Hello and welcome to “Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam Preparation”. My name is Daniel Mease, and I am a trainer at Cloud Academy with over 20 years of software and web development experience.

The main focus of this learning path is to help prepare you for taking Google's Associate Cloud Engineer Certification Exam. However, even if you are not interested in the certification part, you will still find these lessons helpful. Whether your goal is to advance your career, enhance your cloud skills, or simply keep up with the latest innovations.

The Associate Cloud Engineer Exam is designed to test your knowledge in several key areas.

First, you need to know how to set up a cloud environment using Google Cloud Platform.

Second, you must be able to plan and configure a solution for that environment.

Third, you should understand how to deploy and implement any solution you come up with.

Fourth, it is vital that you be able to keep everything operating successfully.

And finally, you will be required to secure your solution by configuring access policies.

This learning path has been designed to align closely with the published learning objectives covered by Google’s exam guide. So to start, you will get a general overview of the main products and services. You will also learn how to set up a development environment, and how to install the Google Cloud SDK.

Next, you will learn all about configuring networks and creating virtual machines. This section covers auto-scaling, load balancing, and network security. So afterwards, you will understand things like what NAT is, and how to configure a Cloud VPN.

Now after that, you will start learning about containers. This will give you a chance to use services like Google Kubernetes Engine, App Engine, and Cloud Run. We will also show you how to use Identity and Access Management to keep your containers running securely.

The next part is going to focus on storage. This includes reading and writing records to databases like Cloud SQL and BigQuery. And it also includes storing and retrieving files on Cloud Storage.

After all that, we will show you how to manage everything using the Cloud Operations Suite. This will teach you how to search log files, how to enable monitoring and set up alerts, and even how to troubleshoot problems by using Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler.

As you can see, we have lots of ground to cover. So let's get started!