exam is all about. Visit the exam guide to see the contents in detail. You will get a solid understanding of the content you will need to prepare for the exam.
Visit the official Google Cloud Platform documentation to clearly understand each of the GCP services. These would make up your GCP knowledge but you still have another essential factor to cover: “Hands-on experience”.

“No technical certification in the world will be useful for you if you don’t know how to implement it in the real world scenario.”

Exam Experience

Undoubtedly, the hardest exam I have ever given!

The questions were fairly lighter than my previous attempt. I got a few straightforward questions, a few hard questions, and a little of what I faced in my previous attempt.

Failing the first attempt gave me a lot of things to watch out for.

There were a few topics that I had been carefully looking out for, specifically the following ones:

Interconnect — Direct and Partner: one big topic that blew my mind.
Peering — Direct and Carrier: another topic that busted my brain.
Routing: How do I define the routes? What are the different routing methods? When is each of the methods used?
Security in Networking: How does Network Intelligence Centre work? When is it used? What is the use of Private Service Access? When and how do you use VPC Service Perimeter?
Networking on GKE: What is the IP range for services, pods, and clusters?