Google Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide

Chapter 16. Understanding and Conquering the Exam

At this point, it’s been close to a decade since my boss called me up and asked me if I’d consider getting the Google Cloud Architect certification. It seemed there was a growing demand for people who could teach Google Cloud classes, and he thought I might be a good candidate. I mentioned the idea of certification to a friend, and he laughed. Turned out that he and three other mutual friends had all been having the same “time to get serious about the cloud” conversation. Within a week, the five of us got together to compare notes and plan our assault on the PCA.

By the end of that meeting, I was feeling pretty intimidated. Friend 1 had been architecting GCP solutions for enterprise clients since before I could spell cloud. Friend 2 had migrated more databases to Cloud SQL than I’d probably ever touched. Friends 3 and 4 had clients on the Fortune 500.

Me? I was still finding my way around the console and didn’t know what half the services were because I’d never had to use them, and the services I did know all related to the dev projects I’d worked on where my primary role had been software engineer, not Cloud Architect.

My friends all had years of real-world experience. They’d designed systems that actually ran in production. They’d troubleshot outages and optimized costs and done all the things that real cloud architects do. If anyone should breeze through the PCA, it was them.

We had another meet a week later, and friend 1 said, ...