Professional Cloud Architect - Google Cloud Certification Guide

Professional Cloud Architect - Google Cloud Certification Guide

by Konrad Clapa, Brian Gerrard
Released October 2019
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781838555276

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Book description

Become a Professional Cloud Architect by exploring essential concepts, tools, and services in GCP and working through tests designed to help you get certified

Key Features

  • Plan and design a GCP cloud solution architecture
  • Ensure the security and reliability of your cloud solutions and operations
  • Test yourself by taking mock tests with up-to-date exam questions

Book Description

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the leading cloud service suites and offers solutions for storage, analytics, big data, machine learning, and application development. It features an array of services that can help organizations to get the best out of their infrastructure. This comprehensive guide covers a variety of topics specific to Google's Professional Cloud Architect official exam syllabus and guides you in using the right methods for effective use of GCP services.

You'll start by exploring GCP, understanding the benefits of becoming a certified architect, and learning how to register for the exam. You'll then delve into the core services that GCP offers such as computing, storage, and security. As you advance, this GCP book will help you get up to speed with methods to scale and automate your cloud infrastructure and delve into containers and services. In the concluding chapters, you'll discover security best practices and even gain insights into designing applications with GCP services and monitoring your infrastructure as a GCP architect.

By the end of this book, you will be well versed in all the topics required to pass Google's Professional Cloud Architect exam and use GCP services effectively.

What you will learn

  • Manage your GCP infrastructure with Google Cloud management options such as CloudShell and SDK
  • Understand the use cases for different storage options
  • Design a solution with security and compliance in mind
  • Monitor GCP compute options
  • Discover machine learning and the different machine learning models offered by GCP
  • Understand what services need to be used when planning and designing your architecture

Who this book is for

If you are a cloud architect, cloud engineer, administrator, or any IT professional who wants to learn how to implement Google Cloud services in your organization and become a GCP Certified Professional Cloud Architect, this book is for you. Basic knowledge of server infrastructure, including Linux and Windows Servers, is assumed. Knowledge of network and storage will also be helpful.

