If you’re looking for some solid information for the GCP Cloud Architect Exam exam, you’ve come to the right place. At Testprep Training, we’ve compiled details and information on the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam in this article. Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect Exam is a certification exam offered by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that assesses an individual’s skills and knowledge in designing and managing solutions on GCP. The exam is designed to validate the individual’s proficiency in using GCP tools and services to design and implement scalable, reliable, and secure cloud solutions.
Let’s understand more about the exam!
About the Exam:
The Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam certifies IT professionals’ skills and knowledge in using Google Cloud technologies. It evaluates the candidate’s understanding of Google Cloud architecture, design, and technology, along with their capability to employ Google Cloud solutions to address business requirements.
The Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam covers the following topics:
- Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture: This includes an understanding of how to design and plan a scalable, secure, and highly available cloud solution, as well as how to select the appropriate cloud technologies for specific business requirements.
- Managing and provisioning infrastructure: The exam tests the candidate’s ability to provision, manage, and monitor Google Cloud infrastructure, including virtual machines, networks, and storage.
- Configuring access and security: The exam covers the configuration of access control, authentication, and security for Google Cloud solutions, including the use of Google Cloud IAM and security keys.
- Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes: The exam tests the candidate’s understanding of how to analyze and optimize business and technical processes using Google Cloud tools and technologies.
Exam Format and Scheduling
Once you get a smart summary of the exam, it‘s time to give consideration to the exam details. Details perform an outstanding role, be it exam details or any other details. Even if you already know the details, double-check them because they may change over time. The Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect test, on the other hand, consists of 40 multiple-choice questions and lasts 120 minutes. The exam is valid for two years after it has been passed. However, no passing score is assigned to the exam. The test is offered in two languages: English and Japanese. Above all, the exam will set you back $200 USD.
To book the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam, you can go to the Official Google Cloud website.
- To register for the exam, you must have a Web Assessor account. If you don’t have one, create it by clicking here.
- Use your personal email, not your work email.
- After creating the account, check the catalog and register for your desired exam. Select the Kryterion Testing Centre as your exam center.
- When you register for an exam, you will need to schedule an exam time at a Kryterion testing center that is convenient for you. You can locate the nearest testing center here.
Exam Rescheduling
- Try and make sure that you take your exam on a determinable date and time. For instance, if you failed to give the exam on the scheduled date, you have to look for the reschedule/cancel the policy.
- You can cancel or reschedule your exam by logging into your Proctor U account. Make sure that you do this 48 hours or 2 days before the actual exam else you have to pay fees for the same.
- Nobody likes to flunk the exam and especially when you have your certification at stake. However, if you fail the exam for the first time, you must wait 14 days before taking it again. Above all, each time you retake the exam, you must pay the entire amount.
- , if you fail a second time, the waiting period increases to 60 days, after which you must wait 365 days before trying again.
Exam Structure
Google has divided the entire syllabus into different sections and then into subject areas for the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam. Look at the following domains and their topics.
Domain 1: Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture (24%)
1.1 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets business requirements. Considerations include:
- Business use cases and product strategy (Google Documentation: Best practices for enterprise organizations, Implementing policies for customer use cases)
- Cost optimization (Google Documentation: Performance and cost optimization)
- Supporting the application design (Google Documentation: Google Cloud system design considerations)
- Integration with external systems (Google Documentation: Using APIs from an External Network, Security, privacy, and compliance)
- Movement of data (Google Documentation: Data lifecycle)
- Design decision trade-offs (Google Documentation: Google Cloud system design considerations)
- Build, buy, or modify
- Success measurements (e.g., key performance indicators [KPI], return on investment [ROI], metrics) (Google Documentation: KPIs for APIs: How Metrics Change Over Time)
- Compliance and observability (Google Documentation: Security, privacy, and compliance)
1.2 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets technical requirements. Considerations include:
- High availability and failover design (Google Documentation: Overview of the high availability configuration)
- The elasticity of cloud resources (Google Documentation: Google Cloud overview)
- Scalability to meet growth requirements (Google Documentation: Reliability, Security, privacy, and compliance)
- Performance and latency (Google Documentation: Performance and cost optimization)
1.3 Designing network, storage, and compute resources. Considerations include:
