Google certified professional cloud architect certification cost

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5. Is Google Cloud Architect certification valuable?

The Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect GCP certification is one of many highly sought-after IT certifications these days. It is without a doubt one of the most difficult exams offered by any cloud vendor today. This certification broadens your professional opportunities and raises your earning potential. The average Google Certified Professional – Cloud Architect salary is $164,000 per year. Let us understand more about the Google Cloud Architect certification exam and the value it adds.

About Google Cloud Architect certification

A Professional Cloud Architect enables businesses to take advantage of Google Cloud technologies. The Professional Cloud Architect can design, produce, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and effective solutions to stimulate business objectives while having a thorough understanding of cloud architecture and Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud certifications validate the candidate’s knowledge and demonstrate their ability to convert businesses using Google Cloud technology.

Who should take the Exam?

The target audience for the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam includes: 

• Anyone who wants to enhance skills with Cloud Architecture Certifications.
• A candidate who wants to get an understanding of Google Cloud Platform – GCP.
• Anyone who is preparing for the Cloud Architect Exam from Google.
• Additionally, Anyone who wants to understand Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud Deployment. 
• Anyone wants to understand the Services offering from Google Cloud Platform.
• Customer of Google Cloud Platform and want to understand services offered.
• Current Customers of Amazon, Azure or any other public cloud wants to understand GCP Services.
• AWS Solution Architect or Microsoft Azure Architects wants to understand Google Cloud Platform.
• Developers, Lead Developers who are using Google Cloud Platform Services, or any other public cloud services.

Exam Format

Another thing that the candidate should be aware of is the fundamentals of the exam. Details such as exam length, fee, number of questions, and so on. As a result, we’re talking about it here. The Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam consists of multiple-choice questions, and the candidate will have 2 hours to complete it. The cost of becoming a Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect is $200. (plus tax where applicable). The exam is available in both English and Japanese.

Let us now look at the course outline to access the worth of this certification!

Is Google Cloud Architect certification valuable?

Yes, the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect Exam is indeed a good value addition. Many IT companies are overhauling teams for better and resource proficient cloud technologies. With Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect Certification in the profile, it makes it much easier for professionals working within the organisation to have hands-experience and the ability to deliver efficiently.

The Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect, also known as GCP Cloud Architect, is one of the best entry-level Cloud certifications that test all of your skills and knowledge required to work with the various Google Cloud technologies. This exam will assess your abilities in designing, developing, planning, and managing secure, robust, dynamic, and scalable cloud solutions for a business.

Furthermore, the certification exam will assess your ability to design cloud services and apps, as well as optimize and analyze various business processes, as well as your proficiency in software development methods. In comparison to most others, this is a simple cloud certification. GCP Cloud Architect, on the other hand, is one of the most valuable certifications and the best Google Cloud certification, particularly for individuals wishing to pursue a career as a Cloud Architect.

Let us now look at some resources that will help you ace this exam –

Google Cloud Documentations and Solutions 

The following step should be to review the Google Cloud documentation and solutions. Google provides the study material, so the candidate has a great opportunity to prepare for the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect exam using these documentations and solutions. Case studies are also available on Google’s official page, to which candidates can refer and try to understand the concepts through the case studies. Mountkirk Games, Dress4Win, and TerramEarth are among the case studies available.

Google Training Program 

Google’s cloud platform provides training programs. Candidates preparing for the exam can look for Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect Training programs. These training programs will provide the candidate with comprehensive guidance and learning. Also, look into the Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect online course.

Exam Course Outline

Google has divided the exam syllabus into sections, and then into subject sections. Let’s look at the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect Certification Course Outline to see what topics are covered in the exam. –

Domain 1: Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

1.1 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets business requirements. Considerations include:

• Business use cases and product strategy (Google Documentation: Best practices for enterprise organizations, Implementing policies for customer use cases)
• Cost optimization (Google Documentation: Performance and cost optimization)
• also, Supporting the application design (Google Documentation: Google Cloud system design considerations)
• furthermore, Integration with external systems (Google Documentation: Using APIs from an External Network, Security, privacy, and compliance)
• moreover, Movement of data (Google Documentation: Data lifecycle)
• also, Design decision trade-offs (Google Documentation: Google Cloud system design considerations)
• furthermore, Build, buy, or modify
• moreover, Success measurements (e.g., key performance indicators [KPI], return on investment [ROI], metrics) (Google Documentation: KPIs for APIs: How Metrics Change Over Time)
• also, Compliance and observability (Google Documentation: Security, privacy, and compliance)

