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.

Exam Objectives

The Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect exam will test your architect skills, including the following: Planning a cloud solution Managing a cloud solution Securing systems and processes Complying with government and industry regulations Understanding technical requirements and business considerations Maintaining solutions deployed to production, including monitoring It is clear from the exam objectives that the full lifecycle of solution development is covered from inception and planning through monitoring and maintenance.

This course includes

• 203 UNIQUE and LATEST practice questions spread across 5 timed tests

• Detailed and exhaustive explanations to why a particular option is correct as well as detailing why other options are incorrect

• You get 30 DAYS NO QUESTIONS ASK REFUND if not satisfied with the course, even if you have completed the course 100%.

• Lifetime access to regular exam updates