- Integration with on-premises/multi-cloud environments (Google Documentation: Hybrid and multi-cloud architecture patterns)
- Cloud-native networking (VPC, peering, firewalls, container networking) (Google Documentation: VPC network overview)
- Choosing data processing technologies (Google Documentation: Data processing, Dataflow, Dataproc)
- Choosing appropriate storage types (e.g., object, file, RDBMS, NoSQL, NewSQL) (Google Documentation: Google Cloud Databases)
- Choosing to compute resources (e.g., preemptible, custom machine type, specialized workload) (Google Documentation: Compute, Creating a VM Instance with a custom machine type)
- Mapping compute needs to platform products (Google Documentation: Google Cloud products)
1.4 Creating a migration plan (i.e., documents and architectural diagrams). Considerations include:
- Integrating solution with existing systems (Google Documentation: Migration to Google Cloud: Getting started)
- Migrating systems and data to support the solution
- Licensing mapping (Google Documentation: Bringing your own licenses)
- Network planning (Google Documentation: Best practices and reference architectures for VPC design, VPC network overview))
- Testing and proof of concept (Google Documentation: Running a hybrid render farm proof of concept)
- Dependency management planning (Google Documentation: Specifying Dependencies)
1.5 Envisioning future solution improvements. Considerations include:
- Cloud and technology improvements (Google Documentation: Google Cloud Improvements)
- Business needs evolution (Google Documentation: Best practices for enterprise organizations, Google Cloud Improvements)
- Evangelism and advocacy (Google Documentation: API Team Best Practices: Developers, Evangelists, and Champions)
Domain 2: Managing and provisioning a solution Infrastructure (15%)
2.1 Configuring network topologies. Considerations include:
- Extending to on-premises (hybrid networking) (Google Documentation: Extending On-Premises Network-Attached Storage to Cloud Storage with Komprise, Google Cloud Hybrid Connectivity)
- Extending to a multicloud environment that may include Google Cloud to Google Cloud communication (Google Documentation: Hybrid and multi-cloud architecture patterns)
- Security protection (e.g. intrusion protection, access control, firewalls)
2.2 Configuring individual storage systems. Considerations include:
- Data storage allocation (Google Documentation: Best practices for Cloud Storage)
- Data processing/compute provisioning (Google Documentation: Provisioning VMs on sole-tenant nodes, Data processing, Dataflow, Dataproc)
- Security and access management (Google Documentation: Identity and Access Management)
- Network configuration for data transfer and latency (Google Documentation: GCP network performance, Performance, and cost optimization)
- Data retention and data life cycle management (Google Documentation: Data lifecycle, Retention policies and retention policy locks)
- Data growth management (Google Documentation: Data lifecycle, Cloud storage growth)
2.3 Configuring compute systems. Considerations include:
- Compute system provisioning (Google Documentation: Provisioning VMs on sole-tenant nodes, Compute Engine)
- Compute volatility configuration (preemptible vs. standard) (Google Documentation: Preemptible VM instances, Creating and starting a preemptible VM instance)
- Network configuration for compute resources (Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, serverless networking)
- Infrastructure orchestration, resource configuration, and patch management
- Container orchestration
Domain 3: Designing for security and compliance (18%)
3.1 Designing for security. Considerations include:
- Identity and access management (IAM) (Google Documentation: Identity and Access Management)
- Resource hierarchy (organizations, folders, projects) (Google Documentation: Resource hierarchy, Using resource hierarchy for access control)
- Data security (key management, encryption) (Google Documentation: Encryption at rest in Google Cloud)
- Separation of duties (SoD) (Google Documentation: Separation of duties)
- Security controls (e.g., auditing, VPC Service Controls, organization policy) (Google Documentation: Overview of VPC Service Controls)
- Managing customer-managed encryption keys with Cloud KMS (Google Documentation: Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK))
- Remote access
3.2 Designing for compliance. Considerations include:
- Legislation (e.g., health record privacy, children’s privacy, data privacy, and ownership) (Google Documentation: Compliance resource center)
- Commercial (e.g., sensitive data such as credit card information handling, personally identifiable information [PII]) (Google Documentation: Scan for sensitive data in just a few clicks, Take charge of your sensitive data with the Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API)
- Industry certifications (e.g., SOC 2) (Google Documentation: SOC 2)
- Audits (including logs) (Google Documentation: Cloud Audit Logs)
Domain 4: Analyzing and optimizing technology and business processes (18%)
4.1 Analyzing and defining technical processes. Considerations include:
- Software development life cycle plan (SDLC)
- Continuous integration / continuous deployment (Google Documentation: Setting up a CI/CD pipeline)
- Troubleshooting / root cause analysis best practices
- Testing and validation of software and infrastructure (Google Documentation: Validate Your Data, Testing Overview)
- Service catalogue and provisioning (Google Documentation: Provisioning Overview)
- Business continuity and disaster recovery (Google Documentation: Disaster recovery planning guide, Solving for business continuity)
4.2 Analyzing and defining business processes. Considerations include:
- Stakeholder management (e.g. influencing and facilitation)
- Change management (Google Documentation: Opening doors, embracing change with cloud data warehouses)
