Professional Cloud Architect
A Professional Cloud Architect enables organizations to leverage Google Cloud technologies. With a thorough understanding of cloud architecture and Google Cloud Platform, this individual can design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objectives.
The Google Cloud Certified – Professional Cloud Architect exam assesses your ability to:
1. Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture
- 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
- High availability and failover design
- Elasticity of cloud resources with respect to quotas and limits
- Scalability to meet growth requirements
- Performance and latency
- Integration with on-premises/multi-cloud 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
- 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
- Cloud and technology improvements
- Evolution of business needs
- Evangelism and advocacy
2. Managing and provisioning a solution infrastructure
- Extending to on-premises environments (hybrid networking)
- Extending to a multi-cloud environment that may include Google Cloud to Google Cloud communication
- Security protection (e.g. intrusion protection, access control, firewalls)
- 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
- 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
3. Designing for security and compliance
- 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
- 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)
4. Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes
- 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
- 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)
5. Managing implementation
- Application development
- API best practices
- Testing frameworks (load/unit/integration)
- Data and system migration and management tooling
- Google Cloud Shell
- Google Cloud SDK (gcloud, gsutil and bq)
- Cloud Emulators (e.g. Cloud Bigtable, Datastore, Spanner, Pub/Sub, Firestore)
6. Ensuring solution and operations reliability
- Monitoring/logging/profiling/alerting solution
- Deployment and release management
- Assisting with the support of deployed solutions
- Evaluating quality control measures