My Google Professional Cloud Architect certification journey: insights & pieces of advice

1 Introduction

On behalf of the partnership of my current company with Google,I had the opportunity to delve into Google technologies and pass Google’s Professional Cloud Architect certification.

Below, you will find a brief overview of my certification journey and some best practices to successfully pass this certification.

2 Prerequisites

Google recommends having at least 3 years of industry experience and at least 1 year designing and managing solutions on GCP.

In my view, this last point is worth considering carefully. If you are not used to coding, integrating, and managing cloud platforms, it will be hard to learn and become “fluent” with the entire Google Cloud stack.

One of the most important parts of the certification is Kubernetes and GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). You must be proficient with these technologies before preparing for the certification.

For instance, although I hadn’t worked much with Google technologies recently, I had a strong background in development (Java, CI/CD, etc.) and containerized technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift). This background helped me learn faster and focus on other parts such as security or data analysis.

Finally, another capability that could be interesting is having a clear overview of the entire software development process and production.

The agenda of this certification is not only technical. You will have to learn some basics about security, project management, production management, compliance, and so on.

If you want to know what topics you must learn to prepare for this certification, you can refer to this spreadsheet.

As you can see, to pass this certification, it’s not necessary to be an expert in all Google technologies, but you must have a clear overview of the whole.

3 How I handled it

I took part of a learning program based on Google Skills Boot Cloud Architect learning path.

The pace is quite exhausting. I had to watch many videos and practice the hands-on labs. Over the course of 9 weeks, I dedicated at least 2 days each week to learning and practicing (not including the time spent reading the books).

They were really well structurised. Besides, there were challenge labs that offered the opportunity to check if we understood all the concepts. No indications were given.

Beyond that, for practicing all the command line tools, I chose to use Cloud Shell exclusively.

I then bought two books to compensate my lack of knownledge of the Google technologies :

• Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide, 2nd Edition
• Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers & Architects

These books are really insightful. They helped me get a glance at the entire Google Cloud Platform.

4 How to practice

Besides the skills boost learning program and the books, it’s crucial to practice the certification exam on a regular basis with quizzes.

It will help you know if you missed some points and delve into them if needed.

I rehearsed every two days the last days before passing the exam!

I used the following quizzes/websites:

• Professional Cloud Architect Sample Questions

• Pre-exam quiz

• PCA - Pre-exam Quiz 2

• ExamTopics

• Whizzlabs

• The Wiley Quizzes

5 Difficulties

One of the main interesting point of this certification is it covers more than just the Google Cloud Platform. Through the learning path, you will learn many things about the Software Development LifeCycle, the NFR, the regulation and much more.

You could find below the main chapters:

1. Section 1: Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture (~24% of the exam)
2. Section 2: Managing and provisioning a solution infrastructure (~15% of the exam)
3. Section 3: Designing for security and compliance (~18% of the exam)
4. Section 4: Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes (~18% of the exam)
5. Section 5: Managing implementation (~11% of the exam)
6. Section 6: Ensuring solution and operations reliability (~14% of the exam)

As you can see, it covers much more than just the Google products.

By the way, it’s really hard to know which technology is the most relevant for which use case (e.g., when to use dataprep or Firestore?). The “Visualizing Google Cloud” book helped me a lot for that purpose.

6 Tips

My first advice is to schedule your learning path over months or weeks. It will take a long time. Then, it’s important to repeat quizzes and exams regularly. It helped me a lot to pinpoint the notions and topics I missed.

Finally, don’t hesitate to prepare for this certification and share this journey with others. It will undoubtedly accelerate your learning path. I had the opportunity to share a lot with some of my colleagues who passed the same certification. It helped us share tips, tricks, and delve into specific topics I missed.

7 The D DAY

After this odyssey, when you eventually take the final exam, it’s really important to be “physically” ready. Try to sleep the night before and be in good shape. The exam lasts 2 hours, and you will need the entire time. Personally, I submitted my answers 1 minute before the end.

Finally, some of the questions are based on case studies that Google has already published. It is recommended to read these case studies before the exam. If you can study and design these platforms in advance, it will be even better, as it will save you time during the exam.

8 Conclusion

This journey was really interesting (exhausting but insteresting). After passing successfully the exam, I think I learned a lot during this certification preparation and improved my skills in software architecture.

If you are eager to pass this certification exam, I hope this article helps you.