Google Cloud Certified – Professional Cloud Architect: Exam Guide [2019]

You might have already passed the Google Cloud Certified – Associate Cloud Engineer exam and planning to take the Professional level exam. You can directly take the Google Cloud Certified – Professional Cloud Architect exam if you already have solid experience working with GCP. Read this article where I’ve shared useful tips from my personal experience on how to prepare for the exam.

About the Exam

You can find details about Google Cloud Certified – Professional Cloud Architect exam in the official certification page.

Prerequisites

The exam has no prerequisites. This exam objectively measures an individual’s ability to enabling organizations to leverage Google Cloud technologies.

Professional level exam is not so easy and the questions are very tricky. In most of the cases, all the answers will be valid solutions for a particular problem but you have to choose the best option(s). They don’t want to test your hands-on experiences on GCP, but it’s very much required in order to solve those bigger puzzles.

That’s why, even if you are good in architecting solutions on other Cloud technologies but if you don’t have enough hands-on experience on GCP then I would highly recommend to take the associate level exam first. That will give you foundation knowledge and hands-on experience which will be a great help for tackling the Professional level exam questions.

If you don’t have prior experience working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), then I highly recommend to take the associate level exam first. I’ve shared my tips on how to prepare for Google Cloud Certified – Associate Cloud Engineer exam.

Take the Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect – Practice exam which familiarizes you with the 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.

Taking the Google Cloud Architect Exam

Following are the high-level details about the exam:

Length	120 minutes
No. of questions	50 (Multiple-choice, multiple-answer)
Cost	$ 200 USD

You get 2.4 minutes per question, however I recommend to target to spend 1 minute per question. If any question is taking longer time then mark that for review and proceed for the next question. This way you can cover all the questions first and later you can revisit the questions which you had not answered earlier. Also, you will have the opportunity to go back and change the answer of any question.

Pro-Tips

Question Format

There are two types of questions – i) single answer and ii) multiple answers.

In single answer type question, you choose one single answer from a list of say 4 answers. In the other type, you may have to choose say 2 answers from a list of say 5 answers.

Testing Center

You have to take this exam at a Kryterion testing center. These centers are located in most of the major cities. Check the nearest center in your locality and choose the time and date to book an exam.

You need 2 identity proofs – at least one with photo. You need to empty your pocket before entering into the room to take your exam. They will provide you locker where you can put your belongings e.g. wallet and lock it. You don’t get any pencil or paper for your rough work.

Once you enter the exam room, they will log you in into a PC and you need to check if your name and the test that you are taking mentioned on the screen are correct or not. Next you need to agree the Google Terms which essentially says you are not going to disclose the questions in the exam. Once you agree, your exam starts, timer begins, you get your first question and a clock on your screen starts showing how much time is left.

When you are done, you can submit all the answers. If not, then at the end of 120 minutes your answers are automatically submitted and it shows your results.

Question Breakdown

Questions will come from the following 6 sections:

1. Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture
2. Managing and provisioning solution Infrastructure
3. Designing for security and compliance
4. Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes
5. Managing implementation
6. Ensuring solution and operations reliability

Study and Learning

This exam objectively measures an individual’s ability to design, develop, and manages robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objectives; proficiency in all aspects of enterprise cloud strategy, solution design, and architectural best practices; and experience in software development methodologies and approaches including multi-tiered distributed applications which span multi-cloud or hybrid environments.

Read the exam guide and continue to refer every week. Align your preparation to the guide.

Learn GCP online courses from different sites like Pluralsight, Linux Academy, Lynda, Coursera, A Cloud Guru etc. and make sure to do enough hands-on learning activities to gain the confidence. Qwiklabs is a great place for hands-on practices.

Think Like a Pro

As I already mentioned, the questions will be tricky and most of the answers in a questions will be valid solutions. But you have to understand the context and what is expected. What is being asked: Is it cost optimization, performance or reliability? Think like an Architect. Sharpen your blades. So, don’t rush. Read those questions very carefully and understand what is the expectation in order to pick the right answer(s).

