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Google Cloud · DevOps & Automation · Professional

Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer exam guide

Exam Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer

Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer validates that you can implement SRE practices, CI/CD pipelines, observability and cost optimization on Google Cloud. It is the go-to Google credential for DevOps and site reliability engineers.

Questions50-60
Time limit120 minutes
Passing scoreSee official page
Exam fee$200 USD
Valid for2 years
DeliveryOnline proctored or onsite at a Pearson VUE test center

Format: Multiple choice. Fee note: Plus tax where applicable..

Who it's for

DevOps engineers and SREs with 3+ years of industry experience, including a year managing production systems on Google Cloud.

What the exam covers

Bootstrapping and maintaining a Google Cloud organization20%
Building and implementing CI/CD pipelines for application, infrastructure, and machine learning workloads25%
Applying site reliability engineering practices18%
Implementing observability practices and troubleshooting issues25%
Optimizing performance and cost12%

Eligibility & prerequisites

Required: None

Recommended: 3+ years of industry experience, including 1+ years designing and managing production systems on Google Cloud.

Keeping it active

Valid for 2 years. Renew by retaking the exam, or through Google Skills by completing the designated renewal courses and/or skill badges during the final year of validity, which extends the certification by 1 year (link CM Connect and Google Skills accounts with the same email).

Skills & careers

Skills it validates

  • Defining SLIs, SLOs and error budgets
  • Building CI/CD with Cloud Build, Artifact Registry and Cloud Deploy
  • Managing infrastructure as code with Terraform
  • Implementing monitoring, logging, alerting and tracing
  • Running incident response and blameless postmortems
  • Optimizing GKE and compute cost and performance

Job roles

DevOps EngineerSite Reliability EngineerPlatform EngineerCloud Operations EngineerRelease Engineer

Where it fits in your path

Planning a degree too? See how this cert earns college credit in the College Credit Navigator.

Build my study plan

  1. Week 1: Read Google's SRE book chapters on SLOs, error budgets, toil and incident management.
  2. Week 2-3: Build a pipeline with Cloud Build, Artifact Registry and Cloud Deploy to GKE and Cloud Run; manage infra with Terraform.
  3. Week 4: Observability: Cloud Monitoring SLOs and alerting policies, log-based metrics, Trace and Profiler.
  4. Week 5: Organization bootstrapping and cost optimization: resource hierarchy, committed use discounts, rightsizing; sample questions.
  5. Week 6: Practice exams and review; sit the exam.

Make it yours: pick your exam date and weekly hours. We'll split your time by domain weight and give you a printable plan.

Exam-day tips

  • CI/CD and observability are each about 25%; spend most of your time there.
  • Know SRE vocabulary precisely: SLI vs SLO vs SLA, error budget policy, toil.
  • Expect incident-management questions: roles (incident commander, communications lead) and postmortem culture.
  • Know deployment strategies (rolling, canary, blue/green) and how Cloud Deploy supports them.
  • CI/CD now explicitly includes ML workloads; know basic pipeline patterns for models.

Key terms for this exam

All 76 terms Study with thinQcards™

Commonly confused on this exam

Frequently asked questions

How much does Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer cost?

$200 plus tax.

How long is it valid?

Professional certifications are valid for 2 years. Renew by retaking the standard exam, or through the Google Skills renewal path in the final year (extends validity by 1 year).

Is it hard?

Moderately hard; SRE concepts trip up candidates who know only tooling.

DevOps Engineer vs Cloud Developer?

DevOps covers pipelines, reliability and operations; Developer covers application design and integration.

Is it worth it?

Yes; SRE and platform engineering roles value it, especially in Google Cloud and GKE environments.

Official page: cloud.google.com. Reviewed November 2026. Vendors change fees and objectives, so confirm with the vendor before you book. Spot something out of date? Tell us.