Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect

Design scalable, resilient, and cost-effective cloud architectures aligned to business requirements on Google Cloud.

• Google Cloud compute options: Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, App Engine, Cloud Functions
• Storage selection: Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Bigtable, Firestore, BigQuery
• Network design: VPC, subnets, firewall rules, VPC peering, Shared VPC
• High availability and fault tolerance patterns on GCP
• Multi-region and global architectures: Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN
• Microservices vs monolith trade-offs on GCP
• Hybrid and multi-cloud: Anthos, Cloud Interconnect, Cloud VPN
• Capacity planning and resource estimation
• Architectural decision frameworks: TOGAF, Google Cloud adoption framework
• Serverless vs containerized vs VM-based trade-offs
• Event-driven architectures with Pub/Sub and Eventarc

Free Design and plan a cloud solution architecture practice questions →Design and plan a cloud solution architecture study guide →

Automate infrastructure provisioning, configure environments, and manage Google Cloud resources at scale.

• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform on GCP, Cloud Deployment Manager
• Google Cloud resource hierarchy: organization, folders, projects
• Cloud Build: CI/CD pipelines, triggers, build steps
• Artifact Registry: container images, packages, versioning
• GKE cluster management: node pools, auto-scaling, upgrades
• Managed instance groups: auto-healing, rolling updates
• Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging: workspaces, alerting policies
• Resource quotas, labels, and cost allocation
• Preemptible and Spot VMs for cost optimization
• Cloud Config Connector: Kubernetes-native resource management

Free Manage and provision a solution infrastructure practice questions →Manage and provision a solution infrastructure study guide →

Implement security controls, identity management, and compliance frameworks on Google Cloud.

• Cloud IAM: roles, bindings, conditions, deny policies
• Service accounts: best practices, workload identity federation
• Organization policies: constraints, boolean and list policies
• VPC Service Controls: service perimeters, access levels
• Cloud Armor: WAF, DDoS protection, security policies
• Cloud KMS: key management, CMEK for GCP services, HSM
• Secret Manager: storing and accessing secrets securely
• Binary Authorization: container image signing and attestation
• Security Command Center: threat detection, vulnerability findings
• Data residency and sovereignty requirements
• Compliance: GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS on GCP
• Audit logs: Admin Activity, Data Access, System Event logs

Free Design for security and compliance practice questions →Design for security and compliance study guide →

Apply cost management, performance optimization, and business continuity planning to GCP solutions.

• Cloud Billing: budgets, alerts, billing export to BigQuery
• Cost optimization: committed use discounts, sustained use discounts, rightsizing
• Cloud Profiler and Cloud Trace: performance analysis
• BigQuery optimization: slot reservations, clustering, partitioning, BI Engine
• GKE cost optimization: workload right-sizing, cluster autoscaler
• Cloud Spanner performance: schema design, interleaving, hotspots
• Disaster recovery: RTO/RPO, backup strategies, Cloud Storage cross-region
• Business continuity: failover patterns, active-active vs active-passive
• Chaos engineering and reliability testing on GCP
• SLOs, SLIs, error budgets in GCP architectures

Free Analyze and optimize technical and business processes practice questions →Analyze and optimize technical and business processes study guide →

Advise development teams on GCP best practices and manage the implementation of cloud solutions.

• Cloud APIs: enabling, quotas, client libraries vs REST vs gRPC
• SDK and CLI: gcloud, gsutil, bq command-line tools
• Migration strategies: lift-and-shift, re-platform, re-architect
• Data migration: Storage Transfer Service, Transfer Appliance, BigQuery Data Transfer Service
• Anthos: hybrid cluster management, Config Management, Service Mesh
• API management: Cloud Endpoints, Apigee
• Testing in GCP: unit, integration, load testing patterns
• Developer productivity: Cloud Shell, Cloud Code, Cloud Workstations

Free Manage implementation practice questions →Manage implementation study guide →

Design and implement monitoring, logging, and incident management for reliable GCP solutions.

• Cloud Monitoring: custom metrics, uptime checks, alerting policies
• Cloud Logging: log-based metrics, log sinks, log retention
• Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler: distributed tracing and CPU profiling
• Error Reporting: exception tracking and alerting
• SRE principles applied to GCP: SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction
• Incident management: runbooks, postmortems, on-call practices
• GKE reliability: pod disruption budgets, liveness and readiness probes
• Cloud Pub/Sub reliability: message ordering, dead letter topics, exactly-once delivery
• Multi-region failover with Cloud Load Balancing and Cloud DNS
• Backup and restore: Cloud SQL automated backups, Persistent Disk snapshots

Free Ensure solution and operations reliability practice questions →Ensure solution and operations reliability study guide →