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright and Credits
    1. Professional Cloud Architect – Google Cloud Certification Guide
  3. Dedication
  4. About Packt
    1. Why subscribe?
  5. Foreword
  6. Contributors
    1. About the authors
    2. About the reviewers
    3. Packt is searching for authors like you
  7. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
      1. Download the color images
      2. Conventions used
    4. Get in touch
      1. Reviews
  8. Section 1: Introduction to GCP
  9. GCP Cloud Architect Professional
    1. The benefits of being a certified architect
    2. Registering for the exam
    3. What to expect from the exam
    4. Some tips
    5. Summary
    6. Further reading
  10. Getting Started with Google Cloud Platform
    1. Introducing the cloud
    2. Understanding GCP
      1. GCP differentiators
      2. GCP locations
      3. Resource manager
        1. Organizations
        2. Folders
        3. Projects
        4. Resources scope
          1. Global resources
          2. Regional resources
          3. Zonal resources
        5. Managing projects
        6. Granting permissions
        7. Billing
          1. Managing billing accounts
          2. Assigning a project to a billing account
          3. Exporting billing
          4. Budgets and alerts
          5. Billing account roles
    3. Summary
    4. Further reading
  11. Google Cloud Platform Core Services
    1. Computing and hosting services
    2. Storage services
    3. Networking services
    4. Big data services
    5. ML services
    6. Identity services
    7. Summary
    8. Further reading
  12. Section 2: Managing, Designing, and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture
  13. Working with Google Compute Engine
    1. Deploying our first GCE instance
    2. Deployment options
      1. Region
      2. Zone
      3. Boot disk
      4. Application images
      5. Snapshots
      6. Existing disks
      7. Labels
      8. Deletion protection
      9. Metadata
      10. Startup scripts
      11. Preemptibilty
      12. Availability policy
      13. Automatic restart
      14. Shielded VM
      15. Deletion rule
      16. Node affinity labels
      17. GPUs and TPUs
    3. Instance templates and instance groups
      1. Setting the location
      2. Port name mapping
    4. Autoscaling
    5. Autohealing
    6. Quotas and limits
    7. IAM roles
    8. Pricing
    9. Summary
    10. Further reading
  14. Managing Kubernetes Clusters with Google Kubernetes Engine
    1. An introduction to microservices
    2. Containers
    3. Docker
    4. Kubernetes
      1. Kubernetes architecture
        1. The master node
        2. Worker nodes
      2. Kubernetes objects
        1. Pods
        2. ReplicaSets
        3. Deployments
        4. Namespaces
        5. Services
          1. Types of services
    5. Google Kubernetes Engine
      1. Node pools
      2. Container-Optimized OS
      3. Storage
      4. GKE cluster management
      5. Creating a GKE cluster
        1. Advanced configuration
        2. Networking
        3. Security
        4. Stackdriver
        5. Additional features
        6. Deploying our first application
        7. Cluster second-day operations
          1. Upgrading the cluster
          2. Auto-upgrades
          3. Auto-repair
          4. Resizing the cluster
          5. Autoscaling a cluster
          6. Rotating the master IP
      6. IAM
      7. Kubernetes role-based access control
      8. Container Registry
      9. Cloud Build
      10. Quotas and limits
      11. Pricing
    6. Summary
    7. Further reading
  15. Exploring Google App Engine as a Compute Option
    1. App Engine components
    2. Choosing the right location
    3. Working with App Engine
    4. Environment types
      1. App Engine Standard environment
      2. Flexible environment
    5. Deploying an App Engine application
    6. Versions
    7. Splitting traffic
    8. Migrating traffic
    9. Firewall rules
    10. Settings
      1. Custom domain
      2. SSL certificates
    11. Scaling
    12. Cron jobs
    13. Memcache
    14. IAM
    15. Quotas and limits
    16. Pricing
    17. Summary
    18. Further reading
  16. Running Serverless Functions with Google Cloud Functions
    1. Main Cloud Functions characteristics
    2. Use cases
      1. Application backends
      2. Real-time data processing systems
      3. Smart applications
    3. Runtime environments
    4. Types of Cloud Functions
      1. HTTP functions
      2. Background functions
    5. Events
    6. Triggers
    7. Other considerations
      1. Cloud SQL connectivity
      2. Connecting to internal resources in a VPC network
      3. Environmental variables
      4. Cold start
      5. Local emulator
    8. Deploying Cloud Functions
      1. Deploying Cloud Functions with the Google Cloud Console
      2. Deploying functions with the gcloud command
        1. Triggers
    9. IAM
    10. Quotas and limits
    11. Pricing
    12. Cloud Run
    13. Summary
    14. Further reading
  17. Networking Options in GCP
    1. Exploring GCP networking
    2. Understanding Virtual Private Cloud
      1. Connectivity
      2. Cost
      3. VPC Flow Logs
      4. Cross-VPC connectivity
        1. Shared VPC
        2. VPC peering
          1. Choosing between shared VPC and VPC peering
    3. Load balancing
      1. Global versus regional load balancing
      2. External versus internal
      3. Proxy versus load balancer
      4. Load balancer types
      5. Comparison
      6. Choosing the right load balancer
    4. NAT
      1. NAT gateway
      2. Cloud NAT
    5. Hybrid connectivity
      1. VPN
      2. Interconnects
      3. Peering
      4. Choosing the right connectivity method
    6. DNS
      1. DNS resolution
      2. Cloud DNS
      3. DNSSEC
    7. Firewall rules
      1. Default rules
      2. Implied rules
      3. Always allowed traffic rules
      4. Always denied rules
      5. User-defined rules
      6. Firewall logging
    8. Private access
    9. Summary
    10. Further reading
  18. Exploring Storage Options in GCP - Part 1
    1. Choosing the right storage option
      1. Data consistency
    2. Understanding Cloud Storage
