How to prepare for Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Exam

In this blog, I’ll share my experience of preparing for the Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam. Also, I’m going to share all the resources which I used for my preparation journey, some important points & tips as well.

Let’s start our preparation……

If you’re planning for this exam then I believe you’ve some real-world project experience with Google Cloud Platform especially in the domain of Migration to GCP from different sources like on-premises, other clouds also maybe you have a little bit of experience in multi-cloud or you’ve some skills on how to architect any infrastructure in the Google Cloud Platform. If you haven’t, some of these experiences then please go through the resources below to get a good idea of how things are working in this domain.

Step 1. Revision

If you’re also following the same as I’m. Like last year I was getting certified as Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer & for that, I followed some specific courses which help me a lot to understand different offerings with their real-world use cases on the Google Cloud Platform. You can follow any of the courses which helped you understand or remind all the topics but in my suggestions, these are some of the best courses to prepare for the Professional Cloud Architect Exam.

1. Architecting with Google Compute Engine Specialization

This is the official course from Google Cloud for their Associate as well Professional Cloud exam, where Googler’s explained each & every offering by Google Cloud in a very layman & structured way. there are lots of very useful slides for last moment revisions & from the understanding prospect because it contains hands-on labs as well. As per PCA prospect, I would be suggesting spending more time in the last course of this specialization (Reliable Google Cloud Infrastructure: Design and Process) will help you tackle questions very easily in the exam. You can take this course on Coursera also on Cloud Skill Boost formally Qwiklabs.

2. GCP Professional Cloud Architect: Google Cloud Certification (Udemy Course by In28Minutes Official)

In this course, Ranga Karanam has explained each GCP offering very nicely in a comparative manner so that you can easily apply those while choosing the best solution in the exam scenario. I like the exam case study part of this course.

3. Google Cloud Professional Architect: Get Certified 2022 (Udemy Course by Dan Sullivan

Dan Sullivan is one of the best instructors to learn GCP, I used his book & course for the ACE exam last year but this time for PCA as well, it was really helpful. You can also try this course for this section of our PCA Preparation.

4. awesome-gcp-certifications Github Repository by Satish VJ

If you want all the study material (Videos, Blogs, Practice Test) links in one place for approx all the Google Cloud certification exams then this GitHub repo is the place you’re searching for. This repo includes different experience blogs related to the PCA exam & some useful courses & practice test links for the preparation of the PCA exam.

You can follow any of the courses mentioned above to get sufficient knowledge for the PCA exam.

Step 2. Recommended Resouces

This is a professional level exam so it is very important that you’ve some real hands-on experience for some mandatory topics

1. Preparing for Professional Cloud Architect Exam course on Qwiklabs (Highly Recommended)
2. Understanding Migration to GCP
3. Official sample architecture examples for different use cases like IoT, Healthcare etc.
4. Exam Case studies in detail on a blog by certguy or Video by Udesh Udayakumar
5. Networking between GCP & Different environment

Step 3. Practice your Learnings

After required learnings, it is very important that we can easily able to apply those learnings in the exam so for that we need to understand the level of questions & how to tackle those in the exam, for this there are some good resources you can follow to get more familiarity of exam level & confidence to handle them.

1. PCA exam Playlist on AwesomeGCP Youtube channel

In this playlist, Satish sir has explained lots of PCA exam level questions with very nicely explanations. Also, you get some tips & tricks to tackle with options in exam. I highly recommend you to go through this playlist because surely, you’ll learn lots of new things rather than you were already knowing the right answer to a particular question.

2. Practice test from Whizlabs

This practice test will help you understand each offering by Google Cloud Platform using scenario-based questions with a nice explanations,

3. Practice questions from examtopics

This is also a good resource for your PCA exam with a good level of questions, which helps understand different syllabus topics with their real use cases.

Okay then, thank you for reading this blog, hope you find this story helpful.

ALL THE BEST FOR YOUR EXAM

If you’ve any queries regarding this, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn

Thank you

Abhishek Sharma