Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect exam objectives
Google Cloud publishes 6 exam domains with official weightings. The weight tells you where your marks come from, so your study time should roughly follow it.
ProfessionalAdvanced
1. Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture
25%- Translating business and technical requirements into an architecture
- Designing for availability, durability and failure, including regional vs multi-regional choices
- Network design: VPC layout, Shared VPC, hybrid connectivity, Private Service Connect
- Cost modelling, and choosing managed services over self-managed where it pays
2. Managing and provisioning a cloud solution infrastructure
17%- Provisioning compute, storage and data services to match the workload
- Infrastructure as code and repeatable environment configuration
- Migration planning: lift-and-shift versus replatforming, and cutover strategy
- Networking implementation: routing, load balancing, DNS, NAT
3. Designing for security and compliance
17%- IAM design: least privilege, service accounts, workload identity federation
- Data protection: CMEK, secret management, encryption in transit and at rest
- Separation of duties and organisation policy constraints across a resource hierarchy
- Meeting regulatory requirements and designing for auditability
4. Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes
15%- Reliability practice: SLIs, SLOs, error budgets and what they change
- Cost optimisation: committed use, autoscaling, rightsizing, storage classes
- Incident and change management processes that hold up under load
- Team and stakeholder considerations in a technical decision
5. Managing implementation
13%- Advising development and operations teams on Google Cloud practice
- CI/CD pipeline design and safe deployment strategies (canary, blue-green)
- Interacting with the platform programmatically through APIs, CLI and client libraries
- Testing and validating an implementation against the design
6. Ensuring solution and operations excellence
13%- Observability: logging, monitoring, tracing and alerting that fires usefully
- Post-incident review, and turning findings into architectural change
- Ongoing optimisation as usage and requirements shift
- Deprecation and lifecycle management of deployed solutions
Our practice exam spreads its questions across these exact domains at these weightings, so your score in each one tells you precisely where you stand.
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