Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Cloud DevOps Engineer Professional Certificate Course Syllabus

Overview: This course prepares learners for the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification by mastering Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, automation, observability, and incident management on Google Cloud. Through hands-on labs and real-world simulations, students gain practical experience in infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, reliability frameworks, and production resilience. The program spans approximately 36–45 weeks of intensive learning, combining theory with project-based implementation.

Module 1: Cloud Foundations for SRE

Estimated time: 40 hours

• Explore Google Cloud regions, zones, and global network topology
• Deploy and manage Compute Engine instances
• Configure IAM roles and policies for operations teams
• Establish monitoring baselines using Cloud Monitoring
• Conduct hands-on incident response simulations

Module 2: Infrastructure as Code

Estimated time: 50 hours

• Manage Terraform state and modules for GCP resources
• Develop reusable templates for VM clusters and networks
• Implement policy constraints using Google Cloud Config Connector
• Build Kubernetes deployment automation
• Integrate GitOps workflows with version-controlled infrastructure

Module 3: Continuous Delivery Systems

Estimated time: 50 hours

• Build CI/CD pipelines using Cloud Build and Artifact Registry
• Configure Spinnaker for progressive delivery
• Implement canary deployments and automated rollback triggers
• Apply security scanning in deployment pipelines
• Manage stateful service deployments with reliability safeguards

Module 4: SRE Observability

Estimated time: 45 hours

• Analyze logs and troubleshoot issues with Cloud Logging
• Implement distributed tracing using Cloud Trace
• Create custom metrics and monitor the four golden signals
• Configure alerting policies and notification channels
• Build and deploy dashboards as code

Module 5: Reliability Engineering

Estimated time: 70 hours

• Implement SLIs, SLOs, and error budget policies
• Conduct blameless postmortems and write incident reports
• Perform chaos engineering experiments and resilience testing
• Plan capacity using forecasting models
• Run game-day exercises to validate system reliability

Module 6: Final Project

Estimated time: 100 hours

• Design and automate a full SRE solution on Google Cloud
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and incident playbooks
• Present reliability metrics and executive summary in a capstone review

Prerequisites

• Familiarity with Linux command line and shell scripting
• Basic understanding of cloud computing and networking concepts
• Access to a Google Cloud billing account for full simulations

What You'll Be Able to Do After

• Apply Google's SRE principles to real-world cloud systems
• Automate infrastructure using Terraform and Deployment Manager
• Build and secure CI/CD pipelines with Cloud Build and Spinnaker
• Monitor services using the Cloud Operations suite
• Lead incident response and reliability improvement initiatives