Introduction
The Google Cloud Platform is a diverse and growing set of services. To pass the Google Cloud Professional Architect exam, you will need to understand how to reason about both business requirements and technical requirements. This is not a test of knowledge about how to do specific tasks in GCP, such as attaching a persistent disk to a VM instance. That type of question is more likely to be on the Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer exam. The Google Cloud Certified Professional Architect exam tests your ability to perform high-level design and architecture tasks related to the following:
- Designing applications
- Planning migrations
- Ensuring feasibility of proposed designs
- Optimizing infrastructure
- Building and deploying code
- Managing data lifecycles
You will be tested on your ability to design solutions using a mix of compute, storage, networking, and specialized services. The design must satisfy both business and technical requirements. If you find a question that seems to have two correct technical answers, look closely at the business requirements. There is likely a business consideration that will make one of the options a better choice than the other. For example, you might have a question about implementing a stream processing system, and the options include a solution based on Apache Flink running in Compute Engine and a solution using Cloud Dataflow. If the business requirements indicate a preference for managed services, then the Cloud Dataflow option is a better choice.
You will be tested on how to plan the execution of work required to implement a cloud solution. Migrations to the cloud are often done in stages. Consider the advantages of starting with low-risk migration tasks, such as setting up a test environment in the cloud before moving production workloads to GCP.
The business and technical requirements may leave you open to proposing two or more different solutions. In these cases, consider the feasibility of the implementation. Will it be scalable and reliable? Even if GCP services have high SLOs, your system may depend on a third-party service that may go down. If that happens, what is the impact on your workflow? Should you plan to buffer work in a Cloud Pub/Sub queue rather than sending it directly to the third-party service? Also consider costs and optimizations, but only after you have a technically viable solution that meets business requirements. As computer science pioneer Donald Knuth realized, “The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”1 The same can be said for architecture as well—meet business and technical requirements before trying to optimize.
The exam guide states that architects should be familiar with the software development lifecycle and agile practices. These will be important to know when answering questions about developing and releasing code, especially how to release code into production environments without shutting down the service. It is important to understand topics such as Blue/Green deployments, canary deployments, and continuous integration/continuous deployments.
In this context, managing is largely about security and monitoring. Architects will need to understand authentication and authorization in GCP. The IAM service is used across GCP, and it should be well understood before attempting the exam. Stackdriver is the key service for monitoring, logging, tracing, and debugging.
How Is the Google Cloud Professional Architect Exam Different from the Google Cloud Associate Engineer exam?
There is some overlap between the Google Cloud Professional Architect and Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer exams. Both exams test for an understanding of technical requirements and the ability to build, deploy, and manage cloud resources. In addition, the Google Cloud Professional Architect exam tests the ability to work with business requirements to design, plan, and optimize cloud solutions.
The questions on the architect exam are based on the kinds of work cloud architects do on a day-to-day basis. This includes deciding which of several storage options is best, designing a network to meet industry regulations, or understanding the implications of horizontally scaling a database.
The questions on the Cloud Engineer exam are based on the tasks that cloud engineers perform, such as creating instance groups, assigning roles to identities, or monitoring a set of VMs. The engineering exam is more likely to have detailed questions about gcloud, gsutil, and bq commands. Architects need to be familiar with these commands and their function, but a detailed knowledge of command options and syntax is not necessary.
This book is designed to help you pass the Google Cloud Professional Architect certification exam. If you’d like additional preparation, review the Official Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide (Sybex, 2019).
What Does This Book Cover?
This book covers the topics outlined in the Google Professional Cloud Architect exam guide available here:
https://cloud.google.com/certification/guides/professional-cloud-architect/
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Google Professional Cloud Architect Exam This chapter outlines the exam objectives, scope of the exam, and three case studies used in the exam. One of the most challenging parts of the exam for many architects is mapping business requirements to technical requirements. This chapter discusses strategies for culling technical requirements and constraints from statements about nontechnical business requirements. The chapter also discusses the need to understand functional requirements around computing, storage, and networking as well as nonfunctional characteristics of services, such as availability and scalability.
Chapter 2: Designing for Business Requirements This chapter reviews several key areas where business requirements are important to understand, including business use cases and product strategies, application design and cost considerations, systems integration and data management, compliance and regulations, security, and success measures.
Chapter 3: Designing for Technical Requirements This chapter discusses ways to ensure high availability in compute, storage, and applications. It also reviews ways to ensure scalability in compute, storage, and network resources. The chapter also introduces reliability engineering.
Chapter 4: Designing Compute Systems This chapter discusses Compute Engine, App Engine, Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Functions. Topics in this chapter include use cases, configuration, management, and design. Other topics include managing state in distributed systems, data flows and pipelines, and data integrity. Monitoring and alerting are also discussed.
Chapter 5: Designing Storage Systems This chapter focuses on storage and database systems. Storage systems include object storage, network-attached storage, and caching. Several databases are reviewed, including Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Firestore, and Bigtable. It is important to know how to choose among storage and database options when making architectural choices. Other topics include provisioning, data retention and lifecycle management, and network latency.
Chapter 6: Designing Networks This chapter reviews VPCs, including subnets and IP addressing, hybrid cloud networking, VPNs, peering, and direct connections. This chapter also includes a discussion of regional and global load balancing. Hybrid cloud computing and networking topics are important concepts for the exam.
