by Taking the GCP Architect exam is quite a challenge as there is very little study material or practice questions available at the time of writing this post.
Exam preparation
- I first took the Coursera GCP Fundamentals for AWS Architects class. Note that I passed the 5 AWS certifications prior to this exam so it helped a lot to not review the concepts of services that basically do the same thing on AWS and GCP
- Read all the documentation links from this page: https://medium.com/@earlg3/google-cloud-architect-exam-study-materials-5ab327b62bc8
- Play with the platform as much as you can (App Engine, Compute Engine, Network, Firewall, Tags, Load Balancers and IAM in priority)
To sum up the exam without saying too much, it was 50 questions for a total of 120 minutes. Timing is friendly, I had about 15-20 minutes left before the end. Half of the exam worked pretty easily by proceeding by elimination to remove the craziest answers. I was surprise to see a split screen with questions on the left and a listbox on the right allowing to switch between the 4 use cases available at the moment.
About 15 questions were related to use cases. They seemed more complex, even confusing sometimes. I had to use only 2 use cases out of 4, the rest of the questions is more general and seemed to be what I would categorize as medium level questions.
Important points to review
- Prepare yourself with the 4 use cases available, work on them for an hour as if they were your customer and how you would deal with each point (means which service you would use on GCP instead of what they have)
- Read about BQ, Bigtable, CloudStorage, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Dataproc and when to use all of them
- Container engine vs Compute Engine vs App Engine
- Know cloud related business terms: capex, opex, tco, capacity planning
- Best practices regarding IAM, audit logs and how to secure them
- Know resources that are global vs regional vs zonal (some major differences with AWS)
- Know how are structured the different databases
- Learn everything about instance groups, load balancers, stress tests
- CI/CD on GCP, how to architect perfectly dev/qa/stg/prod environments
- You will have to look at Java and Python code as expected
- Cloud deployment manager is part of the exam and interesting to know in details
- Migration: how do you deal with existing DC, move data around, etc
- Network: VPN, firewall, tags
Once again, good luck to everyone taking this exam!
Hi paul,
Do we need to memories case studies given in GCP exam course or they will provide access to them ?
https://cloud.google.com/certification/guides/cloud-architect/#sample-case-study
Best regards, Sukrat
Hi Sukrat, they will be provided during the exam (on half of your screen).
Do they ask you to code? Or just to study code and answer multiple questions about it? Thanks!
Hi Nadine, it’s only multiple answer questions. But sometimes they show you a piece of code in the question.
Hi
How long did it take to prepare for the GCP Architect Exam ?
The tests in this set are timed, so you’ll know when you’re taking more time than the official test allows. The pracice tests are categorized into two
1) Case study based questions
2) Scenario based questions
https://www.udemy.com/google-certified-professional-cloud-architect-examprep/?couponCode=GCPEXAM
Hope this helps.
Cheers
Hi Anand, is the course still available? I’m not able to purchase it.
Anand’s exam is no more available in udemy. Where else we can find?
Congrats Paul! I passed the GCP Exam recently! Compared with Aws Professional exams, which was more difficult? Ive passed 3 aws associate level and want the all5 :)
Thanks!
Thank you Victor! My feeling is that the GCP CA certification is more difficult than AWS Associate exams but not as difficult as Pro exams. Good luck on the all-5, not an easy task!
How much time gcp result comes ?
Official confirmation and certificate come after a few days, but you get your PASS or FAIL directly at the end of the exam.
Hi Paul
The result displayed after submitting the exam will be the final result? I did not understand why we have to wait for an official confirmation when they are displaying a result after the submission.
Hey Paul
How many did you have to answer right to get the pass on the GCP -Architect.
And How long did you study.
Thanks
Sunny
Hi Sunny, unfortunately they don’t tell you anything about your score when you pass the exam. I haven’t seen a minimum percentage neither.
I studied 3-4 weeks (4h/week) before the exam. In term of experience 5-6 months passed between my first day on GCP and exam day.
Paul