Google Certified Cloud Architect Professional

I recently cleared the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam and hereby I am sharing the list of study materials and the concepts of the GCP that the certification concentrates on.

I was part of the Partner program by google and got access to the following Coursera courses.

1. Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure
2. Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Foundation
3. Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Core Services
4. Elastic Cloud Infrastructure: Scaling and Automation
5. Elastic Cloud Infrastructure: Containers and Services
6. Reliable Cloud Infrastructure: Design and Process

These courses are designed to give you an overview of all the services in GCP except for Bigquery, Bigtable and other AI/ML services.

The partner program also gave credits to Qwiklabs, which actually provides a hands-on lab environment to explore and play with GCP services. The environments are designed to give a step by step instructions to perform tasks like “hosting a scale-able web application using instance groups”.

Topics covered in the Exam

• Compute Engine
  1. Instance groups and scaling
  2. Images and Snapshots
• Google Kubernetes Engine
  1. Basic concepts and Commands
• Networking
  1. VPC
  2. Hybrid connection scenarios
  3. Load balancing
  4. Firewalls
• Stackdriver : Everything about stackdriver
• Cloud Agnostic design concepts:
  1. Scaling
  2. Availability
  3. Disaster Recovery
  4. Resiliency
• Casestudies : Exam has 4 case studies out of which 3 of them are already listed in the website
  1. Mountkirk Games
  2. Dress4Win
  3. TerramEarth
• BigTable & BigQuery : There were a lot of questions on Bigtable and Bigquery especially on the costing and storage for logging.
  1. Time-series data for Bigtable. https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/schema-design-time-series
  2. Schema Design for Bigtable. https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/schema-design
  3. Bigquery time partitioning tables. https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/partitioned-tables
  4. Bigquery cost optimization. https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/best-practices-costs
  5. Bigquery data loading https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/loading-data
• Organization, Folder and Project hierarchy.

External resources

Along with the courses, documentation and Qwiklabs there was also help from fellow techies, who shared there study notes with the world.

• https://medium.com/@agasthi.kothurkar/google-certified-professional-cloud-architect-study-resources-a66f8f52aac5
• https://medium.com/@earlg3/google-cloud-architect-exam-study-materials-5ab327b62bc8
• https://medium.com/@sathishvj/notes-from-my-google-cloud-professional-cloud-architect-exam-bbc4299ac30
• https://medium.com/@agasthi.kothurkar/google-certified-professional-cloud-architect-study-resources-a66f8f52aac5
• https://medium.com/google-cloud/professional-cloud-architect-certification-6a6dfa5c6ff5

Overall it took me about 6 weeks of study and was fortunate to work on a highly complex GCP project for the same duration, I was able to clear it in a single attempt.

Happy Coding!!!