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Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect

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About the Professional Cloud Architect exam

Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect is the broadest of Google's professional exams. It asks whether you can turn a business problem into a Google Cloud design and then see that design through: networking, storage, compute, security, migration and day-two operations, plus a growing share of AI services. Google recommends three or more years of industry experience, including at least a year designing and managing solutions on Google Cloud, though there is no formal prerequisite.

The questions are written from the point of view of the person making the decision, not the person typing the commands. You get a requirement (global users, a regulator, a tight budget, a legacy database that can't go down for long) and pick the design that fits. Several options usually work in principle; the right one is the one that respects every constraint in the question, and the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework is the yardstick Google expects you to use.

Exam format

  • Questions: 50 to 60, multiple choice and multiple select.
  • Case studies: each exam uses two of the four published case studies (fictional companies with business and technical requirements), and they make up 20-30% of the questions.
  • Time: 2 hours.
  • Passing score: Google reports pass or fail and does not publish a cut score.
  • Cost: 200 USD plus tax, online with a remote proctor or at a Pearson VUE test center. English and Japanese.
  • Validity: 2 years.

What the exam covers

The official exam guide has six sections:

  • Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture (~25%). Turning business and technical requirements into a design, choosing compute (GKE, Cloud Run, Compute Engine, Spot VMs), storage and databases, cloud-native networking with Shared VPC and Private Service Connect, and planning migrations with Migration Center.
  • Managing and provisioning a solution infrastructure (~17.5%). Hybrid and multicloud network topologies, configuring storage and compute, and using Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Model Garden and AI Hypercomputer for ML workloads.
  • Designing for security and compliance (~17.5%). IAM and the resource hierarchy, Cloud KMS and customer-managed keys, VPC Service Controls, organization policies, Identity-Aware Proxy, Workload Identity Federation, Model Armor, and regulations around health data and privacy.
  • Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes (~15%). CI/CD, testing, root cause analysis, disaster recovery, change management and CapEx versus OpEx thinking.
  • Managing implementation (~12.5%). Advising teams on deployment, API management with Apigee, the gcloud and bq tools, emulators and Terraform.
  • Ensuring solution and operations excellence (~12.5%). Monitoring, logging and alerting, release management, and testing reliability with load tests and chaos engineering.

How the practice questions here are organised

There is one 10-question practice test so far, and it touches all six sections. It covers choosing a globally consistent database, migrating a database with little downtime, hybrid connectivity that meets an SLA, shared POSIX file storage, domain-restricted sharing, VPC Service Controls against data exfiltration, Shared VPC ownership, BigQuery capacity costs, SLOs and error budgets, and multi-region failover behind a load balancer. Every question explains why the right answer is right and why each wrong option is wrong, with a link to the Google Cloud documentation it is based on.

The test does not reproduce the case studies. Read the four published ones on the official exam page before the exam; knowing each company's constraints in advance saves real time.

A study plan that works

  • Take the practice test cold to find your weak sections, then read every explanation, including the ones for questions you got right by guessing.
  • Read the four case studies twice: once for the business goals, once for the technical constraints. For each, sketch the architecture you would propose.
  • Learn the decision points that come up again and again: Spanner versus Cloud SQL versus Bigtable, Cloud Interconnect versus Cloud VPN, GKE versus Cloud Run, and which security control stops which threat.
  • Read the Well-Architected Framework pillars. When two answers both work, the one that fits its guidance on reliability, security and cost is usually the one Google wants.
  • Build something small in a free-tier project: a VPC with a load balancer, a Cloud Run service and an organization policy teach more than reading about them.

These questions are original, written from the public Google Cloud documentation and the official exam guide. They are not real exam questions, and this site is not affiliated with Google.