The public cloud service market is expected to be worth $623.3 billion globally. Every year, more than half of enterprises spend more than $1.2 million on cloud-related services. Cloud computing accounts for approximately 30% of global IT budgets. As a result, becoming a Google Cloud Architect will undoubtedly be worthwhile. More than 65% of businesses have already established a cloud center of excellence or a centralized cloud team.
Cloud architects are IT professionals who help businesses use Cloud technology for application deployment and other purposes. They have extensive knowledge of Cloud Computing and its use in various industries. Moreover, They collaborate closely with a variety of stakeholders. They navigate both the technical and business aspects of the Cloud infrastructure. Given their difficult responsibilities, the cloud architect’s salary is commendable.
To become a Google Cloud Architect you will need to pass the GCP Cloud Architect Exam. Let us now look at the Google Cloud Architects career prospects!
About Google Professional Cloud Architect
A Google Cloud Architect is the one who fulfills these –
- Professional Cloud Architects are in charge of enabling organizations to use Google Cloud technologies.
- Second, they plan, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions for driving business goals using their expert-level abilities and understanding of cloud architecture and Google Cloud. Furthermore, Cloud Architects perform a variety of tasks in their role, including monitoring cloud activity.
- application planning and migration
- designing action plans
- defining computational loads
- Third, Cloud Architects understand software development processes and approaches such as multi-tiered distributed systems that span multiple clouds or hybrid environments.
- Cloud Architects occupy a unique position in the field of information technology. To put it simply, they manage teams and develop plans based on solid technical expertise to achieve better results.
Remuneration for a Google Cloud Architect
According to Gartner, the expected shift to the cloud by 2022 could increase global IT spending to more than $1.3 trillion. This spending would include money spent on other aspects of IT as well. According to a Forbes article, more than 70% of CFOs believe cloud computing has been beneficial to their company’s growth in recent years. Cloud service demand has also increased significantly in recent years. These statistics clearly demonstrate that cloud services are already the preferred choice of organizations all over the world.
The average base salary of a cloud architect in India is around Rs 1,600,000 per year. Several factors could cause this to rise significantly. In some cases, the average base salary has been reported to be Rs 2,400,000 per year. Your experience as a cloud architect is possibly the most important factor of all. A senior cloud architect earns around Rs 2,500,000 per year. In contrast, a technical architect in cloud computing earns around Rs 2,400,000 per year.
Salary of a Cloud Architect: Determined by the Employer
So, how much do top corporations pay their cloud architects? Let’s take a look at a couple of those businesses! A cloud architect at Tata Consultancy Services will earn a median base salary of approximately 1,500,000 per year. TCS offers a minimum salary of around Rs 2,30,000 per year and a maximum salary of Rs 3,800,000 per year. This difference is explained by a variety of factors.
Salary of a Cloud Architect: Determined by Qualifications
So, what qualifications are required to make the cut, if you will? A PostGraduate degree is held by approximately half of the cloud architects employed by various companies. Only about 49% of other cloud architects have a bachelor’s degree, and only 1% have a doctorate. Let us now look at the salaries of people with various educational backgrounds.
A graduate will earn approximately Rs 1,500,000 per year. A cloud architect with a PostGraduate degree can expect to earn around Rs 1,900,000 per year. If you have an MBA, your annual salary can reach nearly Rs 2,000,000. As you can see, your educational credentials do matter. More than a quarter of employees in this role have cloud computing skills, which makes sense given global cloud computing market trends. Other skills include solution architecture (14% of employees) and VMWare (15%).
So, in order to get this highly demanded credential, you should follow a certain path that can help you ace the exam in one go. Let us have a look at that!
Pathway to become a Google Cloud Architect
The most in-demand career role is Google Professional Cloud Architect, and becoming certified in this field will not only improve your abilities and knowledge but will also serve as a key to several profitable opportunities. To become certified, follow these steps:
Step 1 – Gather all the exam information
The exam, on the other hand, will have around 50 questions and a time limit of 2 hours. Multiple choice and multiple select question formats will be used. Furthermore, for a $200 registration fee, the exam can be given in both English and Japanese (plus tax where applicable). For the Google Professional Cloud Architect exam, you should have at least three years of industry experience, including at least one year of experience designing and managing solutions using Google Cloud.
