Google Cloud Platform — Professional Cloud Architect (GCP PCA) Certification | Preparation Guide
Hello everyone, this weekend I passed the Google Cloud Platform — Professional Cloud Architect exam. So, I am here to share my experience and guidance on how to prepare for it.
Table Of Contents
- Introduction
- Certification Details
- Certification Topics
- Official Learning/Practice Options
- Other Learning/Practice Options
- Important Notes
- Certification Appointment Booking
- System Test (Prior to Exam Day)
- On Certification Day
- Some tips…
Introduction
This certification provides candidates with foundational knowledge of design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objectives in Google Cloud Platform.
Certification Details
- Certification Name: Professional Cloud Architect
- Format: Multiple Select & Multiple Choice (Combination of case study & stand-alone questions)
- Exam Duration: 120 minutes
- Number of Questions: 50
- Passing Score: Pass/Fail — only feedback at end of exam. No score/No breakdown of performance by topic.
- Registration Fee: $200 (plus tax where applicable)
Certification Topics
Section 1: Designing and planning a cloud solutions architecture
1.1 Designing a solutions infrastructure that meets business requirements
1.2 Designing a solutions infrastructure that meets technical requirements
1.3 Designing network, storage, and compute resources
1.4 Creating a migration plan (i.e., documents and architectural diagrams)
1.5 Envisioning future solutions improvements
Section 2: Managing and provisioning solutions Infrastructure
2.1 Configuring network topologies
2.2 Configuring individual storage systems
2.3 Configuring compute systems
Section 3: Designing for security and compliance
3.1 Designing for security
3.2 Designing for legal compliance
Section 4: Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes
4.1 Analyzing and defining technical processes
4.2 Analyzing and defining business processes
4.3 Developing procedures to test resilience of solutions in production (e.g., DiRT and Simian Army)
Section 5: Managing implementation
5.1 Advising development/operation team(s) to ensure successful deployment of the solutions
5.2 Interacting with Google Cloud using GCP SDK (gcloud, gsutil, and bq)
Section 6: Ensuring solutions and operations reliability
6.1 Monitoring/logging/alerting solutions
6.2 Deployment and release management
6.3 Supporting operational troubleshooting
6.4 Evaluating quality control measures
Official Learning/Practice Options
Google provided official learning course in Coursera, study guide, hands-on in Qwiklabs and practice tests too.
Exam Guide
Google provides official exam guide for PCA exam. Please go through it before proceeding further with the preparation.
Coursera
Coursera provides a full learning path ‘Cloud Architecture with Google Cloud Professional Certificate’ for preparing to PCA exam.
This learning path consists of below 6 courses which will give you all details about GCP services & the last course will provide details about PCA Certification.
Official Study Guide
Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide written by Dan Sullivan also covers all the topics in the exam guide. Its available in Amazon for purchase.
Qwiklabs
Qwiklabs provides hands-on experience for topics related to Cloud Architect exam.
Official Practice Exam
Google provides practice exam with around 18–20 questions which will familiarize you with types of questions you may encounter on the certification exam and help you determine your readiness or if you need more preparation and/or experience.
Other Learning/Practice Options
Linux Academy/A Cloud Guru
Linux Academy covers majority of PCA exam related topics and its web based practice sessions are added advantage associated after each lesson.
Packt
Packt provides a ‘Professional Cloud Architect — Google Cloud Certification Guide’ which covers all the exam guide topics of the PCA certification. Its exam tips and practice questions are also useful.
O’Reilly
O’Reilly provides a comprehensive details about all GCP services which helps you in understanding the concepts clearly in a simple manner.
Udemy
There are many udemy courses available for PCA certification. I have tried below one and it have 100 practice questions.
Important Notes
This section contains the important notes for the certification topics for quick reference.
Case Studies
Please refer below case studies as it will cover around 20% of exam questions. You don’t need to remember the case study as it will be available during exam; but please remember the solutions for it.
