Course Summary

Professional Cloud Architect
Professional Cloud Architects enable organizations to leverage Google Cloud technologies. With a thorough understanding of cloud architecture and Google Cloud, they design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objectives.

The 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

Section 1: Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture (~24% of the exam)

1.1 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets business requirements. Considerations include:

● Business use cases and product strategy

● Cost optimization

● Supporting the application design

● Integration with external systems

● Movement of data

● Design decision trade-offs

● Build, buy, modify, or deprecate

● Success measurements (e.g., key performance indicators [KPI], return on investment [ROI], metrics)

● Compliance and observability

1.2 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets technical requirements. Considerations include:

● High availability and failover design

● Elasticity of cloud resources with respect to quotas and limits

● Scalability to meet growth requirements

● Performance and latency

1.3 Designing network, storage, and compute resources. Considerations include:

● Integration with on-premises/multicloud environments

● Cloud-native networking (VPC, peering, firewalls, container networking)

● Choosing data processing technologies

● Choosing appropriate storage types (e.g., object, file, databases)

● Choosing compute resources (e.g., preemptible, custom machine type, specialized workload)

● Mapping compute needs to platform products

1.4 Creating a migration plan (i.e., documents and architectural diagrams). Considerations include:

● Integrating solutions with existing systems

● Migrating systems and data to support the solution

● Software license mapping

● Network planning

● Testing and proofs of concept

● Dependency management planning

1.5 Envisioning future solution improvements. Considerations include:

● Cloud and technology improvements

● Evolution of business needs

● Evangelism and advocacy

Section 2: Managing and provisioning a solution infrastructure (~15% of the exam)

2.1 Configuring network topologies. Considerations include:

● Extending to on-premises environments (hybrid networking)

● Extending to a multicloud environment that may include Google Cloud to Google Cloud communication

● Security protection (e.g. intrusion protection, access control, firewalls)

2.2 Configuring individual storage systems. Considerations include:

● Data storage allocation

● Data processing/compute provisioning

● Security and access management

● Network configuration for data transfer and latency

● Data retention and data life cycle management

● Data growth planning

2.3 Configuring compute systems. Considerations include:

● Compute resource provisioning

● Compute volatility configuration (preemptible vs. standard)

● Network configuration for compute resources (Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, serverless networking)

● Infrastructure orchestration, resource configuration, and patch management

● Container orchestration

Section 3: Designing for security and compliance (~18% of the exam)

3.1 Designing for security. Considerations include:

● Identity and access management (IAM)

● Resource hierarchy (organizations, folders, projects)

● Data security (key management, encryption, secret management)

● Separation of duties (SoD)

● Security controls (e.g., auditing, VPC Service Controls, context aware access, organization policy)

● Managing customer-managed encryption keys with Cloud Key Management Service

● Remote access

3.2 Designing for compliance. Considerations include:

● Legislation (e.g., health record privacy, children’s privacy, data privacy, and ownership)

● Commercial (e.g., sensitive data such as credit card information handling, personally identifiable information [PII])

● Industry certifications (e.g., SOC 2)

● Audits (including logs)

Section 4: Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes (~18% of the exam)

4.1 Analyzing and defining technical processes. Considerations include:

● Software development life cycle (SDLC)

● Continuous integration / continuous deployment

● Troubleshooting / root cause analysis best practices

● Testing and validation of software and infrastructure

● Service catalog and provisioning

● Business continuity and disaster recovery

4.2 Analyzing and defining business processes. Considerations include:

● Stakeholder management (e.g. influencing and facilitation)

● Change management

● Team assessment / skills readiness

● Decision-making processes

● Customer success management

● Cost optimization / resource optimization (capex / opex)

4.3 Developing procedures to ensure reliability of solutions in production (e.g., chaos engineering, penetration testing)

Section 5: Managing implementation (~11% of the exam)

5.1 Advising development/operation teams to ensure successful deployment of the solution. Considerations include:

● Application development

● API best practices

● Testing frameworks (load/unit/integration)

● Data and system migration and management tooling

5.2 Interacting with Google Cloud programmatically. Considerations include:

● Google Cloud Shell

● Google Cloud SDK (gcloud, gsutil and bq)

● Cloud Emulators (e.g. Cloud Bigtable, Datastore, Spanner, Pub/Sub, Firestore)

Section 6: Ensuring solution and operations reliability (~14% of the exam)

6.1 Monitoring/logging/profiling/alerting solution

6.2 Deployment and release management

6.3 Assisting with the support of deployed solutions

6.4 Evaluating quality control measures

Prerequisites: None Recommended experience: 3+ years of industry experience including 1+ years designing and managing solutions using Google Cloud

About this certification exam Length: 2 hours Registration fee: $200 (plus tax where applicable) Languages: English, Japanese Exam format: 50-60 multiple choice and multiple select questions Case studies: Each exam includes 2 case studies that describe fictitious business and solution concepts. Case study questions make up 20-30% of the exam and assess your ability to apply your knowledge to a realistic business situation. You can view the case studies on a split screen during the exam. Certification Renewal / Recertification: Candidates must recertify in order to maintain their certification status. Unless explicitly stated in the detailed exam descriptions, all Google Cloud certifications are valid for two years from the date of certification. Recertification is accomplished by retaking the exam during the recertification eligibility time period and achieving a passing score. You may attempt recertification starting 60 days prior to your certification expiration date.

Following your booking, a confirmation message will be sent to all participants, ensuring you're well-informed of your successful enrollment. Calendar placeholders will also be dispatched to assist you in scheduling your commitments around the course. Rest assured, all course materials and access to necessary labs or platforms will be provided no later than one week before the course begins, allowing you ample time to prepare and engage fully with the learning experience ahead.

Our comprehensive training package includes all the necessary materials and resources to facilitate a full learning experience. Enrollees will be provided with detailed course content, encompassing a wide array of topics to ensure a thorough understanding of the subject matter. Additionally, participants will receive a certificate of completion to recognize their dedication and hard work. It's important to note that while the course fee covers all training materials and experiences, the examination fee for certification is not included but can be purchased separately.

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