Study Guide: Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect
I recently completed the Google Cloud certification exam for Professional Cloud Architect and since the content is pretty widely spread across many sites and channels, I thought it would be worthwhile to share some of my preparations for the test. The test itself is very comprehensive as it covers not just the Google Cloud product portfolio but also some general best practices around Software Engineering, cloud-first design, and reliable software architecture.
Online Courses
Google offers a number of courses on Coursera that help you get familiar with the tools available in GCP. Together with the online lab environment qwiklabs (part of Google since Nov. 2016), the courses offer an opportunity to get a high-level overview as well as hands-on experience with the platform. In preparation for the certification specifically, I took the following classes:
- Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure
- Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Core Services
- Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Foundation
- Elastic Cloud Infrastructure: Scaling and Automation
- Elastic Cloud Infrastructure: Containers and Services
- Reliable Cloud Infrastructure: Design and Process
- Securing and Integrating Components of your Application
Out of interest I also took the following classes but for the certification, it would suffice to just know what the different tools do at a high level.
- Leveraging Unstructured Data with Cloud Dataproc on Google Cloud Platform
- Serverless Data Analysis with Google BigQuery and Cloud Dataflow
Official Google Cloud Documentation
Some things to focus on while reading the official documentation:
- Product descriptions and use cases
- Reference Architectures for different industries and problems
- Any decision tree/flow chart to distinguish between products
- Best-Practices
- Troubleshooting checklists
- Underlying open source technologies e.g. Apache Beam behind Dataflow.
Podcasts, Youtube, Blogs
- Google Cloud Platform Youtube Channel (Especially the Cloud Next Events of 2018 and 2017)
- Google Cloud Podcast
- Google Cloud Blog and especially the one on compute options
- Google Cloud on Medium and especially the condensed flow charts and this products cheat sheet
Books
- Site Reliability Engineering This book definitely goes far beyond the scope of the certification but gives some additional background to many of the best practices related to designing and maintaining a cloud-first infrastructure.
Hands-on Experience
Last but not least, it is worth noting that the certification is definitely targeted at engineers with substantial practical experience and that some of the questions are testing the depth of that knowledge without directly relating to any GCP products.
