Passed Professional Cloud Architect at Next 2018

I took the Professional Cloud Architect exam at Next 2018. The only reason I mention where I took it because it may have been a different version of the test. The exam portal did mention that the exam was for Next 2018 attendees. Anyway…

Mattias says in the second-to-last module of the section that he recommends watching the Google Cloud Minute videos playlist on YouTube – Do this! Especially if you don’t have an extensive background in development or Linux administration. I would have failed 10-20% of the questions if I hadn’t watched those videos two hours before the test started. 

With regards to how well the actual exam lines up to what the exam outline says, I think we are pretty restricted from discussing the actual content of the test. I can say that I was very worried about the part of the exam description that says knowledge of Python and Java (at a minimum) would be required (as I have no developer experience), but that was not an issue on the exam. 

Things you should definitely be airtight on:

1) Automation – Especially knowing what GKE does/does not allow for, relationships between pods, clusters, and nodes, how to use templates, and what advantages a container cluster has over autoscaling and managed instance groups. You probably won’t need to debug a template or startup script but you will need to at least look at it and be able understand what it is doing (or trying to do). You won’t need to know HOW to use kubectl commands, but you should know when and where they can be used.

2) When to use all of the GCS and Big Data & Analytics services. Memorize all of the differences between Dataproc, Dataflow, BigTable, BigQuery, Datastore, etc. A lot of the questions will ask you which service(s) is appropriate in a given scenario.

3) Collecting, viewing, exporting, and analyzing Stackdriver logs.

4) Which services (and features of those services) are zonal, regional, and global. Which services are fully-managed vs. not may also appear on case study questions, which make up a healthy portion of the questions. One nice thing is that all of the questions for a given case study are grouped together, so you aren’t constantly looking back and forth.

5) Basic networking concepts. VPCs, the differences between and use-cases for VPN, Interconnects, and peering, and especially which load balancers you should use, given a particular use case or requirement. 

Best practices for CI/CD frameworks, setting IAM policies, and organizing hierarchies is also important. Having at least a basic understanding of common third-party tools like Jenkins will be helpful. I didn’t memorize all of the gcloud, gsutil, or bq commands and that was not an issue at all. 

Other people have said that the exam was harder than AWS Solutions Architect Associate, and I would agree with that statement. 

About an hour after I took the test, I ran into Mattias, so that was a cool experience. Anyways, good luck to all!