- Team assessment/skills readiness (Google Documentation: Migration to Google Cloud: Assessing and discovering your workloads)
- Decision-making process
- Customer success management
- Cost optimization / resource optimization (Capex / Opex) (Google Documentation: Cloud cost optimization, Cost Management)
4.3 Developing procedures to ensure reliability of solutions in production (e.g., chaos engineering, penetration testing) (Google Documentation: Patterns for scalable and resilient apps)
Domain 5: Managing implementation (11%)
5.1 Advising development/operation team(s) to ensure successful deployment of the solution. Considerations include:
- Application development (Google Documentation: Application modernization, Application Development)
- API best practices (Google Documentation: API Key Best Practices)
- Testing frameworks (load/unit/integration) (Google Documentation: Testing Overview, test – Run gsutil unit/integration tests (for developers))
- Data and system migration tooling (Google Documentation: Data center migration)
5.2 Interacting with Google Cloud programmatically. Considerations include:
- Google Cloud Shell
- Google Cloud SDK (gcloud, gsutil and bq)
- Cloud Emulators (e.g. Cloud Bigtable, Datastore, Spanner, Pub/Sub, Firestore)
Domain 6: Ensuring solution and operations reliability (14%)
6.1 Monitoring/logging/profiling/alerting solution (Google Documentation: Introduction to alerting, Alerting behavior)
6.2 Deployment and release management (Google Documentation: Google Cloud Deployment Manager)
6.3 Assisting with the support of solutions in operation (Google Documentation: Cloud Monitoring, Operations)
6.4 Evaluating quality control measures (Google Documentation: Google security whitepaper)
Learning Resources for Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect
1. Google Learning Resources
The Google Cloud Free Tier provides the candidate with free resources to study Google Cloud services. If a candidate is absolutely new to the platform and needs to grasp the basics, this is even more beneficial. As a result, we’ve included two quick links to extra resources for you. Google Cloud Platform Documentation and Technical Guides.
2. Google Cloud Essentials
In this introductory-level quest, the candidate will get hands-on practice with Google Cloud’s fundamental tools and services. So, Google Cloud Essentials is the recommended first Quest for the Google Cloud learner. This gives the candidate real-world experience that they can put to use on their first Google Cloud project.
3. Testprep Training Online Course
- Deploy managed Hadoop apps on the Google Cloud
- Make informed decisions about Containers, VMs, and AppEngine
- Understand the overall architecture and working of Google Cloud Gain the ability to work on GCP practically
- Preparedness for the Cloud Architect professional exam
4. Testprep Online Tutorials
Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect Online Tutorial enhances your understanding of exam concepts, providing in-depth coverage of exam information and policies. These online courses offer comprehensive insights, better preparing you for the exam.
5. Try Practice Test
Practice tests are a crucial tool for candidates to assess their preparation. They help identify areas of weakness that need improvement. Nowadays, there’s a variety of practice tests available online for candidates to choose from. At Testprep Training, we also offer practice exams, particularly beneficial for those who are prepared and ready for the test.
Quick Exam Tips:
Here are some tips to help prepare for the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect Exam:
- Familiarize yourself with the exam objectives: Make sure you understand the exam objectives and the specific skills that will be tested, and review the exam guide to get a sense of the topics that will be covered.
- Gain hands-on experience with Google Cloud: The best way to prepare for the exam is to gain hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Create projects, experiment with the various GCP services, and become familiar with the GCP console and the GCP command-line interface.
- Use online resources: Numerous online resources, such as courses, tutorials, and practice exams, are accessible to aid in exam preparation. Make use of these resources to strengthen your grasp of GCP and become acquainted with the exam’s format and style.
- Read the official Google Cloud documentation: The official Google Cloud documentation is a wealth of information and is essential for anyone preparing for the exam. Make sure you have a solid understanding of the GCP architecture, components, and features.
- Join the Google Cloud community: Joining the Google Cloud community can be a great way to connect with other GCP users and to stay up-to-date on the latest GCP developments. Participating in online forums, attending meetups, and following Google Cloud experts on social media can be a great way to learn more about GCP and to network with others in the GCP community.
- Practice, practice, practice: Practice is key, and it holds true for the exam as well. Utilize practice exams and hands-on exercises to solidify your understanding of GCP and build confidence in your skills.
- Focus on the key concepts: The exam will test your understanding of the key concepts of GCP, including architecture, design, security, and optimization. Make sure you understand these concepts thoroughly and can apply them to real-world scenarios.
Expert Corner
Google certifications are highly valued in the job market, increasing job opportunities. Clearing the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam certifies you and opens doors to numerous high-level opportunities. To ensure success, various training solutions offer study guides, online self-study tools, and comprehensive courses covering everything you need for the Google exam. So, get some hands-on knowledge and start preparing for the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam.
