PCA Study Guide — How to Pass Google Professional Cloud Architect

Weeks 1–3

Designing Cloud Solutions: compute, storage, networking, databases

Tip: PCA uses two case studies in the exam: Mountkirk Games and Dress4Win (or equivalent). Read the official Google case studies before your exam — the exam refers to these companies by name and asks you to design solutions for their stated requirements.

Weeks 4–6

Managing and Provisioning: IAM, deployment manager, Terraform, Anthos

Tip: Anthos is Google's hybrid and multi-cloud platform. Know that Anthos clusters can run on GCP, on-premises (VMware), and other clouds (AWS, Azure). Anthos Config Management applies Kubernetes configurations consistently across all clusters using GitOps-style policy management.

Weeks 7–9

Designing for Security and Compliance: VPC Service Controls, Cloud Armor, Identity-Aware Proxy

Tip: VPC Service Controls create a security perimeter around Google Cloud services. Know that they prevent data exfiltration by blocking access to GCP APIs from outside the perimeter, even from authenticated identities — this is different from IAM, which controls who can do what.

Weeks 10–15

Analysing Processes and Ensuring Reliability: SLOs, error budgets, DR, monitoring

Tip: Google SRE concepts appear on PCA: SLI (what you measure, e.g. request latency), SLO (your target, e.g. 99.9% of requests under 200ms), SLA (commitment to customers, often slightly lower than SLO), error budget (how much reliability you can afford to spend on new features). Know these definitions and their relationships.