1.2 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets technical requirements. Considerations include:

• High availability and failover design (Google Documentation: Overview of the high availability configuration)
• also, The elasticity of cloud resources (Google Documentation: Google Cloud overview)
• furthermore, Scalability to meet growth requirements (Google Documentation: Reliability, Security, privacy, and compliance)
• moreover, Performance and latency (Google Documentation: Performance and cost optimization)

1.3 Designing network, storage, and compute resources. Considerations include:

• Integration with on-premises/multi-cloud environments (Google Documentation: Hybrid and multi-cloud architecture patterns)
• Cloud-native networking (VPC, peering, firewalls, container networking) (Google Documentation: VPC network overview)
• Choosing data processing technologies (Google Documentation: Data processing, Dataflow, Dataproc)
• Furthermore, Choosing appropriate storage types (e.g., object, file, RDBMS, NoSQL, NewSQL) (Google Documentation: Google Cloud Databases)
• Moreover, Choosing to compute resources (e.g., preemptible, custom machine type, specialized workload) (Google Documentation: Compute, Creating a VM Instance with a custom machine type)
• Mapping compute needs to platform products (Google Documentation: Google Cloud products)

• Integrating solution with existing systems (Google Documentation: Migration to Google Cloud: Getting started)
• also, Migrating systems and data to support the solution
• furthermore, Licensing mapping (Google Documentation: Bringing your own licenses)
• moreover, Network planning (Google Documentation: Best practices and reference architectures for VPC design, VPC network overview))
• also, Testing and proof of concept (Google Documentation: Running a hybrid render farm proof of concept)
• furthermore, Dependency management planning (Google Documentation: Specifying Dependencies)

1.5 Envisioning future solution improvements. Considerations include:

• Cloud and technology improvements (Google Documentation: Google Cloud Improvements)
• also, Business needs evolution (Google Documentation: Best practices for enterprise organizations, Google Cloud Improvements)
• fuerthermore, Evangelism and advocacy (Google Documentation: API Team Best Practices: Developers, Evangelists, and Champions)

Domain 2: Managing and provisioning a solution Infrastructure

2.1 Configuring network topologies. Considerations include:

• Extending to on-premises (hybrid networking) (Google Documentation: Extending On-Premises Network-Attached Storage to Cloud Storage with Komprise, Google Cloud Hybrid Connectivity)
• Extending to a multi-cloud environment that may include GCP to GCP communication (Google Documentation: Hybrid and multi-cloud architecture patterns)
• Security and data protection (Google Documentation: Data Protection)

2.2 Configuring individual storage systems. Considerations include:

• Data storage allocation (Google Documentation: Best practices for Cloud Storage)
• Also, Data processing/compute provisioning (Google Documentation: Provisioning VMs on sole-tenant nodes, Data processing, Dataflow, Dataproc)
• furthermore, Security and access management (Google Documentation: Identity and Access Management)
• moreover, Network configuration for data transfer and latency (Google Documentation: GCP network performance, Performance, and cost optimization)
• also, Data retention and data life cycle management (Google Documentation: Data lifecycle, Retention policies and retention policy locks)
• furthermore, Data growth management (Google Documentation: Data lifecycle, Cloud storage growth)

2.3 Configuring compute systems. Considerations include:

• Compute system provisioning (Google Documentation: Provisioning VMs on sole-tenant nodes, Compute Engine)
• Compute volatility configuration (preemptible vs. standard) (Google Documentation: Preemptible VM instances, Creating and starting a preemptible VM instance)
• Network configuration for compute nodes (Google Documentation: Sole-tenant nodes
• Infrastructure provisioning technology configuration (e.g. Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Terraform/Deployment Manager) (Google Documentation: Infrastructure as code)
• Container orchestration with Kubernetes (Google Documentation: Google Kubernetes Engine)

