Badge of the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification.

I just successfully passed my Google Professional Cloud Architect certification. I’m really happy about that! Let me share with you the public materials and resources I leveraged for my preparation.

First of all, I’m a learning-by-doing person, so since I joined Google (~5 months ago) I practiced by doing hands-on activities I documented on my blog as well as doing engagements with my customers. Learning by doing the real stuffs! ;)

The other consideration is that I have already some Cloud Architecture knowledge with Microsoft Azure, so I leveraged this resource Google Cloud for Azure professionals to help me get up to speed based on my previous experiences. If you are coming from the AWS world, you could find the same resource here.

To be honest with all of that said, my focus was not on the PCA by itself during the last 5 months, but more on broad architecture concepts focused on infrastructure, networking and security. And then few days/weeks before, I narrowed my focus based on few materials publicly available to prepare the PCA:

The last part of my preparation, because it was my first GCP certification ever, was about to reach out to colleagues and the community to get few feedback about what a GCP certification looks like, get few tips and tricks, etc. For example, with a quick search you could find this recent one: How I got my Google Cloud Professional Architect certificate. You could find a lot of examples like this in there too: Awesome GCP Certifications resources.

Note: my tips for you are 1/ read carefully the questions (and the case studies) 2/ don’t find the right answer but do find the best answer (most of the time, all the questions are correct, but there is just one answering best the question based on the criteria, requirements, etc.).

Certifications are a great way to learn, validate knowledge and make room for improvements. I learned a lot while preparing that one and I have already few pointers to improve my knowledge and skills on GCP ;) My next certification with GCP will be either the Cloud Security Engineer or the new Cloud Developer. Stay tuned!

Hope you will be able to leverage few pointers from this one for your own path to the Google PCA certification, cheers!