- Mountkirk Games — https://cloud.google.com/certification/guides/cloud-architect/casestudy-mountkirkgames-rev2
- Dress4Win — https://cloud.google.com/certification/guides/cloud-architect/casestudy-dress4win-rev2
- TerramEarth — https://cloud.google.com/certification/guides/cloud-architect/casestudy-terramearth-rev2
Remember the diagrams given in the below proposed architecture for these case studies.
- Mountkirk Games — https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-gaming-analysis-telemetry
- TerramEarth — https://cloud.google.com/solutions/iot-overview
All GCP products in 4 words
This is a complete list of all GCP products and short description about each of it.
Keywords
When trying to understand scenario based questions it helps to break the question down to keyword that define the solution.
- Data < 10TB & single region — Cloud SQL
- Data > 10TB — BigQuery
- Transactional NoSQL database — Cloud Datastore
- Timeseries database — Bigtable
- Streaming/arrives late/Buffers data — Pub/Sub
- Analyze and optimize for performance — Stackdriver
- Automation framework — Deployment manager/Terraform
- Hadoop/Spark — Dataproc
- Convert onprem HDFS/Object Storage — Cloud Storage first HDFS second
- Block Storage — Persistent Disk
- Containers — Kubernetes
- Network protocols other than HTTPS — Kubernetes or Compute Engine
- Websites — App Engine
- Static websites — Cloud Storage
- Event Driven — Cloud Functions
- Relational Data — Cloud SQL (vertical scaling) or Spanner (horizontal scaling)
- Analytics Database — BigQuery
- In memory — Cloud Memorystore (Redis)
- No-Ops/Managed service — No infrastructure to manage such as GKE and GAE.
- Data Lake/HDFS — Cloud Storage
- User Profile and Game State — Cloud Datastore
- Preemptible VMs — Lives only for 24 hours
Decision Trees
Deciding which service to choose in a particular scenario is an important task — not only for exam but also in real-time for an architect. The below link contains many decision trees which will help you in this.
Certification Appointment Booking
Please follow below steps to book appointment for the certification exam:
- Go to https://www.webassessor.com/googlecloud/
- Use your existing Webassessor account to log in or create a new account and log in.
- Select ‘Register For An Exam’.
- Click on ‘Google Cloud Certified — Professional Cloud Architect (English)’.
- Select how you want to take the exam and follow the prompts.
System Test (Prior to Exam Day)
I highly recommend you to perform system test from the same computer and location you will be testing from on exam day. Please follow below link for further steps:
You must install Sentinel and set up your Biometric Profile prior to your scheduled exam time. You can install Sentinel by logging into your Webassessor account at www.webassessor.com/googlecloud and referring to the Sentinel info found in My Assessments.
Ensure you have administrative rights on your computer to be able to download the software and proceed further with the prompts.
On Certification Day
The certification will be open 10 minutes before the booked time and please be ready at least before 10 minutes so that you will be ready for the booked time after completing the admission process.
- Login: https://www.webassessor.com/googlecloud/
- Click on your exam under ‘My Assessments’
- Click “Launch” and proceed through the self check-in process and wait for a Proctor to connect with you
- If you face any issue during the exam, then please contact the Kryterion Technical Support through Live Chat: https://kryterion.force.com/support/s/contactsupport?language=en_US
Some tips…
- There are totally 50 questions and you have 120 minutes — so you have around 2.5 minutes for each question. So take your time to read the question carefully before choosing the answer and also review each question once you completed all questions.
- Read questions properly, sometimes they are tricky and you can often miss some minute details which will be a key point to find the correct answer.
- Case studies covers around 20–25% of the questions (~10–14 questions). So, please concentrate more on the 3 case studies given and remember the solutions for them.
- If you take the exam from home, then you are video proctored. So strictly follow the Webassessor guide for taking the exam.
Good that you read the whole article; hopefully it will be useful for you.
All the best for Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Certification exam. Please contact me if you have any queries/need any details on this at Balaji Ashok Kumar
No certification post would be complete without some proof that I’m not just making this up to entertain you, so here’s my GCP PCA Certificate
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