GCP-PCA: Google Professional Cloud Architect

Professional Cloud Architects enable organizations to leverage Google Cloud technologies. With a thorough understanding of cloud architecture and Google Cloud, they design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objectives.

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The Professional Cloud Architect certification exam assesses your ability to:

  • Design and plan a cloud solution architecture
  • Manage and provision the cloud solution infrastructure
  • Design for security and compliance
  • Analyze and optimize technical and business processes
  • Manage implementations of cloud architecture
  • Ensure solution and operations reliability

Google GCP-PCA Exam Summary:

Exam Name Google Professional Cloud Architect 
Exam Code GCP-PCA 
Exam Price $200 USD 
Duration 120 minutes 
Number of Questions   50 
Passing Score Pass / Fail (Approx 70%) 
Recommended Training / Books Google Cloud training
Google Cloud documentation
Google Cloud solutions 
Sample Questions Google GCP-PCA Sample Questions
Recommended Practice  Google Cloud Platform – Professional Cloud Architect (GCP-PCA) Practice Test 

Google Cloud Architect Syllabus:

Section Objectives 
Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

1. Designing a solution infrastructure that meets business requirements. Considerations include:

  • Business use cases and product strategy
  • Cost optimization
  • Supporting the application design
  • Integration with external systems
  • Movement of data
  • Design decision trade-offs
  • Build, buy, modify, or deprecate
  • Success measurements (e.g., key performance indicators [KPI], return on investment [ROI], metrics)
  • Compliance and observability

2. Designing a solution infrastructure that meets technical requirements. Considerations include:

  • High availability and failover design
  • Elasticity of cloud resources with respect to quotas and limits
  • Scalability to meet growth requirements
  • Performance and latency

3. Designing network, storage, and compute resources. Considerations include:

  • Integration with on-premises/multicloud environments
  • Cloud-native networking (VPC, peering, firewalls, container networking)
  • Choosing data processing technologies
  • Choosing appropriate storage types (e.g., object, file, databases)
  • Choosing compute resources (e.g., preemptible, custom machine type, specialized workload)
  • Mapping compute needs to platform products

4. Creating a migration plan (i.e., documents and architectural diagrams). Considerations include:

  • Integrating solutions with existing systems
  • Migrating systems and data to support the solution
  • Software license mapping
  • Network planning
  • Testing and proofs of concept
  • Dependency management planning

5. Envisioning future solution improvements. Considerations include:

  • Cloud and technology improvements
  • Evolution of business needs
  • Evangelism and advocacy
Managing and provisioning a solution Infrastructure

1. Configuring network topologies. Considerations include:

  • Extending to on-premises environments (hybrid networking)
  • Extending to a multicloud environment that may include Google Cloud to Google Cloud communication
  • Security protection (e.g. intrusion protection, access control, firewalls)

2. Configuring individual storage systems. Considerations include:

  • Data storage allocation
  • Data processing/compute provisioning
  • Security and access management
  • Network configuration for data transfer and latency
  • Data retention and data life cycle management
  • Data growth planning

3. Configuring compute systems. Considerations include:

  • Compute resource provisioning
  • Compute volatility configuration (preemptible vs. standard)
  • Network configuration for compute resources (Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, serverless networking)
  • Infrastructure orchestration, resource configuration, and patch management
  • Container orchestration
Designing for security and compliance

1. Designing for security. Considerations include:

  • Identity and access management (IAM)
  • Resource hierarchy (organizations, folders, projects)
  • Data security (key management, encryption, secret management)
  • Separation of duties (SoD)
  • Security controls (e.g., auditing, VPC Service Controls, context aware access, organization policy)
  • Managing customer-managed encryption keys with Cloud Key Management Service
  • Remote access

2. Designing for compliance. Considerations include:

  • Legislation (e.g., health record privacy, children’s privacy, data privacy, and ownership)
  • Commercial (e.g., sensitive data such as credit card information handling, personally identifiable information [PII])
  • Industry certifications (e.g., SOC 2)
  • Audits (including logs)
Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes

1. Analyzing and defining technical processes. Considerations include:

  • Software development life cycle (SDLC)
  • Continuous integration / continuous deployment
  • Troubleshooting / root cause analysis best practices
  • Testing and validation of software and infrastructure
  • Service catalog and provisioning
  • Business continuity and disaster recovery

2. Analyzing and defining business processes. Considerations include:

  • Stakeholder management (e.g. influencing and facilitation)
  • Change management
  • Team assessment / skills readiness
  • Decision-making processes
  • Customer success management
  • Cost optimization / resource optimization (capex / opex)

3. Developing procedures to ensure reliability of solutions in production (e.g., chaos engineering, penetration testing)
Managing implementation

1. Advising development/operation team(s) to ensure successful deployment of the solution. Considerations include:

  • Application development
  • API best practices
  • Testing frameworks (load/unit/integration)
  • Data and system migration and management tooling

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)
Ensuring solution and operations reliability 1. Monitoring/logging/profiling/alerting solution
2. Deployment and release management
3. Assisting with the support of deployed solutions
4. Evaluating quality control measures