Consider these scenarios:

• How to propose a design for lowest cost, or Google’s stated best practices, or achieve fastest time to market, or performance.
• Most questions describes a scenario. In associate level exam, they typically ask service names etc. but in the professional level exam, the focus is on design and big picture.
• Scenario could be around hybrid solutions (On-prem + Cloud), Multi Cloud, etc.
• Your system has failed – how to build high availability or how to quickly recover / fail-over.
• Learn about DR concepts such as RPO and RTO. Rolling back, if a critical bug is found in the system.
• How to on-board a new team member or a new team, etc. (access control, permissions, IAM).
• Connectivity options (Direct Connect vs. VPN vs. Peering) and how each of these is important?
• Storage options
• Security and IAM will be tested more and enough.
• Read Security Whitepapers.

If you have never done Software Development, learn basics of these topics:

• Testing (types of testing – white box, black box, unit, integration, etc.).

• Release Management (Canary, Blur Green, A/B testing etc.)

• Ability to read YAML and Python will help. Exam doesn’t ask you to code, but as part of automation etc. – there may be questions, where you need to look at a very simple Python code or YAML and do something.

Key Notes

• Read SRE Book. Skip chapters that you know very well, but ensure you have picked up the concept and jargon.

• Read Whitepapers.

• Watch Google Cloud Platform YouTube videos.

• For Kubernetes, you can refer https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF3s2WICJlqOiymMaTLjwwHz-MSVbtJPQ and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIivdWyY5sqL3xfXz5xJvwzFW_tlQB_GB.

• For Networking, you can refer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQc9P7xA_wU, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-YAQCP2Bdg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmP6SQe5J7g and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28ildhOzMSI

• Refer https://gcp.solutions, where you can get plenty of reference architecture targeting to different use-cases.

• Validate more about the exam. Many people have already shared their experiences on Medium and LinkedIn.

Many people say that in-depth knowledge is not required, only broader knowledge about different GCP services are sufficient; however my experience doesn’t say that. Definitely, you need to have a broader knowledge of services along with good architectural knowledge. But you also need very good hands-on experience without which you can’t gain deep knowledge on different services. There won’t be any direct question asking for a particular thing to test your depth. But you will surely find many questions whose answers will go to very deep level, and finding the best (not correct because most of the answers will be correct only) answer(s) will definitely require you to have solid hands-on knowledge.

Case Studies

Google has publicly shared 3 case studies and you will get a majority of the questions referring to these case studies. They will mention in the question which case study is being referred.

I highly recommend to read through each of those multiple times so that you can memorize the whole matter. You will get access to the case studies from your screen, but obviously you won’t like to spend long time reading and understanding those during the exam. Hence I recommend to memorize the matter clearly, what all different things are expected. If you do so, then during exam you will be able to quickly go to the required section to validate the information and answer fast.

Here I’ve discussed about one possible solutions architecture for each of the case studies. You might propose a different architecture for a case study, that’s fine. As long as it meets the requirement, you can propose one. But all I want you to understand and remember at least one solution architecture for each of the case studies. It will help you understand the context and answer quickly.

Mountkirk Games

TerramEarth

Data Flow Life-cycle

Keep a mind-map between data and how it flows between different services.

After You Pass

There are few benefits which you get after you pass this certification exam.

Google Certificate

First of all, you receive a Congratulations: You are Google Cloud Certified email within 5 business days, however I got it in the next 2 days. There you find the digital certificate link which takes you to your badge like this:

Perks

You also get a voucher code using which you can order an item from Google Cloud Certification Perks Webstore:

Bottom Line

I’ve cleared multiple certifications (both associate and professional levels) on different Cloud technologies and realized that there is no short-cut to achieve that. The only things that are required to clear these exams are your knowledge and understanding the context. Most of the questions in this exam will be scenario based where they will make you think and choose the best possible answer(s) isolating them from the other answers. You can only expect a very few direct questions. So, in every question you need to understand the context and apply your knowledge to solve that puzzle.

But if you prepare well and do your homework as I mentioned above, you will succeed. All the best for your exam!

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Did you appear for the exam? Then please share your experience in the comments below.