Google Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide

Chapter 17. Case Study Deep Dive

Remember my four friends from Chapter 16? The ones who knew more about Google Cloud than I did, who had years of real-world experience architecting production systems, and who all failed the PCA exam?

When I asked them what went wrong, case studies came up more than once. Friend 1 mentioned that he’d barely glanced at the case studies before the exam—figured he’d just read them during the test. Friend 3 said she’d read through them but hadn’t really analyzed them, hadn’t thought through what questions Google might ask or what architectural decisions the scenarios implied. Friend 4 admitted he didn’t even know the case studies were published in advance.

After watching them fail, I knew I couldn’t make the same mistakes, and going in cold seemed to be a common thread. So I downloaded all four case studies, pulled them up in my iPad PDF editor, sat down in my comfy chair with a can of cashew nuts, and...stared at them.

Now what?

I had four fictional companies in front of me. Each one had a company overview, a solution concept, an existing technical environment, business requirements, technical requirements, and an executive statement. It was maybe 10 pages total across all four documents. I read through them. I understood the words. But I had no idea what I was supposed to do with this information.

Was I supposed to memorize the details? Design complete architectures for each company? Make flashcards of their technical requirements? The case studies ...