My Journey To Google Professional Cloud Architect In 2020

My path to a Google Professional Cloud Architect

To achieve the distinction of being Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect, you need to pass the Professional Cloud Architect exam.

In this blog post, I will cover how I prepared and passed the exam. I will not be discussing any questions that came up so I can be within Google’s guidelines.

Google Professional Cloud Architect Assessment Areas

Before sitting the exam, I reviewed the assessment criteria provided by Google for the certification. The areas of assessment include (and are not limited to) the following:

Design and plan a cloud solution architecture
Analyse and optimise technical and business processes
Manage and provision cloud solution infrastructure
Manage implementations of cloud architecture
Design for security and compliance
Ensure solution and operations reliability

Google does not provide a weighting for each section which made my study harder as I had to make sure I was confident across all segments.

For additional information, please refer to the exam guide.

About Google Professional Cloud Architect certification Exam

This exam is delivered using the following methods:

Going to an on-site test centre
Take the exam remotely as an online proctored exam

Due to the situation with COVID-19, I decided to take an online proctored exam.

Here is some necessary information to know before registering for the exam:

Registering for the exam costs $200
You have two hours to complete the exam
There are no prerequisites to take the exam, but the recommendation is you have three-year experience in the industry.

The Google Cloud Architect certification exam has one of the more stringent retake policies than I have seen compared to other certifications (for example, Microsoft). These state:

If you don’t pass an exam first time, then you can attempt it again after fourteen days
If you don’t pass the second time, you must wait sixty days before attempting it again
If you don’t pass the third time, you have to wait a full year to attempt it again.

The retake policy, along with the lack of information around the weightings given for each section means you need to know the material.

Google Case Studies

During the exam, questions referred me to various case studies that describe a business and a solution concept. I would recommend reviewing these case studies before the exam. These case studies are:

I would recommend that you consider the case studies and ask yourself how you would architect a solution based on the given requirements.

Google Professional Cloud Architect Exam Study Material

After looking through the exam material provided on the google website, I started looking around for some study material that I could use for the exam.
I found three available options that suited my needs:
- Qwiklabs – Hands-On Cloud Training
- Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide by Dan Sullivan

- ACloudGuru

After some additional research, I decided to use the three resources mentioned here

How I Studied for Google Professional Cloud Architect exam

Once I found the study material, I started revising for my exams in July 2020. I started by going through the exam guide again to familiarise myself with the assessment areas.

Once I was happy that I understood the requirements, I started my preparation by reading the official study guide when at home.

I decided to get a subscription with ACloudGuru and started listening to their lectures when walking to work.

I also looked into the differences between the services in Microsoft Azure and contrasted them with Google GCP

Google Professional Cloud Architect Exam Guides

I decided to start looking into some of the questions that will come up in the exam to familiarise myself. I found a link in the book by Dan Sullivan that pointed me to a sample exam.

This link had a few features that I found useful

Sample exam questions
Flashcards to help me remember important concepts and services
An electronic version of questions provided in the Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide

ACloudGuru also provided some example questions that I went through multiple times

The day before the Google Professional Cloud Architect exam

I would recommend logging into the google certification site. I had to verify the following:

I had a working Microphone
I had a working Webcam
The internet speed where

I then had to register a biometric footprint which is just a picture taken from your browser as part of the procedure.

Please make sure you are in a well-lit room when you take this picture.

Day Of Google Professional Cloud Architect Exam

Finally, after studying and registering the day of the exam arrived. Before sitting the exam, you required to complete a couple of admin tasks.

Login to your exam at least 30 minutes early
If you cannot see the option to launch your exam, you need to logout and back in again.
Once verification is complete, the exam is released.
It is a condition that there is no one in the exam area and that there is speaking.
Completing a survey at the end of the exam is counted as part of the exam time.

Once the exam is complete, the only feedback you receive is whether you passed or failed.

Conclusion

I hope this article has been useful in preparing you to get certified with Google Cloud Platform.

In this article, I have shared information on the Google Professional Cloud Architect exam. I then covered the study materials I used to prepare the exam. I briefly covered what you need to do before the exam day as well on the exam day.

My advice is to work through the entire list of skills measured in the exam guide to ensure that you are happy with the content

I would then recommend that you go through the case studies mentioned here to make sure you are familiar with them.

I would then recommend that you go through practise exams and flashcards mentioned in Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide

Next Steps

My next goal is to prepare for Google’s Associate Cloud Engineer