The Architect and the Helicopter Racing

This article is written on fresh impressions about passing the certification for the Google’s Professional Cloud Architect. It’s wrapped into structured report and spiced with good amount of thoughts, reminiscences about my similar experience with AWS Architect certification, and all of this is under the sauce of reflections about modern cloud technologies in general.

I have successfully passed this exam in July 2022, and for me the whole journey was surprisingly refreshing and inspirational one. I’m going to dive deeper into the details in a moment.

Why did I sit the exam?

Why, indeed? I’m a seasoned technologist with 5+ years experience in companies of various size. Jointly with my research work in the area of Computational Physics, CG and Fintech, it’s more than a decade in a business. Why should I sit at the school desk and jump through the hoops again?

The answer is simple — for me the exam itself never was a prime target. I always thought about exams as milestones, showing me my progress, and serving at the same time the role of anchor, independent review of everything I know.

Exam helps to avoid procrastinating indefinitely long time (we all just love doing this), via setting solid deadlines, helps to not get lost in self-illusions about how much you know, providing an objective evaluation of your design skills in building complex cloud systems.

And the last, but not least , it helps to stay on right path and — the most importantly — to finish the marathon.

The Google way

Google always was an extraordinary company.

In early days one could hear the weird questions in their interviews, like “Why are manhole covers round?”, or “How many gas stations/dogs/cats are there in the United States?”. These questions are not asked anymore, but the geekiness is not gone anywhere.

This year they added an interesting case-study to their list of fictitious companies which are served as a background for the GPA exam’s questions. It’s a Helicopter Racing League, which according to description is “a global sports league for competitive helicopter racing”.

The absurdity of such kind of sport is nicely married to the technical challenges faced in order to make the whole extravaganza highly entertaining and attractive. For example, how are you supposed to provide the live coverage? One will need a couple of air-crafts with cameras, because nobody will find entertaining to see only readings from GPS trackers on big tableau. Also it’s preferably to shoot everything in 4k (or even in 8k, because cameras can not be put too close to helicopters and people wish to see all in details, of course - especially the helicopter’s collisions which will take place for sure). Plus it’s nice to have a slow-motion mode due to high speed of helicopters (up to 250 mph, which is twice as more as the max speed of car bolides). So, how much data we will need to record and broadcast? A lot, I guess.

I wonder, what they will come out with next time? Based on the history of Google’s peculiarities, it could be anything. Time will tell.

The importance of the planning

Tactics win battles; strategy wins wars.

When it comes to anything related to informational technologies, the constant planning and preparations for the worst is the key which will allow you to succeed in everything. IT is a child of XX century, born in attempt to deal with exponentially growing amount of data, but only the XXI century has shown what this is about.

The domain area of Google Cloud Architect exam is Cloud technologies, which is an enormously large topic nowadays, including both low-level concepts (such as networking and the building blocks of Internet) and the high-level ones, such as services, technologies and software frameworks.

It took me a lot of time to structure my knowledge and work out the approach to solve design-specific questions. How much? It’s been about a year, which I spent on studying GCP documentation, reading books (check out my reviews in last section) and validating all what I have known via performing experiments in private space, to gain hands-on experience.

This was a long road, but it helped me to master my skills, develop the cloud mindset and get confidence in my knowledge.

About exam

Skilled architect is not a juggler, who operates with fancy facts about which service/technology/approach can be used in a specific circumstances.

He is not a coder either. This role is actually a quintessence of what the job of software developer is about in current world, which is — the job of helping people to handle big volume of information, to work more efficiently via automating and outsourcing routine work to computer systems, and to be more productive and creative via extending human abilities through ML/AI technologies. And to do all aforementioned economically, which is a synonym of a money-wise today.

That’s why the exam contains quite a diverse set of questions.

Roughly 30% of all questions are very technical ones, up to asking the exact syntax of command to perform some operation with cloud resources (this is to check the knowledge and hands-on experience with gcloud, gsutil, bq and other tools).

