My Experience with Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect Exam

I took this exam in mid of May 2020 during Covid lockdown period. I have been struggling to find time to write and post this blog since then. Here are my technical watch points for exam that may help other exam takers to prepare them for the same.

Please note, due to NDA signed with Google, I will refrain myself from revealing any particular exam question specific information.

GCP exam emphasises a lot on data driven and orchestration based services. Probably because GCP is best cloud when it comes to client with huge amount of data (may be TB, PB and XB of data). Unlike AWS and Azure Exam, this exam is not focused primary upon IaaS services.

1.    Understand when to use App Engine (Flex or Standard) or Kubernetes or Compute Engines.

2.    Be acquainted with resources sharing between projects of GCP (under same account or different).

3.    Not much of IAM was tested in my case. Understand that GCP recommends using IAM predefined roles for most of the cases.

4.    Kubernetes are majorly used to deploy micro-service architecture based services, they emphasis this enough in their training programs and mock questions and you will tested upon that.

5.    Extreme depth of Kubernetes service in GCP exam was behaviour before but that has been changed now but basic commands to deploy Kubernetes cluster and resizing that would come handy.

6.    Differentiate how and which database model would be apt for which use case. Big Table (No SQL) is most ideal for Time Series database and Low latency read-write. Look for Big Query, if question has OLAP or Analytics requirement. Cloud SQL is for vertically scaling database and Cloud Spanner is for horizontal scaling requirement of database.

7.    Understand how to configure SQL Server database high availability in GCP. With Cloud SQL or Using Native method of SQL Server Always on and Windows Failover Service. Not sure if my answers was correct. Despite of launching next version of Cloud Datastore as Cloud Firestore. I did not receive any question on Firestore. However there were a couple of questions on Datastore and its use cases.

8.    Learn how to read JSON of Cloud Storage Life Cycle Management

9.    Learn when to use Cloud Direct Interconnect (above 10 GBPS, up to 200 GBPS) vs Cloud Partner Connect (up to 50 MBPS). also limitation of these different physical connectivity options can play tricks in your head.

10. Nothing specific on cost optimisation. Might be just luck with me only.

11. Where ever Possible, GCP recommends using Managed Instance group for compute loads.

12. Understand when to use Transfer appliances to transfer data over to cloud from on premise and which TA would suit best for particular use case.

13. Any mention of Hadoop cluster, look for DataProc managed service might be of your interest.

14. Learn about exporting billing and log to Big Query and Cloud Storage.

15. Learn the differences between different load balancers. For most questions, HTTP or Global HTTP load balancer got special attention.

16. How to encrypt objects in Google Cloud storage. Note, that .boto file is used to deploy encryption and decryption key.

17. Three Case studies: I got around a dozen odd questions from 3 famous case studies. Now the thing is, if you prepare well these cases and know variety of combinations of services to setup these cases, these can be proven as low hanging fruits and earn you easy points. Freebie: In Terramearth Case Study, Cloud pub/sub has major role to play.

My Prepration Material

1. Completed acloudguru "GCP Associate Cloud Engineer" to get context of all GCP services. Acloudguru also has their GCP professional course but trust me guys, that does not do any good. acloudguru team might not like this comment of mine

2. Completed Coursera "Architecting with Google Compute Engine" course series of 5 courses. Thats best thing you can get for GCP in current online course market.

3. Read all three case studies (Mountkirk Games, Dress4win and Terramearth) unless you want to put yourself at serious disadvantage.

3. Completed Coursera "Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Exam" Course.

4. Prepared questions from Whizlabs. Kept practicing until I started scoring more than 90% in each exam. Please note that many answers given in Whizlabs are wrong (despite of justification given for their answers)

5. Took GCP Practice exam a day before exam.

Exam Day:

Since I scheduled the exam for around mid-night, which gave me added advantages like no background noises, less chances of power cut (which is quite common in India during day time), Internet bandwidth will be less concerning. Before appearing for exam, that evening I did not touch any course material that day and kept myself relaxed. I avoided travelling anywhere that evening to just maintain the state of mind. A hot water shower and light meal at night.

Exam time, I maintained comfortable sitting posture, cleared the surrounding area for any electronic devices (like mobile, tablet, extra laptop, camera, watches etc), kept a water bottle near me.

I appeared for exam with my company provided laptop (with camera), which apparently did not work out. Despite of passing all the checks, Laptop failed to stream my live video to proctor and my exam did not start because of that. I got panicked since timer had started and I contacted exam team and they were generous enough to reschedule it. (There is a button on exam screen, by pressing that a chat window with proctor can start in few minutes, apparently that’s the way you can interact with proctor). I explained them that my Laptop is not responding well to situation and re-scheduled the exam after one hour. I managed to bring my personal laptop and did pre-checks by that time and exam started like breeze.

Exam had exact 50 questions. Since I was unaware of difficulty level of exam questions, trick that I used that write exam was this.

Mark best answers for all the questions (even for those you are not sure of, since you never know if you will ever get time to review those back). But for those you are uncertain, flag those questions so that if time permits later (which actually will in most of the cases), you can review and change answers if required. For me, out of 50, there were 20 questions those were very easy for me, another 20 with moderate difficulty and 5 question were very hard and rest 5, I serious had doubt if I can get right answer for them.

I finished exam in 90 mins. I have bad habit of not reviewing all the questions before submitting. I just review those I flagged to review. Sometime it puts me on serious disadvantage. If my memory serves me good, I submitted the exam before 95 min timer and got result as "Passed" immediately on screen. I gracefully exited the exam and closed all windows and took breath of relief. You can re-confirm your previsionary result in exam site any time after exam. It took long 16 days for official confirmation mail to arrive that "You are Certified"

A day after that Google certification merchandise coupon arrived which I redeemed for a hoodie in the month of August. It has been shipped via Fedex but order is yet to be delivered. I will post a picture once I receive that.

So this was overall experience of mine for GCP PCA exam. I hope you got some what idea about the exam and its preparation model. Thanks all for reading. Provide me feedback if you liked the article, which will eventually motivate me to write another. I will be coming back soon with my another experience of most prestigious exam of AWS series "AWS Advanced Networking Speciality" exam. Please ignore grammar and typos in article.