Getting Certified as a Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect — 2021
Woohoo! Super excited to be certified as a GCP — Professional Cloud Architect! Personally I find this one of the tougher certifications I had been through. I took up the whole 2 hours to finish doing 50 questions and manage to check through only some of my answers. The questions are long, the answers are long. It was an intense 2 hours of concentration. (and sweating in the gloves I had to wear for the on-site exam)
Having had a background as a developer, architect and some AWS and GCP hands-on experience. I took about 4 months to prepare for the certification to make sure I went through as much material as I could to be well prepared. There are just so many features and nitty gritty details of each GCP products and services!
Sharing here the resources I went through to get prepared (in the order of how useful I felt the resource is):
This gives you a list of key things the exam will be testing you on, use cases that will be referenced in the exams and sample exam questions. Especially read it at least within 1 week before the exam. I was slightly worried when I read the guide 1 day before the exam to find that the exam had fully transitioned to add 2 new use cases!
Though not a pre-requisite for the architect exam, I took the ACE certification last year. I feel that I was definitely grilled more on hands on details such as command lines, syntax and permissions in ACE. PCA goes more into using the correct combination of products/steps given the situation. But in the end whatever knowledge I gained from learnt studying ACE is still relevant for the PCA certification.
As the name says — labs. I definitely do not have experience in every single product on GCP so this gives me the space to really try things out which really helped me to remember things better.
This is definitely my go-to exam questions bank. A lot of great comments there from I believe to be actual users trying to rationalise what the correct answer should be. I am in turn encouraged to read more documentations to find out what is the right answer. Great fun. :)
Going through this course will not be enough for the certification but it gives a good summary of GCP products, thought process to arrive at the right technical decision and good references to resources that definitely helped me to gain key knowledge on GCP.
This book gave me guidance to the things I need to know for the exam by referencing closely to the objectives in the exam guide. Again, going through this guide will not be enough for the certification but gives a good grounding of the basics of which I would go through more documentation to find out more about.
With all the preparation, I do find myself having gaps in my knowledge for some questions. And for that, I had to go for reading the question carefully, good common sense of what is the best option to go for given the objectives. Hence, having a well rested mind before the exam is important!
But ultimately, the learning process for this certification is totally worth it. Beyond product knowledge, I had a good recap and some fresh knowledge of what an architect should be knowledgable about.
If you are still thinking about whether to take up this certification, go for it! :)
