How I passed the GCP Professional Architect Exam
Pass the Google Cloud Certified Professional Architect exam
In this article, I would like to share my experiences in for preparing and taking the exam. I hope they’ll help you in one way or another.
The GCP Professional Cloud Architect certification exam assesses your ability to Design and plan a cloud solution architecture, manage and provision the cloud solution infrastructure, design for security and compliance, analyze and optimize technical and business processes, manage implementations of cloud architecture
Ensure solution and operations reliability
The whole preparation took me nearly 2-3 months, but with some more focus time, I could’ve done it in 1 month. Following steps that I have taken to pass the exam :
- Coursera: Google official video courses
- Udemy course
- Books and resources
- Official documentation
- Quizzes/ExamTopics/Mock test
- Cheatsheet
- Notes
- Assessment
- Tips
1. Google official video courses(Theory + Practical)
I recommend going through the Professional Cloud Architect Google course from google cloud training.
The official guide for the Cloud Architect exam is here.
This course covers the following topics:
- Learn the skills needed to be successful in a cloud architect role
- Prepare for the Professional Cloud Architect certification
- Learn about the infrastructure and platform services provided by Google Cloud Platform
- Identify the purpose and value of Google Cloud products and services
It has the following 7 major classes with which you can attain a badge from google :
1. Google Cloud Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure
2. Essential Google Cloud Infrastructure: Foundation
3. Essential Google Cloud Infrastructure: Core Services
4. Elastic Google Cloud Infrastructure: Scaling and Automation
5. Reliable Google Cloud Infrastructure: Design and Process
6. Architecting with Google Kubernetes Engine: Foundations
7. Preparing for your Professional Cloud Architect Journey
2. Udemy
I followed the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect course: by Ranga Karanam. I have followed all the classes in this course. As for the public it costs $99 and it covers the following :
- Start your journey to becoming a Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect
- Get hands-on with computing, networking, storage, and database services in the Google Cloud Platform
- Understand how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on the Google Cloud Platform
- Understand the best practices for building available, scalable, resilient, and secure applications on the Google Cloud Platform
At the end of the course and in the middle, there will be ample questions/quizzes to solve.
3. Books and resource
If you are more of a book person than going through a video course.
I strongly recommend you go through the Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide [Book] by Dan Sullivan. This study guide offers 100% coverage of every objective for the Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam.
This book covers most of the exam topics and there are around 20 quizzes for each chapter.
4. Official documentation
It is also very important to go through the official documentation to get updated information about google products and services.
5. Quizzes/ExamTopics/Mock test
The most important part of the preparation is going through as many quizzes as possible and verifying reasonable answers. To pass the actual exam, you have to spend more time learning & re-learning through multiple practice tests.
I recommend the following sites for preparing exam:
- Exam topics: There will be a robotic check once after 10 questions and we should pay to get rid of those checks and which allow you to focus well on the preparation. Please be aware of wrong answers in Exam topics try to search by yourself to assure that it's the correct one.
- Udemy: There are around 6 full practice tests with ~53 questions. These practice exams are close to the actual exams
- WhizLabs: There are around 25 multiple-choice questions with which we can able to get insights on the certification and feel a little more confident.
- Sample Questions from Google: There are around 25 sample questions from google at the end of its official course. You can get the answer and explanation once you submit the form. But it is not guaranteed to help you pass the exam.
6. Cheatsheet
I recommend you go through the Cheatsheet once. It covers the Cloud architecting lifecycle, machine learning, Google case studies, and GCP’s storage, computing, and big data products.
Other Resources :
- https://googlecloudcheatsheet.withgoogle.com/
- https://github.com/priyankavergadia/google-cloud-4-words
Going through only this cheatsheet is not guaranteed to help you pass. But it can help you with your revision and refresh the topics that you have prepared over the period before.
7. Notes
Note-taking app: Notion. The best app for note-taking.
The notion has helped me to revise effectively before exams on all the essential topics. I recommend taking notes for the following topics.
These are the core GCP products that the assessment covers.
But there was some overlap with other Google tools too.
- Cloud Storage
- Cloud Spanner
- Composer
- Compute Engine
- Data Loss Prevention
- Dataprep
- Datastore
- Firestore
- Natural Language AI
- Tensorflow
- Text-to-speech
- Video AI
8. Tips
- Preparation is key to success. so many weekends, many holidays, spent preparing for this exam.
- You can eliminate all the answers that recommend non-GCP solutions.
- As with many multiple-choice exams, eliminate. If you can’t eliminate one possible answer, make a guess.
9. Assessment
I took the assessment via Kryterion’s Webassessor. Exam Duration: 2 hours, Registration fee: $200 (plus tax where applicable), Languages: English, Japanese and Exam format: Multiple choice and multiple select took remotely or in person at a test center.
On exam day, I had to show my surroundings via webcam, turn off my phone, and empty my desk, If my name is not visible should take a photo from my mobile, and then you should show it to the sponsor staff at the other end, etc. All this took ~ about half an hour. I didn’t have to talk to the person behind the camera, but we can chat. The person also monitors you via webcam during the assessment.
I found the questions a bit hard and challenging. In the end, I got a provisional Pass, but it should be confirmed by Google — for whatever reason. That confirmation came 4 –10 days later. So now I am officially Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect 🎉 and here is my Official Google Certification!
