Google Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide

Chapter 1. Certification 101

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

There are only two major places in this book where I talk extensively about test taking, this chapter and the final “PCA Exam Mastery” book section. For most of the chapters, the focus will be on making you a better Google Cloud Architect, but test taking will take a back seat. If you aren’t interested in test taking at this time, they go ahead and skip to Chapter 2.

Yes, now.

If you are still here, then let’s talk certs! My goal in this chapter is to get you thinking about your PCA certification path. You should NOT read this book and then run out the next day and take the certification. That would likely be a recipe for failure. Instead, in this chapter, I want to make sure you understand what the Professional Cloud Architect certification is, how you register for it, the kinds of things it will ask you, and ultimately, how you should approach conquering it.

Certification, What is the Big Deal? ...