Other questions implies the familiarity with system design. The correct answer to some questions may depend on details of company overview, business and technical requirements, and of the executive statement which you can find only in full description of use-case (but you don’t have to memorize the company’s profile — during exam you will have access to it)

Be ready to expect some deep-level, non-trivial questions on Kubernetes (K8s) and DevOps stuff. Kubernetes is one of the corner-stone of Google Cloud (and to be fair, one of the foundation of any advanced distributed microservice based system). It’s a quite vast topic by itself, so I’d suggest to read a separate book devoted solely to K8s.

Summarizing, in order to pass the GPA exam you have to have a wide and deep knowledge of everything related to GCP, both from practical and theoretical perspective. Which is, by the way, a sort of fair requirement — people holding architect roles have to know everything or nearly everything in many areas.

Final thoughts

In the final section I’d like to compare my experience of having GPA exam with taking a similar one for the knowledge of AWS platform (I’ve got certified as a AWS Architect in December of 2021)

I have to say, the questions were not only quite similar to those from GCP, but in some cases there were direct relations. Which is kind of surprising, because Google Cloud and AWS are actually competitive offerings, and from the first sight they should use every single opportunity to advertise and show the advantages of their own solution over the one from the enemy house; but in reality Google actually supports integration with some AWS services via their newest technology called Anthos.

Studying something, acquiring new knowledge is a very interesting process. I consider an absolute importance of finding what skills and hobbies fulfill your life, finding the way to extend your world-views, regain the childlike motivation to constantly widen your own circle of knowledge and expertise. Also it’s important to go out from time to time from your comfort zone, from convenient harbor of familiar and understandable, to escape from never-ending cycle of daily routine, job, schoolwork — you name it. It’s definitely not easy to just go out and do whatever you want to, due to lack of time or lack of motivation, due to responsibilities we all have and just physical limits of human beings, of human brain to consume new information. But this is absolutely necessary.

Knowledge is power, it makes us who we are and what we are able to achieve, whom we will become, so accepting this life-path of Pioneer and Explorer of the Informational Frontier of strange new worlds is the mandatory prerequisite to your future success. Sadly, schooling and studying today are often tied with negative emotions, and the whole process of learning is not considered fascinating, but this is not how it is supposed to be. For me it seems like for many people the school (=learning) got associated with something strongly negative, which stresses out and eventually has become the symbol of dullness, boringness and uselessness.

But it my mind studying got tied to the feeling of belonging to the club of like-minded people fell in love with intellectual search, competition and discovery.

I acquire new knowledge in two main ways — via reading books (and passing relevant exams) and via work on different projects, both at work and in private space. The first way allows to gain theoretical knowledge in an acceptable tempo and volumes, giving you the control over the process.

I consider work and personal projects to be a sort of trial which meant to show your mastery as it is seen from the objective point of view.

For me the multi-year experience in various realms of technological universe was very precious exactly to its versatility. All this knowledge of different technologies, languages, frameworks, libraries, etc, etc, allows me today to see different approaches invisible to others, to create something that have never been done before, to innovate, to solve any problem in a creative way.

I noticed that new knowledge is not a ballast but a Swiss-knife, a universal master key if you will, which is able to open the door of possibilities to the Unimaginable.

Useful references

[1] https://cloud.google.com/docs — the primary source of information about GCP and the bible containing the answers to literary any questions regarding platform. This is both an advantage and disadvantage in the same time. All topics are relatively good structured and categorized, but the amount of information could be overwhelming. So this can be viewed first of all as a handbook.

[2] Official Google Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide, by Dan Sullivan — a very useful book, which brings insights on what type of questions you have to expect at Professional Cloud Architect exam. But it’s a quite high-level though. Ideally it should be the last book you have to read in your studying

[3] Professional Cloud Architect — Google Cloud Certification Guide, by Konrad Clapa and Brian Gerrard — can be used (as the title suggests) as a guide. And yes, this is a detailed and thoughtfully methodological plan of studies. I’ve read this book in the very beginning of my journey, and it helped me a lot.

[4] Kubernetes in Action, by Marko Luksa — a must read book on K8s and everything around

[5] https://github.com/akaliutau/gcp-grimoire — these are the notes I used to prepare for the exam. This repository contains also some code and scripts I used to gain some hands-on experience with the platform. Practical part is quite skinny, because I already had an extensive experience with GCP. Note, there are official GCP repositories with how-to-do-it examples, and you should use those to close gaps in knowledge.