Study Guide: Google certified Professional Cloud Architect

Introduction

I recently managed to pass the Google Cloud Certified: Professional Cloud Architect exam.

What is the Professional Cloud Architect certification?

Google describes it as follows:

Professional Cloud Architects enable organizations to leverage Google Cloud technologies. With a thorough understanding of cloud architecture and Google Cloud, they design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objectives. The Professional Cloud Architect certification exam assesses your ability to:

• Design and plan a cloud solution architecture
• Manage and provision the cloud solution infrastructure
• Design for security and compliance
• Analyze and optimize technical and business processes
• Manage implementations of cloud architecture
• Ensure solution and operations reliability

Preparation

In my previous GCP related training posts, I covered the Get GCP Certified program.

I used the same program this time, again taking advantage of 10 weeks of free instructor led and also self-paced hands on training with free access to Google Cloud.

The last day I could take the GCP PCSE exam using the free exam voucher from the program was 15th July so I had booked the exam for that date - giving myself a breather on study I was also working on a side project you will hopefully hear about in a couple of months time. A few deadlines conspired against me and so 2 days ahead of the exam I resumed study for the exam by:

• Rewatching the recordings of the weekly sessions with the instructor
• Reading the reference material he’d shared each week
• Watching the reference videos he’d shared each week
• Taking the prep questions he’d shared each week and where I got a question wrong, spending time reading up on that area in detail
• Took the Google provided Sample Questions and again where I didn’t fare well, spend time reading up more in that area

Focus Areas

Obviously, pay keen attention to the Exam Guide from Google.

Couple of pointers from me:

1. Question types:

   1. Multiple Choice Single Answer
   2. Multiple Choice Multiple Answer
   3. Case Study x2

2. There are no “Ask you the same thing on several questions in a row with different answer choices, where none of the choices being correct is possible” - often referred to as “Repeated Answer choices”

3. There are no labs

4. There were 50 questions in an allotted time of 2 hours

5. Strong focus on:

   • SLOs, SLIs, SLAs
   • Compute Engine (GCE)
   • Persistent Disks
   • instance Groups
   • App Engine (Flexible)
   • App Engine (Standard)
   • Cloud Run
   • Cloud Functions
   • Cloud Storage
   • Bucket Locks
   • Cloud Filestore
   • Cloud Spanner
   • Cloud SQL
   • Storage Transfer Service
   • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
   • Load Balancing
   • Connectivity between on-premise and GCP
   • Network Intelligence Center
   • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) including Shared VPC and VPC Peering
   • Ckoud DLP
   • VPC Service Controls
   • BeyondCorp
   • Organization Policy
   • Cloud IAM
   • Cloud Identity
   • Cliud IAP
   • BigQuery
   • Dataflow
   • Dataproc

General Preparation

A couple of takeaways though that I think are relevant for all exams:

1. Read the exam outline thoroughly.

2. Use any practice tests that you can get access to.

3. After each practice test, review the areas you didn’t do as well in - spend extra time studying up in those areas before further practice tests and the exam itself.

4. Take your time - whilst you don’t want to run out of time in the exam, you don’t want to answer a question incorrectly because you misread the question.

5. Read each question thoroughly - certain key words will lead you away from obvious wrong answers so even if you don’t know 100%, you can probably deduce a likely correct answer - for example, if you are asked how to redact sensitive PII information in text, three of the answers refer to using the Cloud Vision API (which detects and extracts text from images) while the remaining answer refers to using the Cloud Data Loss Prevention API which can detect and transform sensitive data in text - hopefully the correct answer is clear.

6. This sounds like a contradiction but don’t spend too long on any one question and run out of time. I have a tactic for that…

7. Mark every question for review as soon as the question loads. At the end of a section, you’ll be given the chance to review and change your answers on the questions you marked for review. So those ones that were irking you, you can come back to once you’ve answered every question in that section. Again don’t spend too long, the clock is still running.

Summary

I found this exam harder than PCSE in that it is broader in terms of technologies and considerations you need to consider (not just security!) but still quite deep in some areas.

I did however find the exam itself enjoyable!

As ever, thanks for reading and feel free to leave comments down below!

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