Google Cloud Architect Professional certified!

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

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!

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Sukrat Kaushik
Sukrat Kaushik
5 years ago

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

Nadine
5 years ago

Do they ask you to code? Or just to study code and answer multiple questions about it? Thanks!

Fritzie
Fritzie
5 years ago

Hi
How long did it take to prepare for the GCP Architect Exam ?

Anand
6 years ago

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

Sushant
Sushant
6 years ago
Reply to  Anand

Hi Anand, is the course still available? I’m not able to purchase it.

Kumar
Kumar
6 years ago
Reply to  Anand

Anand’s exam is no more available in udemy. Where else we can find?

Victor
Victor
6 years ago

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!

Karthik
Karthik
6 years ago

How much time gcp result comes ?

Avinash
Avinash
5 years ago
Reply to  pchapotet

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.

Sunny
Sunny
6 years ago

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