Passing Google’s Professional Cloud Architect Exam

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a training course for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) at the Google Toronto offices. It was an excellent seminar — a day well spent filling in the gaps of my knowledge that I’d acquired from a few years of using GCP.

Photo by Jordan Harrison on Unsplash At the end of the course, it was mentioned there was a more in-depth course being held over the next few days, but unfortunately it, and the upcoming courses, were already full with wait lists. The in-depth course was a preparatory course to the Google Cloud Architect exam, one of the various GCP certifications.

I decided later that day that I’d be interested in getting that certification. After a bit of research, and $200 USD (about $270 CAD these days), I booked my exam at a Toronto test centre giving myself a week to study. Why a week? I was pretty confident with my previous Google Cloud Platform experience, and when studying for tests in the past, I never really started studying until a week before anyways.

Preparation and Studying Over the next week I spent my time after work reviewing Google Cloud documentation, and taking the Official “Architecting with Google Cloud Platform Specialization” course on Coursera. I did not however complete the “Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Exam” course, mostly because I forgot about it — though I’m sure it would have been helpful. I spent a lot of time using Qwicklabs, as set up by the Coursera course, to experiment with various services on GCP that were simply too expensive for me to set up on my personal account; it’s a great resource.

My biggest advice for how to prep is to review the official guide on the registration website, and take a look at some reddit threads — they seem to have the most recent information and best third party resources. I didn’t end up using any, but if I had more time it would have been my next step.

I had heard from a few online sources that the test was particularly difficult. I can’t speak about specific content on the test, but when completing the practice exam, I felt that there were questions with more than one correct answer. The content for studying itself isn’t that difficult — providing you are familiar with GCP’s architecture. The difficult part is applying it all together to determine the best possible architecture for a company’s resources, based on their specific needs, which I imagine is the idea behind the certification.

Writing The Test I did not feel comfortable the morning of the test — but then again, I never do before any test. I’m fortunate enough to say though that I received a pass, and am now a Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect — which comes with great bragging rights, new found knowledge, and a pretty sweet branded backpack.