ACE cheat sheet

Exam at a glance

Domain weightings

How much of the exam each domain covers. Spend your study time in proportion — the heavier the domain, the more questions you'll see.

Key terms

Project

A project is the base-level organizing entity in Google Cloud that groups resources, billing, and permissions. Every resource belongs to exactly one project, and projects sit under folders and an organization in the resource hierarchy.

Resource Hierarchy

The resource hierarchy is the structure — organization, folders, projects, and resources — through which Google Cloud applies IAM policies and organization policies. Permissions granted higher up are inherited by everything below.

Cloud IAM

Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the service that controls who (members) can do what (roles) on which Google Cloud resources. ACE requires assigning basic, predefined, and custom roles following least privilege.

Service Account

A service account is a special Google Cloud identity used by applications and VMs rather than people, authenticating with keys or workload identity. ACE covers creating service accounts, granting them roles, and managing their keys and scopes.

gcloud CLI

The gcloud CLI is the command-line tool, part of the Google Cloud SDK, for creating and managing Google Cloud resources. ACE expects fluency with gcloud commands, configurations, and Cloud Shell.

Compute Engine

Compute Engine is Google Cloud's infrastructure-as-a-service for running virtual machines. ACE covers machine types, images, persistent disks, snapshots, managed instance groups, and autoscaling.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is Google Cloud's managed Kubernetes service for deploying and operating containerized applications. ACE covers creating clusters, deploying workloads, and scaling on GKE.

Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a managed compute platform that runs stateless containers in response to requests or events, scaling to zero when idle. It is one of the serverless compute options ACE compares alongside App Engine and Cloud Functions.

Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage is Google Cloud's object storage service, organizing data into buckets with storage classes (Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive) and lifecycle rules. ACE covers creating buckets, controlling access, and choosing classes for cost.

VPC Network

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network is a global, software-defined network that connects Google Cloud resources using regional subnets, firewall rules, and routes. ACE covers configuring VPCs, firewall rules, and load balancing.

Cloud Load Balancing

Cloud Load Balancing is a managed service that distributes traffic across Google Cloud resources, with global and regional options for HTTP(S), TCP, and UDP. ACE covers selecting and configuring load balancers for availability and scale.

BigQuery

BigQuery is Google Cloud's serverless, highly scalable data warehouse for running SQL analytics over large datasets. ACE covers it as one of the managed data services to choose among alongside Cloud SQL and Firestore.

Cloud Monitoring

Cloud Monitoring is part of the Google Cloud operations suite, collecting metrics, dashboards, uptime checks, and alerting policies. ACE covers using it, along with Cloud Logging, to ensure the successful operation of a solution.

Cloud Logging

Cloud Logging is the operations-suite service that stores, searches, and analyzes log data from Google Cloud resources and applications. ACE covers viewing logs, creating log-based metrics, and using audit logs for security.