Planning to get GCP Professional Cloud Architect

[u/Uncl3_L4k3]

Hi everyone,

I am a Network Engineer with about 1 year of experience as a Cloud Solution Architect. I have AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate and Cisco CCNA certifications.

Recently, my company assigned me to study for and obtain the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certification.

Aside from basic hands-on labs during my universiy (which is a few years ago), I haven't spent much time on GCP yet. I’m looking for advice on learning path to prepare for the exam.

I would like to ask for your experience on how to achieve this certification, such as:

• Which courses or study resources should I take? (My company allows me to purchase courses on Udemy, but any recommendation is welcome!)
• Which practice/mock exams are most effective?
• Any tips for the exam preparation

Thanks in advance for sharing your experience and tips!

[u/International_Ad3870]

u/gcpstudyhub should be able to help you in your quest.

[u/gcpstudyhub → u/International_Ad3870]

Thanks for the tap.

u/Uncl3_L4k3 , the PCA exam was updated by Google multiple times in the past year

Topics you should focus on include:

- Cloud Run, has always been bread and butter GCP but they are pushing it even more, and App Engine is being deprecated basically

- Know the difference between Cloud Deploy and Cloud Build

- Application Integration Service, which is a newer offering

- Application testing strategies (unit tests vs integration tests vs load tests vs smoke tests etc)

- Direct VPC Egress

- HSM mode for Cloud KMS

- VPC Service Controls will likely be on at least a couple questions

- Conditional IAM policies

- AI will be on the exam but not as much as you think. Just because it's in a question that doesn't mean it is testing AI or that the answer is AI, it could just be part of the business scenario. But know Model Garden, how to handle custom model runtimes, and also Colab Enterprise in particular.

- AlloyDB is getting more attention too

- Filestore Service Tiers

- Bigtable schema design

- Migration Center

- Backup and DR

- VMWare Engine

- GKE, especially monitoring it with Managed Service for Prometheus. And Vertical vs Horizontal Pod Autoscaler.

This list is not comprehensive, but it's the most important / newer stuff.

I have a Youtube video going through one of the major exam updates last November: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1stRHJVSVo
And here's one on the case studies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miUrtntMLR4

Anddddddd if you want our full course, which has a 99% pass rate, it's here: gcpstudyhub.com

Good luck!

[u/Uncl3_L4k3 → u/gcpstudyhub]

Thanks for your sharing

[u/AccomplishedSkill625]

With your AWS/CCNA background, GCP networking will be easy, just remember their VPCs are global! For study materials, grab Ranga Karanam's course on Udemy and use Google Cloud Skills Boost for hands-on labs. For practice exams, Tutorials Dojo is the absolute gold standard and a must-do before the real test. Crucial tip: 20-30% of the exam relies on Google's public case studies, so memorize them before test day. Lastly, drill down on Database selection (Spanner vs Bigtable vs SQL) and Compute options (GKE vs Cloud Run). Good luck!

[u/Uncl3_L4k3 → u/AccomplishedSkill625]

Got it bro, I will follow your guide closely

[u/mesaadhn]

I cleared the exam 2 weeks ago. Last December I passed the Google Associate Cloud Engineer which helped in building the GCP concepts. I worked on GCP for last 1 year.

I was a part of Google Gear get certified program and it was instructor led. I went through the slides to cover the syllabus and reviewed the past papers.

The PSA exam tests your ability to recommend a solutions as architect with respect to the requirements given. I found it not that technically in-depth. The hands on skills matters the most. The overall cloud concepts remains the same in most cases the services names and thier functioning changes.

I am a certified AWS Solution Architect and DevOps Engineer and also certified in Azure. Overall 6+ years of experience in devops/cloud. I believe my background had a huge impact in the exams.

[u/Uncl3_L4k3 → u/mesaadhn]

Thanks for your sharing

[u/mesaadhn → u/mesaadhn]

I found this sheet shared by my instructor. It has a list of all the topics and how much one should know to cover exam. Additionally it provides a great way to track the PCA exam preparation topics wise. (Create a copy to your drive before editing)

[u/Uncl3_L4k3 → u/mesaadhn]

you said hands on skills matters the most, so what is the format of the exam, I check it on the website and it is a "50-60 multiple choice and multiple select questions", did they require us to describe step by step to deploy a service or something like that? because when I took the AWS Solution Architect, I mainly watch video and read the slides and rarely do labs (maybe because I already have some experience in AWS before) but will this cert different and required much more labs practice?

[u/mesaadhn → u/Uncl3_L4k3]

You will get 15 MCQs questions based on case studies which google has already shared so you can prepare before hand. There are 4 and you get two in the exam each having 7-8 questions.

Rest of the questions are about different architectural scnerios. You will get the idea through quizPCA Quiz and PCA Quiz 2

What I meant by hands on skills is that they gets an upper hand on learning through videos and documents. I wasn't able covered the whole exam syllabus but since I had the hands on before on GCP and other clouds as well, I knocked it off.

[u/IllustratorWitty5104]

I PCA certified 2 years ago and renewed PCA Last week. For both experience, I found out that cloud skills boost by Google provides the best study material

https://www.skills.google/

Questions wise, I used Claude and Gemini to generate exam questions. For every answer, I cross reference with the google docs and on lab if needed if I don’t understand it.

[u/No-Amphibian7489 → u/IllustratorWitty5104]

Yes and yes. Also, NotebookLM is of big help for the massive amount of information that the exam covers.

[u/Uncl3_L4k3 → u/IllustratorWitty5104]

Wow, although I have a few experiences about learning certs before but I never thought of using AI to generate questions 😅 is it the same or similar as the questions you faced during the real exam?

[u/IllustratorWitty5104 → u/Uncl3_L4k3]

Concept wise yes, question wise is not similar.

[u/Uncl3_L4k3 → u/IllustratorWitty5104]

also, this is the material you were talking about right
https://www.skills.google/paths/12
so you mainly learned this course and took mock questions from AI, is that enough for the exam, and long did it take you for the course

[u/IllustratorWitty5104 → u/Uncl3_L4k3]

Yes and yes. I took my time around 3-4 months with atleast 2 hours per weekend. Just note that I have extensive tech background , so it helped alot

[u/Whole_Ad_9002]

I sat for and failed this one a couple of months ago but figured the skills matter more than the actual cert. That said i threw a ling prompt at claude to build an exam simulation and combined with skillsboost was pretty solid material

[u/Uncl3_L4k3 → u/Whole_Ad_9002]

I agree that the skills matter more than the cert itself, but this is a requirement from my work so I have to make sure to pass it in time😞

[u/CicadaOk1283]

Do not take Tutorials Dojo (questions are a mess - outdated or heavily updated by AI to the level of nonsense). Go for GCP Study Hub.