Google Professional Cloud Architect Certification: Introduction - Things To Know Before You Start

The Google Cloud Professional Architect exam covers several broad areas, including the following:
Planning a cloud solution
Managing a cloud solution
Securing systems and processes
Complying with government and industry regulations
Understanding technical requirements and business considerations
Maintaining solutions deployed to production, including monitoring

These areas require business as well as technical skills. For example, since architects regularly work with nontechnical colleagues, it is important for architects to understand issues such as reducing operational expenses, accelerating the pace of development, maintaining and reporting on service-level agreements, and assisting with regulatory compliance. In the realm of technical knowledge, architects are expected to understand functional requirements around computing, storage, and networking as well as nonfunctional characteristics of services, such as availability and scalability.
The exam includes three case studies, and some exam questions reference the case studies. Questions about the case studies may be business or technical questions.
 

1. Assume every word matters in case studies and exam questions. Some technical requirements are stated explicitly, but some are implied in business statements. Review the business requirements as carefully as the technical requirements in each case study. Similarly, when reading an exam question, pay attention to all of the statements. What may look like extraneous background information at first may turn out to be information that you need in order to choose between two options.
2. Study and analyze case studies before taking the exam. Become familiar with the case studies before the exam to save time while taking the text. You don’t need to memorize the case studies, as you’ll have access to them during the test. Watch for numbers that indicate the scale of the problem. If you need to transmit more than 10 Gbps, then you should consider a Cloud Interconnect solution over a VPN solution, which works up to about 3 Gbps.
3. Understand what is needed in the near term and what may be needed in the future. For example, in the TerramEarth case study, 200,000 vehicles are equipped with cellular communications equipment that can collect data daily. What would change about your design if all 20 million vehicles in production reported their data daily? This requirement is not stated, and not even implied, but it is the kind of planning for the future that architects are expected to do.
4. Understand how to plan a migration. Migrations are high-risk operations. Data can be lost, and services may be unavailable. Know how to plan to run new and old systems in parallel so that you can compare results. Be able to identify lower-risk migration steps so that they can be scheduled first. Plan for incremental migrations.
5. Know agile software development practices. You won’t have to write code for this exam, but you will need to understand continuous integration/continuous deployment and maintaining development, test, staging, and production environments. Understand what is meant by an infrastructure-as-code service and how that helps accelerate development and deployment.
6. Keep in mind that solutions may involve non-Google services or applications. Google has many services, but sometimes the best solution involves a third-party solution. For example, Jenkins and Spinnaker are widely used tools to support continuous integration and deployment. Google Cloud has a code repository, but many developers use GitHub. Sometimes businesses are locked into existing solutions, such as a third-party database. The business may want to migrate to another database solution, but the cost may be too high for the foreseeable future.