First of all, this guide is based on my own experience and is specific to this certification but the process is the same for all the others GCP certifications.
Step 1 : Use the official GCP learning path and take notes
It is very good, with a theoretical part and the possibility of testing in the real GCP environment. IMPORTANT, do not skip the instructions because Google will close the laboratory and if you insist they may block your account and you can no longer continue with the learning path.
Take basic notes during the theoretical part: I repeat BASIC. It is impossible to know everything about the GCP platform. You have to know what the basic services are in each of the GCP sections and what they offer, their main characteristics. That is all by the moment. With this basic concepts and using your logic, many questions are answered. At the end of the post I leave you an outline of the important services that you need to know about.
Step 2: Use a testing course
Buy a testing course: now you have completed the learning path and you have the basic theoretical knowledge. It is time to do many many many tests, to the point where you are able to identify the patterns of the questions and intuit the answer.
Fundamental: while you take the tests, complete the theoretical document with parts of theory that appear in the questions and that have not appeared in the learning path. There are some services, like almost all computing or storage services, where you have to go deeper and others, like machine learning, where almost nothing.
In my case I have used THIS COURSE and most of the questions appeared in the exam.
This is the most important step. DON’T SLEEP, DON’T EAT JUST TEST TEST AND TEST. This is the key to successfully passing the exam.
Step 3: before the exam understand all these services
This schema is super useful because it contains all the services that you should understand before taking the exam, some of them broken down.
- GCP organization (regions and zones)
- IAM
- Cloud identity
- Virtual networks: VPC (shared and standalone), Interconnect options (VPN, Direct Peering, Carrier Peering, Dedicated Interconnect and Partner Interconnect), VPC load balancing options (Global HTTPS, Global SSL Proxy, Global TCP Proxy, Regional and Regional Internal).
- Compute: Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google App Engine and Google Cloud Functions. It is very important to know all the services and some of them deeply.
- Storage: BigTable, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Datastore and Cloud Memory Store.
- BigData: Big Query, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Dataproc and Dataprep are the main ones, but also DataLab, Cloud Data Fusion, Cloud Data Catalog, Data Studio and Data Transfer.
- Machine learning (knowing that they exist and what they do is enough): Natural Language API, Vision API, Machine Learning, Speech API, Translate API, Image and Video Analysis API and Explainable AI.
- Cloud Operations Suite: Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Error Reporting, Tracing, Debugging and Profiler.
- Otros: Cloud Audit Logs, Anthos or Istio.
- Passwords, secrets, security: Password Sync, Identity Platform, Google Cloud Directory Sync, Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Cloud Key Management (KMS), Secret Manager, Web Security Scanner and Cloud Armor.
- Redes: Cloud NAT, Cloud Router, API Gateway, Cloud DNS, Cloud CDN, Private Google Access, Private Services Access, Serverless VPC Access, NIC, Identity-Aware Proxy and NEGs, ApiGee.
- Deployment, code and infraestructure: Google Cloud Deployment Manager, Cloud Source Repositories, Cloud Build, Binary Authorization, Container Registry and Firebase.
- Third party services: Helm, Jenkins, Spinnakker.
Step 4: the exam day
First of all, go calmly, it depends a lot on each person but try to go as calmly as possible and preferably, do it the morning to not spend the whole day thinking about it (I think this is applicable to any exam…).
The second and fundamental thing is to read Google’s instructions, specially if you do the exam from home, the room must be completely clear and you cannot have anything within reach, only you and the computer. During the exam, stand as still as possible, do not leave the webcam plane and do not make any noise. If they detect something strange, they will pause your exam and in the worst case they may even suspend it.
Finally, if you have followed all these steps, success is assured and you will be able to be Certified in Professional Cloud Architecture.
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