Fast-Tracked to the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Certification
I recently cleared the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certification. Due to busy schedules, I opted for a minimal study plan on top of the learnings I obtained previously and on the job experience. It took me one night of studying before heading into the exam the next day.
My background before coming into the exam was: 1 year of hands-on/practical experience on GCP and cloud technologies. I’m also certified in GCP Professional Data Engineer, AWS Big Data Specialty and AWS Solution Architect Associate which was obtained over 1 year ago without cloud experience.
Here I present a guide to the prerequisites and resources I used to reaching this goal. Although everyone’s study path may vary, I believe having real-world and practical experience with GCP will contribute mostly to your learnings; your results may vary. Firstly, I will highlight the exam format, then pinpoint the resources I used for study. Finally, I will provide overview of the topics that were covered in the exam.
Exam Format
The Professional Cloud Architect exam is 2 hours in length with 50 multiple choice questions, and about 30% of the questions are based on the 3 case studies: Mountkirk, Dress4Win, TerramEarth (note that in the past exams there was 4 case studies). Spend a decent amount of time on these cases — eg draft up notes with proposed solutions/services to see how they will meet the company’s business and technical requirements. In addition, complete the practice exam to assess your readiness for the exam is a must.
Study Resources
Coursera Training:
- Architecting with Google Compute Engine Specialisation — a 5 course module on infrastructure and platform services on GCP is a great course to go through if time allows or if you’re new to GCP/cloud.
- Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Exam — This course is free to enrol, and I suggest complete the practice quiz here as a minimum.
Qwiklabs Hands-On Training:
For those without hands-on practical experience with GCP, these Qwiklab courses are a good start.
Exam Topics
The following topics one should have a good grasp on before they take the exam are:
Compute:
- Different use cases and architecture design choice between Compute Engine (GCE), Kubernetes Engine (GKE), AppEngine Standard/Flexible (GAE), Cloud Functions. IaaS vs PaaS vs Micro Service.
- Autoscaling and managed instance groups, the different autoscaling policies/metrics available
- Storage options for Compute Engine, eg Zonal/Regional disk types, GCS etc. Managing snapshots and custom images.
Networking:
- VPC, Subnets, and how they can be setup within Regions and Zones.
- Load Balancing — contrast differences of the various types, and how Cloud CDN is integrated. Global vs Regional LBs.
- Hybrid Cloud/On-Prem Connections — Cloud VPN, Cloud Interconnect (Dedicated/Partner) and Peering (Direct/Carrier)
Storage:
- Storage types in GCS and lifecycle management
- Persistent Disk vs SSD Persistent Disk vs Local SSD
- Contrast the storage types and use-cases between CloudSQL, Datastore, BigQuery, BigTable
- Storage transfer options available — then consider network bandwidth vs file sizes
IAM:
- Organisation and Project roles, Primitive vs Predefined vs Custom roles, Service Accounts
Others:
- Understand the services available in Stackdriver, eg Logging, Cloud Audit Logs, Monitoring, Trace, Error Reporting
- Implement a failover and autoscaling options with load balancing, with different compute resources, eg GCE/GKE
- Options to manage PII information in transit and at rest, and understand how Cloud DLP can be used in a data pipeline
- How Pub/Sub and Dataflow fits in a data pipeline architecture
- Infrastructure automation with Deployment Manager, CI/CD options such as Jenkins
Good luck all to your journey to Google Cloud certification!
Originally posted in LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fast-tracked-google-cloud-professional-architect-simon-lee/
