Introduction
The Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer exam tests your ability to design, deploy, monitor, and adapt services and infrastructure for data-driven decision-making. The four primary areas of focus in this exam are as follows:
Designing data processing systems
Building and operationalizing data processing systems
Operationalizing machine learning models
Ensuring solution quality
Designing data processing systems involves selecting storage technologies, including relational, analytical, document, and wide-column databases, such as Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Cloud Firestore, and Cloud Bigtable, respectively. You will also be tested on designing pipelines using services such as Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Dataproc, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Cloud Composer. The exam will test your ability to design distributed systems that may include hybrid clouds, message brokers, middleware, and serverless functions. Expect to see questions on migrating data warehouses from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.
The building and operationalizing data processing systems parts of the exam will test your ability to support storage systems, pipelines, and infrastructure in a production environment. This will include using managed services for storage as well as batch and stream processing. It will also cover common operations such as data ingestion, data cleansing, transformation, and integrating data with other sources. As a data engineer, you are expected to understand how to provision resources, monitor pipelines, and test distributed systems.
Machine learning is an increasingly important topic. This exam will test your knowledge of prebuilt machine learning models available in GCP as well as the ability to deploy machine learning pipelines with custom-built models. You can expect to see questions about machine learning service APIs and data ingestion, as well as training and evaluating models. The exam uses machine learning terminology, so it is important to understand the nomenclature, especially terms such as model, supervised and unsupervised learning, regression, classification, and evaluation metrics.
The fourth domain of knowledge covered in the exam is ensuring solution quality, which includes security, scalability, efficiency, and reliability. Expect questions on ensuring privacy with data loss prevention techniques, encryption, identity, and access management, as well ones about compliance with major regulations. The exam also tests a data engineer’s ability to monitor pipelines with Stackdriver, improve data models, and scale resources as needed. You may also encounter questions that assess your ability to design portable solutions and plan for future business requirements.
In your day-to-day experience with GCP, you may spend more time working on some data engineering tasks than others. This is expected. It does, however, mean that you should be aware of the exam topics about which you may be less familiar. Machine learning questions can be especially challenging to data engineers who work primarily on ingestion and storage systems. Similarly, those who spend a majority of their time developing machine learning models may need to invest more time studying schema modeling for NoSQL databases and designing fault-tolerant distributed systems.
What Does This Book Cover?
This book covers the topics outlined in the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer exam guide available here:
cloud.google.com/certification/guides/data-engineer
Chapter 1: Selecting Appropriate Storage Technologies This chapter covers selecting appropriate storage technologies, including mapping business requirements to storage systems; understanding the distinction between structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data models; and designing schemas for relational and NoSQL databases. By the end of the chapter, you should understand the various criteria that data engineers consider when choosing a storage technology.
Chapter 2: Building and Operationalizing Storage Systems This chapter discusses how to deploy storage systems and perform data management operations, such as importing and exporting data, configuring access controls, and doing performance tuning. The services included in this chapter are as follows: Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Firestore, BigQuery, Cloud Memorystore, and Cloud Storage. The chapter also includes a discussion of working with unmanaged databases, understanding storage costs and performance, and performing data lifecycle management.
Chapter 3: Designing Data Pipelines This chapter describes high-level design patterns, along with some variations on those patterns, for data pipelines. It also reviews how GCP services like Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Dataproc, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Cloud Composer are used to implement data pipelines. It also covers migrating data pipelines from an on-premises Hadoop cluster to GCP.
Chapter 4: Designing a Data Processing Solution In this chapter, you learn about designing infrastructure for data engineering and machine learning, including how to do several tasks, such as choosing an appropriate compute service for your use case; designing for scalability, reliability, availability, and maintainability; using hybrid and edge computing architecture patterns and processing models; and migrating a data warehouse from on-premises data centers to GCP.
Chapter 5: Building and Operationalizing Processing Infrastructure This chapter discusses managed processing resources, including those offered by App Engine, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Dataflow. The chapter also includes a discussion of how to use Stackdriver Metrics, Stackdriver Logging, and Stackdriver Trace to monitor processing infrastructure.
Chapter 6: Designing for Security and Compliance This chapter introduces several key topics of security and compliance, including identity and access management, data security, encryption and key management, data loss prevention, and compliance.
Chapter 7: Designing Databases for Reliability, Scalability, and Availability This chapter provides information on designing for reliability, scalability, and availability of three GPC databases: Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and Cloud BigQuery. It also covers how to apply best practices for designing schemas, querying data, and taking advantage of the physical design properties of each database.
Chapter 8: Understanding Data Operations for Flexibility and Portability This chapter describes how to use the Data Catalog, a metadata management service supporting the discovery and management of data in Google Cloud. It also introduces Cloud Dataprep, a preprocessing tool for transforming and enriching data, as well as Data Studio for visualizing data and Cloud Datalab for interactive exploration and scripting.
Chapter 9: Deploying Machine Learning Pipelines Machine learning pipelines include several stages that begin with data ingestion and preparation and then perform data segregation followed by model training and evaluation. GCP provides multiple ways to implement machine learning pipelines. This chapter describes how to deploy ML pipelines using general-purpose computing resources, such as Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine. Managed services, such as Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Dataproc, are also available, as well as specialized machine learning services, such as AI Platform, formerly known as Cloud ML.
Chapter 10: Choosing Training and Serving Infrastructure This chapter focuses on choosing the appropriate training and serving infrastructure for your needs when serverless or specialized AI services are not a good fit for your requirements. It discusses distributed and single-machine infrastructure, the use of edge computing for serving machine learning models, and the use of hardware accelerators.
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