The Ultimate Guide to Passing the Professional Cloud Architect Certification by Google Cloud
About the certification exam
Duration: 2 hours
Exam format: 50 multiple-choice and multiple-select questions
Case Studies: 2 case studies and 10–12 questions based on that.
I am pleased to announce that I successfully passed🎯 the Professional Cloud Certification exam on December 23, 2022, on my first attempt. In this blog, I will share some strategies and resources that helped me prepare for the exam and my overall learning journey. Here we go 🚀
- Learning Courses:
First and foremost, study for the exam and cover all the relevant topics per the Exam Guide. You can take any of the below learning courses at your convenience:
- The Udemy course by Ranga Karanam.
- Professional Cloud Architect learning path by Coursera. ( I took this)
2. Hands-on practice:
While video tutorials can be a useful learning tool, it is important to supplement this instruction with hands-on practice to understand and retain the material fully. To gain practical experience, I recommend signing up for a trial account with Google Cloud( Use this tutorial) or using Qwiklabs to work through exercises and apply your knowledge. This will help you better understand the concepts and ensure that you are well-prepared for the long term.
3. Case studies
One important aspect of the exam is including case studies, which comprise 20–30% of the total exam. These case studies present fictional business scenarios and solutions and test your ability to apply your knowledge in a realistic context. Understanding how to analyze and solve problems using the concepts you have learned is important, as demonstrated through your performance on these case study questions. Try to understand these four case studies in detail.
I would also recommend going through this amazing playlist by Sathish VJ in which he gave a neat explanation of questions based on these case studies and more.
4. Sample questions
To get a sense of the types of questions you can expect on the exam, it is advisable to review the official sample questions provided by Google Cloud. This will give you an idea of the format and style of the questions and help you gauge your understanding of the material.
5. GCP Cheatsheet:
No GCP certification preparation is completed without the amazing cheatsheet by Ammett W Here’s the link to it along with Priyanka Vergadia’s Sketch Notes on GCP.
6. Offical GCP documentation
Lastly, please refer to the official GCP documentation to gain insights about the services and use cases.
Time for the Tips and Tricks 🔥
I am excited to share the key takeaways from my learning journey with the community. As I progressed through my studies, I learned a few key things that I believe will be valuable to others preparing for the exam. These are the key points that I want to emphasize 📌 :
✔ The PCA exam can be viewed as an extension to the Associate Cloud Engineer certification exam. If you have already completed ACE, you have covered almost 60% of the course content. Just try to get in-depth knowledge and hands-on experience on what you already know from ACE, along with some additional topics such as Security Centre, Cloud Armor, CICD, Pub-Sub, Hybrid cloud, Data transfers, Organization policy constraints, Load balancers, Cloud functions, Firebase, Cloud NAT, Cloud CDN, etc.
✔ You should be well-versed in understanding when to use which gcp service. Here are some of the important blogs/videos that you should have a look at:
- Which VPN service to choose, adequately explained by Ammett W
- Choose the right load balancer as per your requirements
✔ In case of any IAM-related questions, you should always consider the principle of least privilege access while answering it.
✔ You should also consider cost-effectiveness and Google-recommended best practices while answering.
✔ You should always use Cloud-native services instead of the open-source or third party unless the GCP service doesn't satisfy the requirements. e.g In the case of Infrastructure as a Code service, you should select Deployment Manager instead of Terraform.
Thank you for following along on my journey to becoming a Professional Cloud Architect certified by Google Cloud Platform. I hope that my tips and tricks have been helpful to you as you prepare for the exam. If you found this blog helpful, please don’t forget to give it a clap or two. If you want to stay updated on my future content, follow me and consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. Good luck on your journey to certification, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or need additional support.
References:
- Namaste Google Cloud Playlist by Piyush Sachdeva: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLkgDAt9GtM&list=PLl4APkPHzsUXvkDFARdrH2LMESVqeuH8W
- Sketch Notes by priyanka vergadia
- The Udemy course by Ranga Karanam. Ranga Rao Karanam
- Cheat sheet by Ammett W
- AwesomeGCP by sathish vj
