Google Cloud Professional Architect
I am writing this article directly after the exam so that i don’t forget to include the important topics. Firstly if you are going to attempt the exam be ready for 50 hypothetical case studies :) , every question in itself is a case study which you need to answer considering all the aspects demanded
Below are some key topics which you can find
- Compute : Majority of questions come from Compute (around 20%) covering Managed Instance Groups, Auto-scaling, Kubernetes, App Engine standard vs App Engine Flexible, Backup & Recovery Methods, Health checks ( intermittent/ continuous restart), Preemptible VMs vs Standard VMs
https://cloud.google.com/compute/
2. Disks/ Images/ Snapshots( 2 Questions) covering Google Best practices of backups and what suits best in the given scenario. An example would be that Solution architect wants no downtime, what is the best method among all. Also see the recommended process to create them
3. GCP Networking Services (3–4 Questions)
VPC Networks, Firewall rules, Load Balancers, NAT vs VPN. Also cover the different interconnect options and SLAs( Dedicated Interconnect, Partner interconnect). VPN Dynamic vs Static routing
Network tags
4. IAM : This section i found a bit tricky, here you needed to cover different scenerios and you need to identify which usertype or role will be best. Go with google best practices
Service Accounts, Predefined or Custom role (which one to choose) Bigquery User vs Bigquery JobUser etc
5. Storage (5–7 questions)
Cloud Storage — Storage classes, Customer supplied Encryption keys, Object Lifecycle management, Object versioning
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/storage-classes
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/lifecycle
Cloud Datastore — Indexes( an important topic to cover)
https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/indexes
Bigtable vs Bigquery, you can expect some scenarios over there
Microsoft SQL
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/sql-server/configure-availability
6. Data Flow, Data Proc (2–3 Questions)
7. Pub/ Sub, Data Prep, Data Lab — cover these topic as well
8. Data Transfer : Here cover the below 3
https://cloud.google.com/products/data-transfer/
a) gsutil, multi-threading, recursive
b) Storage Transfer Service
c) Transfer appliance and Rehydrator
9. Stackdriver. Monitoring, Logging, Retrace, Error Reporting & Debuger Cover all aspects, from logs export to storage for future use cases ( Cloud Storage, Bigquery), Log Retention
Monitoring agents , Latency etc
10 Memcache , also see Shared vs Dedicated
11. Case Studies — This covers almost 8–10 questions from 3 case studies
Apart from these , do refer the google cloud solutions for various cases
Official Links
Main Link — https://cloud.google.com/certification/cloud-architect
Exam Guide— https://cloud.google.com/certification/guides/professional-cloud-architect/
Practice Exam — https://cloud.google.com/certification/practice-exam/cloud-architect
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