Domain 3: Designing for security and compliance

3.1 Designing for security. Considerations include:

• Identity and access management (IAM) (Google Documentation: Identity and Access Management)
• also, Resource hierarchy (organizations, folders, projects) (Google Documentation: Resource hierarchy, Using resource hierarchy for access control)
• furthermore, Data security (key management, encryption) (Google Documentation: Encryption at rest in Google Cloud)
• moreover, Penetration testing
• also, Separation of duties (SoD) (Google Documentation: Separation of duties)
• Security controls (e.g., auditing, VPC Service Controls, organization policy) (Google Documentation: Overview of VPC Service Controls)
• moreover, Managing customer-managed encryption keys with Cloud KMS (Google Documentation: Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK))

3.2 Designing for compliance. Considerations include:

• Legislation (e.g., health record privacy, children’s privacy, data privacy, and ownership) (Google Documentation: Compliance resource center)
• Commercial (e.g., sensitive data such as credit card information handling, personally identifiable information [PII]) (Google Documentation: Scan for sensitive data in just a few clicks, Take charge of your sensitive data with the Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API)
• Industry certifications (e.g., SOC 2) (Google Documentation: SOC 2)
• Audits (including logs) (Google Documentation: Cloud Audit Logs)

Domain 4: Analyzing and optimizing technology and business processes

4.1 Analyzing and defining technical processes. Considerations include:

• Software development life cycle plan (SDLC)
• also, Continuous integration / continuous deployment (Google Documentation: Setting up a CI/CD pipeline)
• furthermore, Troubleshooting/post mortem analysis culture (Google Documentation: Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure, Fearless shared postmortem)
• moreover, Testing and validation (Google Documentation: Validate Your Data, Testing Overview)
• Service catalogue and provisioning (Google Documentation: Provisioning Overview)
• Business continuity and disaster recovery (Google Documentation: Disaster recovery planning guide, Solving for business continuity)

4.2 Analyzing and defining business processes. Considerations include:

• Stakeholder management (e.g. influencing and facilitation)
• Change management (Google Documentation: Opening doors, embracing change with cloud data warehouses)
• Team assessment/skills readiness (Google Documentation: Migration to Google Cloud: Assessing and discovering your workloads)
• Decision-making process
• Customer success management
• Cost optimization / resource optimization (Capex / Opex) (Google Documentation: Cloud cost optimization, Cost Management)

4.3 Developing procedures to ensure the resilience of solutions in production (e.g., chaos engineering) (Google Documentation: Patterns for scalable and resilient apps)

Domain 5: Managing implementation

5.1 Advising development/operation team(s) to ensure successful deployment of the solution. Considerations include:

• Application development (Google Documentation: Application modernization, Application Development)
• API best practices (Google Documentation: API Key Best Practices)
• Testing frameworks (load/unit/integration) (Google Documentation: Testing Overview, test – Run gsutil unit/integration tests (for developers))
• Data and system migration tooling (Google Documentation: Data center migration)

5.2 Interacting with Google Cloud using GCP SDK (gcloud, gsutil, and bq). Considerations include:

• Local installation (Google Documentation: Installing Google Cloud SDK)
• Google Cloud Shell (Google Documentation: Google Cloud Shell documentation)

Domain 6: Ensuring solution and operations reliability

6.1 Monitoring/logging/profiling/alerting solution (Google Documentation: Introduction to alerting, Alerting behavior)

6.2 Deployment and release management (Google Documentation: Google Cloud Deployment Manager)

6.3 Assisting with the support of solutions in operation (Google Documentation: Cloud Monitoring, Operations)

6.4 Evaluating quality control measures (Google Documentation: Google security whitepaper)

Practice Tests 

Practice tests are the most important step in the preparation guide. Candidates can take a hands-on practice test to ensure their preparation. Furthermore, the practice tests will assist the candidate in identifying their weak points so that they can work on them.

You can also visit online tutorials to know more details about the exam.

Conclusion

A Professional Cloud Architect enables businesses to take advantage of Google Cloud technologies. The Professional Cloud Architect can design, produce, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and effective solutions to stimulate business objectives while having a thorough understanding of cloud architecture and Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud certifications validate the candidate’s knowledge and demonstrate their ability to convert businesses using Google Cloud technology.

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