      1. Bucket locations
      2. Storage classes
        1. Legacy storage classes
      3. Data consistency
      4. Cloud Storage FUSE
      5. Creating and using a bucket
      6. Versioning and lifecycle management
        1. Versioning
        2. Lifecycle management
      7. Transferring data
        1. Cloud Storage Transfer Service
        2. Google Transfer Appliance
      8. Understanding IAM
      9. Quotas and limits
      10. Pricing
    3. Understanding Cloud Datastore
      1. Data consistency
      2. Creating and using Cloud Datastore
      3. Datastore versus Firestore
      4. IAM
      5. Quotas and limits
      6. Pricing
    4. Understanding Cloud SQL
      1. Data consistency
      2. Creating and managing Cloud SQL
      3. Read Replicas
      4. Failover Replica
      5. Backup and recovery
      6. Migrating data
      7. Instance cloning
      8. IAM
      9. Quotas and limits
      10. Pricing
    5. Summary
    6. Further reading
  19. Exploring Storage Options in GCP - Part 2
    1. Cloud Spanner
      1. Instances configuration
      2. Node count
      3. Replication
      4. TrueTime
      5. Data consistency
      6. Creating a Cloud Spanner instance
      7. IAM
      8. Quotas and limits
      9. Pricing
    2. Bigtable
      1. Bigtable configuration
        1. Instances
        2. Clusters
        3. Nodes
        4. Schema
        5. Replication
        6. Application profiles
      2. Data consistency
      3. Creating a Bigtable instance and table
      4. IAM
      5. Quotas and limits
      6. Pricing
    3. Summary
    4. Further reading
  20. Analyzing Big Data Options
    1. End-to-end big data solution
    2. Cloud Pub/Sub
      1. Creating a topic and subscription
      2. IAM
      3. Quotas and limits
      4. Pricing
    3. Cloud Dataflow
      1. IAM
      2. Quotas and limits
      3. Pricing
    4. BigQuery
      1. BigQuery features
        1. Datasets
        2. Tables
      2. Using BigQuery
        1. Importing and exporting data
        2. Storage
      3. IAM
      4. Quotas and limits
      5. Pricing
    5. Dataproc
      1. Architecture
      2. IAM
      3. Quotas and limits
    6. Cloud IoT Core
      1. IAM
      2. Quotas and limits
      3. Pricing
    7. Additional considerations
    8. Summary
    9. Further reading
  21. Putting Machine Learning to Work
    1. An introduction to AI and ML
    2. The seven steps of ML
      1. Gathering and preparing the data
      2. Choosing a model
      3. Training
      4. Evaluation
      5. Hyperparameter tuning
      6. Prediction
    3. Learning models
    4. GCP ML options
    5. TensorFlow
    6. Cloud ML Engine
      1. Using ML Engine
      2. Interacting with ML Engine
      3. ML Engine scale tiers
      4. Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)
      5. Submitting a training job
      6. Deploying the model
      7. Predictions
        1. Submitting predictions
    7. Pretrained ML models
      1. The Cloud Speech-to-Text API
      2. The Cloud Text-To-Speech API
      3. The Cloud Translation API
      4. The Cloud Natural Language API
      5. The Cloud Vision API
      6. The Google Cloud Video Intelligence API
    8. Dialogflow
    9. AutoML
    10. Summary
    11. Further reading
  22. Section 3: Designing for Security and Compliance
  23. Security and Compliance
    1. Introduction to security
    2. Cloud Identity
    3. Resource Manager
    4. Identity and Access Management (IAM)
      1. Service accounts
      2. Cloud Storage access management
    5. Firewall rules and load balancers
    6. Cloud Security Scanner
    7. Monitoring and logging
    8. Encryption
      1. Data encryption keys versus key encryption keys
      2. CMEKs versus CSEKs
    9. Industry regulations
      1. PCI compliance
      2. Shared responsibility model
      3. Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
      4. Penetration testing in GCP
    10. Additional security services
      1. Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)
      2. Security Command Center (SCC)
      3. Forseti
      4. Cloud Armor
    11. Summary
    12. Further reading
  24. Section 4: Managing Implementation
  25. Google Cloud Management Options
    1. Using APIs
    2. Google Cloud Shell
    3. The GCP SDK
      1. gcloud
      2. gsutil
      3. bq
      4. cbt
    4. Cloud Deployment Manager
    5. Pricing Calculator
    6. Additional things to consider
    7. Summary
    8. Further reading
  26. Section 5: Ensuring Solution and Operations Reliability
  27. Monitoring Your Infrastructure
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Introduction to Stackdriver
      1. Cost
    3. Configuring Stackdriver
    4. Stackdriver Monitoring
      1. Groups
      2. Dashboards
      3. Alerting policies
      4. Uptime checks
      5. Monitoring agents
    5. Stackdriver Logging
      1. Logs Viewer
      2. Basic log filtering
      3. Advanced filtering
      4. Exporting logs
      5. Logging agent
      6. Log-based metrics
      7. Cloud audit logs
      8. ACTIVITY
      9. Retention
    6. APM
      1. Trace
      2. Debugger
      3. Profiler
    7. Error Reporting
    8. Summary
    9. Further reading
  28. Section 6: Exam Focus
  29. Case Studies
    1. Understanding how to approach exam case studies
    2. What are they looking for in the case studies?
      1. Company overview
      2. Solution concept
      3. Business requirements
      4. Technical requirements
      5. Executive summary
      6. Forming a solution
        1. The analytics platform
        2. The backend platform
      7. Summary of Mountkirk
    3. Additional case studies
      1. TerramEarth
        1. Analysis
      2. Dress4Win
        1. Analysis
    4. Summary
    5. Further reading
  30. Test Your Knowledge
    1. Mock test 1
    2. Mock test 2
  31. Assessments
    1. Answers to Mock Test 1
    2. Answers to Mock Test 2
  32. Other Books You May Enjoy
    1. Leave a review - let other readers know what you think

Product information

  • Title: Professional Cloud Architect - Google Cloud Certification Guide
  • Author(s): Konrad Clapa, Brian Gerrard
  • Release date: October 2019
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781838555276