Chapter 7: Designing for Security and Legal Compliance This chapter discusses IAM, data security including encryption at rest and encryption in transit, key management, security evaluation, penetration testing, auditing, and security design principles. Major regulations and ITIL are reviewed.
Chapter 8: Designing for Reliability This chapter begins with a discussion of Stackdriver for monitoring, logging, and alerting. Next, the chapter reviews continuous deployment and continuous integration. Systems reliability engineering is discussed, including overloads, cascading failures, and testing for reliability. Incident management and post-mortem analysis are also described.
Chapter 9: Analyzing and Defining Technical Processes This chapter focuses on software development lifecycle planning. This includes troubleshooting, testing and validation, business continuity, and disaster recovery.
Chapter 10: Analyzing and Defining Business Processes This chapter includes several business-oriented skills including stakeholder management, change management, team skill management, customer success management, and cost management.
Chapter 11: Development and Operations This chapter reviews application development methodologies, API best practices, and testing frameworks, including load, unit, and integration testing. The chapter also discusses data and systems migration tooling. The chapter concludes with a brief review of using Cloud SDK.
Chapter 12: Migration Planning This chapter describes how to plan for a cloud migration. Steps include integrating with existing systems, migrating systems and data, license mapping, network management and planning, as well as testing and developing proof-of-concept systems.
Interactive Online Learning Environment and Test Bank
Studying the material in the Official Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide is an important part of preparing for the Professional Cloud Architect certification exam, but we also provide additional tools to help you prepare. The online Test Bank will help you understand the types of questions that will appear on the certification exam.
The sample tests in the Test Bank include all of the questions in each chapter as well as the questions from the assessment test. In addition, there are two practice exams with 50 questions each. You can use these tests to evaluate your understanding and identify areas that may require additional study.
The flashcard in the Test Bank will push the limits of what you should know for the certification exam. There are more than 100 questions that are provided in digital format. Each flashcard has one question and one correct answer.
The online glossary is a searchable list of key terms introduced in this exam guide that you should know for the Professional Cloud Architect certification exam.
To start using these to study for the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam, go to www.wiley.com/go/sybextestprep, and register your book to receive your unique PIN; then once you have the PIN, return to www.wiley.com/go/sybextestprep, find your book, and click Register or Login to register a new account or add this book to an existing account.
Additional Resources
People learn in different ways. For some, a book is an ideal way to study, while auditory learners may find video and audio resources a more efficient way to study. A combination of resources may be the best option for many of us. In addition to this study guide, here are some other resources that can help you prepare for the Google Cloud Professional Architect exam.
- The Professional Cloud Architect Certification Exam
Guide:
https://cloud.google.com/certification/guides/professional-cloud-architect/ - Exam FAQs:
https://cloud.google.com/certification/faqs/#0 - Google’s Assessment Exam:
https://cloud.google.com/certification/practice-exam/cloud-architect - Google Cloud Platform documentation:
https://cloud.google.com/docs/ - Cousera’s on demand courses in the “Architecting with Google
Cloud Platform Specialization”:
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/gcp-architecture - QwikLabs Hands-on Labs:
https://google.qwiklabs.com/quests/47 - Google’s instructor-led courses:
https://cloud.google.com/training/courses/core-fundamentals - A Cloud Guru’s Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect
video course:
https://acloud.guru/learn/gcp-certified-professional-cloud-architect
The best way to prepare for the exam is to perform the tasks of an architect and work with the Google Cloud Platform.
Exam objectives are subject to change at
any time without prior notice and at Google’s sole discretion.
Please visit the Google Professional Cloud Architect website
(https://cloud.google.com/certification/cloud-architect)
for the most current listing of exam objectives.
Objective Map
| Objective | Chapter |
| Section 1: Designing and planning a cloud solutions architecture | |
|
1.1 Designing a solutions infrastructure that meets business requirements |
2 |
|
1.2 Designing a solutions infrastructure that meets technical requirements |
3 |
| 1.3 Designing network, storage, and compute resources | 4 |
| 1.4 Creating a migration plan (i.e., documents and architectural diagrams) | 12 |
| 1.5 Envisioning future solutions improvements | 2 |
| Section 2: Managing and provisioning solutions Infrastructure | |
| 2.1 Configuring network topologies | 6 |
| 2.2 Configuring individual storage systems | 5 |
| 2.3 Configuring compute systems | 4 |
| Section 3: Designing for security and compliance | |
| 3.1 Designing for security | 7 |
| 3.2 Designing for legal compliance | 7 |
| Section 4: Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes | |
| 4.1 Analyzing and defining technical processes | 9 |
| 4.2 Analyzing and defining business processes | 10 |
| 4.3 Developing procedures to test resilience of solutions in production (e.g., DiRT and Simian Army) | 8 |
| Section 5: Managing implementation | |
| 5.1 Advising development/operation team(s) to ensure successful deployment of the solutions | 11 |
| 5.2 Interacting with Google Cloud using GCP SDK (gcloud, gsutil, and bq) | 11 |
| Section 6: Ensuring solutions and operations reliability | |
| 6.1 Monitoring/logging/alerting solutions | 8 |
| 6.2 Deployment and release management | 8 |
| 6.3 Supporting operational troubleshooting | 8 |
| 6.4 Evaluating quality control measures | 8 |