Step 2 – Know about Exam Objectives
Domain 1: Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture
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)
- furthermore, 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
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 multi-cloud environment that may include GCP to GCP communication (Google Documentation: Hybrid and multi-cloud architecture patterns)
- Security and data protection (Google Documentation: Data Protection)
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 nodes (Google Documentation: Sole-tenant nodes
- Infrastructure provisioning technology configuration (e.g. Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Terraform/Deployment Manager) (Google Documentation: Infrastructure as code)
- Container orchestration with Kubernetes (Google Documentation: Google Kubernetes Engine)
Domain 3: Designing for security and compliance
3.1 Designing for security. Considerations include:
- Identity and access management (IAM) (Google Documentation: Identity and Access Management)
- also, Resource hierarchy (organizations, folders, projects) (Google Documentation: Resource hierarchy, Using resource hierarchy for access control)
- furthermore, Data security (key management, encryption) (Google Documentation: Encryption at rest in Google Cloud)
- moreover, Penetration testing
- also, Separation of duties (SoD) (Google Documentation: Separation of duties)
- furthermore, Security controls (e.g., auditing, VPC Service Controls, organization policy) (Google Documentation: Overview of VPC Service Controls)
- moreover, Managing customer-managed encryption keys with Cloud KMS (Google Documentation: Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK))
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)
- also, 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)
- furthermore, Industry certifications (e.g., SOC 2) (Google Documentation: SOC 2)
- moreover, Audits (including logs) (Google Documentation: Cloud Audit Logs)
Domain 4: Analyzing and optimizing technology and business processes
4.1 Analyzing and defining technical processes. Considerations include:
- Software development life cycle plan (SDLC)
- also, Continuous integration / continuous deployment (Google Documentation: Setting up a CI/CD pipeline)
- furthermore, Troubleshooting/post mortem analysis culture (Google Documentation: Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure, Fearless shared postmortem)
- moreover, Testing and validation (Google Documentation: Validate Your Data, Testing Overview)
- also, Service catalogue and provisioning (Google Documentation: Provisioning Overview)
- furthermore, 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)
- also, Change management (Google Documentation: Opening doors, embracing change with cloud data warehouses)
- furthermore, Team assessment/skills readiness (Google Documentation: Migration to Google Cloud: Assessing and discovering your workloads)
- moreover, Decision-making process
- also, Customer success management
- moreover, Cost optimization / resource optimization (Capex / Opex) (Google Documentation: Cloud cost optimization, Cost Management)
4.3 Developing procedures to ensure the resilience of solution in production (e.g., chaos engineering) (Google Documentation: Patterns for scalable and resilient apps)
Domain 5: Managing implementation
5.1 Advising development/operation team(s) to ensure successful deployment of the solution. Considerations include:
- Application development (Google Documentation: Application modernization, Application Development)
- also, API best practices (Google Documentation: API Key Best Practices)
- furthermore, Testing frameworks (load/unit/integration) (Google Documentation: Testing Overview, test – Run gsutil unit/integration tests (for developers))
- moreover, Data and system migration tooling (Google Documentation: Data center migration)
5.2 Interacting with Google Cloud using GCP SDK (gcloud, gsutil, and bq). Considerations include:
- Local installation (Google Documentation: Installing Google Cloud SDK)
- Google Cloud Shell (Google Documentation: Google Cloud Shell documentation)
Domain 6: Ensuring solution and operations reliability
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)
Step 3- Use Case Studies
You may be directed to a case study that explains a fictional business and solution concept during the Cloud Architect Certification exam. These case studies are intended to provide you with additional information to help you make an informed decision (s). Examine the case studies that may be used in the exam as well. These are some examples:
Step 4- Using Extra Training Resources
The more study materials you have for the Professional Cloud Architect Certification Exam, the better. To put it another way, if you want to have a successful revision, you should focus on improving your conceptual understanding. There are, however, a few resources worth investigating:
- Firstly, Using Webinars for tuning into Cloud OnAir for valuable exam tips, tricks, and insights from industry experts.
- Secondly, Google Cloud documentation
- Then, Google Cloud solutions
- Lastly, Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide
Step 5- Use Practice Tests to assess yourself
Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect practice exams can help you identify your weak points and work on them. You will also be able to determine your strong and weak areas by analyzing yourself with these exams. You’ll also be able to improve your answering skills, which will save you a significant amount of time. However, the best time to begin administering practice exams is after you’ve completed one entire topic.
Final Words
A cloud architect is one of those jobs that will be in high demand for quite some time. With the cloud computing field expected to grow exponentially in the coming years, becoming a cloud architect is the best thing you can hope for right now in your career. It’s not only a great way to get a high-paying job, but it’s also a great way to gain first-hand experience working with new and exciting technologies.