How to get Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Certification (Detailed Guide)

This is my first GCP certification and the resources I used are:

1. Pluralsight GCP PCA course
2. Whizlabs practice exams (was more detailed and useful in AWS CSA’s case but still helpful)
3. GCP CPA Study Guide by Dan Sullivan(Second Edition April 2022 print)
4. Visualizing Google Cloud — Brilliant resource TBH. I used it to revise all the topics before exam and could’ve used earlier instead on the the pluralsight course.
5. Practice Exam

If I had to prepare in short time, I would’ve only used the study guide(3), visualizing google cloud(4) and practice exams(5).

If this is the first cloud certification that you’re attempting then definitely go the qwiklabs exercises in the course(1). This was my second overall cloud architect certification (I am already AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate) so I understood majority of the concepts without exercise.

There were other official documentation links which I referred for better understanding:

1. Compute — set auto delete, shutdown scripts, app engine migrating and splitting traffic, applying MIG config updates, using preemptible VMs in GKE, GKE node taints, resizing persistent disk, adding persistent disk to VMs, GKE cluster autoscaler, Shielded VMs, app engine-standard vs flexible, binary authorization, cloud functions pro tip, managing custom images
2. IAM — service account insights, activity analyzer, GKE workload identity, service account best practices
3. Network — choosing load balancer, network endpoint groups, serverless NEGs, connecting to google cloud: networking options 1 and 2, default firewall rules, traffic director, vpc peering, Private Service Connect vs Private Google Access vs Private Services Access, K8s external load balancer, direct peering, carrier peering
4. Security — Web Security Scanner, Security Command Center, Virtual Machine Threat Detection, Google Cloud Armor, Anomaly Detection, Container Threat Detection, Cloud Data Loss Prevention, Identity-Aware Proxy, identity aware proxy TCP forwarding, Customer-managed encryption keys, BQ Authorized Views, VPC Service Controls
5. Data, Storage — Transfer Appliance, CloudSQL automatic storage increases, Transcoder API, Database Migration Service, Cloud Composer, automating Cloud Storage data classification, Pub-Sub, BQ partitioned tables, BQ clustered tables
6. Analytics, AI — BQ data Jupyter notebooks, Vertex AI, Vertex AI Workbench, BQ ML with TensorFlow models, Cloud Video Intelligence API, AIStreamer, Document AI
7. Best practices — Control costs in BigQuery, Cloud Storage, operating containers, Spanner schema design, VPC design, Deployment Manager, Resource hierarchy, CDN,

Official Links

Certification main link — https://cloud.google.com/certification/cloud-architect

All the best for your GCP certifications. You can reach me at LinkedIn and Twitter