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.

This is ideal for those who have a good chunk of experience in IT and using the Google Cloud Platform as a cloud engineer, administrator, developer, or manager. By earning the Professional Cloud Architect certification, you signal to the world that you are serious about being a cloud expert with a business-oriented mindset, which is critical for success in working with executives and their companies’ technical infrastructure. You essentially become the go-to person for an organization and being relied upon to align business strategy with cloud technology.

The exam is 2 hours long and costs $200.

Exam Content & Outline – What Will You Be Tested On?

There are SIX main crucial capabilities that the exam will test you on:

1. 1. Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

1. 1. Managing and provisioning a solution infrastructure

1. 1. Designing for security and compliance

1. 1. Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes

1. 1. Managing implementation

1. 1. Ensuring solution and operations reliability

Let’s look at each of these in more detail and find out what exactly to study in order to be certified as a Google Professional Cloud Architect.

Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture

This section of the exam covers the entire process of business case analysis, all the way to the production of a complete blueprint of the architecture that meets the technical and business needs of the organization.

1. 1. Designing a solution infrastructure that meets business requirements
      • • 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 (KPIs), return on investment (ROI), metrics)
      • • Compliance and observability

1. 1. Designing a solution infrastructure that meets technical requirements
      • • High availability and failover design
      • • Elasticity of cloud resources with respect to quotas and limits
      • • Scalability to meet growth requirements
      • • Performance and latency

1. 1. Designing network, storage, and compute resources
      • • Integration with on-premises/multi-cloud 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 (pre-emptible, custom machine type, specialized workload)
      • • Mapping compute needs to platform products

1. 1. Creating a migration plan (i.e., documents and architectural diagrams)
      • • 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

1. 1. Envisioning future solution improvements
      • • Cloud and technology improvements
      • • Evolution of business needs
      • • Evangelism and advocacy

Managing and Provisioning a Solution Architecture

A typical cloud environment contains multiple components, including the computing hardware, a storage hardware, and the network that connects these components together. This section concerns itself with testing your ability to securely configure network structure while considering technical modifications that may be applied to various storage services and compute engines that ultimately meet the requirements of the business.

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

1. 1. Configuring individual storage systems
      • • 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

1. 1. Configuring compute systems
      • • Compute resource provisioning
      • • Compute volatility configuration (pre-emptible vs. standard)
      • • Network configuration for compute resources (GCE, GKE, serverless networking)
      • • Infrastructure orchestration, resource configuration, and patch management
      • • Container orchestration

Designing For Security and Compliance

For this section, you will be expected to know how to use various security tools in GCP to conceive a solution that provides a strong and hardened layer of security for your assets as well as meet various compliance laws.

1. 1. Designing for security
      • • Identity and access management (IAM)
      • • Resource hierarchy (organizations, folders, projects)
      • • Data security (key management, encryption, secret management)
      • • Separation of duties (SoD)
      • • Security controls
          • • Auditing
          • • VPC Service Controls
          • • Context-aware access
          • • Organization policy
      • • Managing customer-managed encryption keys with Cloud Key Management Service
      • • Remote access

1. 1. Designing for compliance
      • • Legislation (health record/children/data privacy and ownership)
      • • Commercial (Credit card information, personally identifiable information – PII)
      • • Industry certifications (e.g. SOC 2)
      • • Audits (including logs)

Analyzing and Optimizing Technical and Business Processes

Just as Ford streamlined the process of car manufacturing with the assembly line, you are also expected to be able to figure out how to enhance processes in business and technology to improve efficiency and create value.

1. 1. Analyzing and defining technical processes
      • • Software development life cycle (SDLC)
      • • Continuous integration / continuous deployment
      • • Troubleshooting / root cause analysis
      • • Testing and validation of software and infrastructure
      • • Service catalog and provisioning
      • • Business continuity and disaster recovery

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

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

Managing Implementation

As a cloud architect, not only are you expected to know how to implement the blueprint, you are also expected to play a leadership and project manager role who will lead IT teams to ensure the successful delivery of the project. You will be expected to be familiar with all terminologies in the section to the point where you are able to clearly articulate these terms to your teams.

1. 1. Advising development/operation (DevOps) teams to ensure successful deployment of the solution
      • • Application development
      • • API best practices
      • • Testing frameworks (load/unit/integration tests)
      • • Data and system migration and management tooling

1. 1. Interacting with Google Cloud programmatically
      • • Google Cloud Shell
      • • Google Cloud SDK (gcloud, gsutil, bq)
      • • Cloud Emulators
          • • Cloud Bigtable
          • • Cloud Datastore
          • • Cloud Spanner
          • • Pub/Sub
          • • Cloud Firestore

Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability

Technology sometimes fails during operation. It is part of your duty as a cloud architect to ensure a solution for logging and monitoring is there with highest quality in standard.

1. 1. Monitoring/logging/profiling/alerting solution

1. 1. Deployment and release management

1. 1. Assisting with the support of deployed solutions

1. 1. Evaluating quality control measures

Recommended Study Materials

1. 1. Books
      • • Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect All-in-One
      • • Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects
      • • Architecting Google Cloud Solutions: Learn to design robust and future-proof solutions with Google Cloud technologies