Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Training

This course prepares you for the Professional certification exam, covering all official exam domains and their approximate weightings:

Domain 1 Section 1: Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture (25%)

• Design cloud infrastructure meeting business requirements: use cases/product strategy, functional & non-functional requirements, business continuity, cost optimization, workload disposition (build/buy/modify/deprecate), KPIs/ROI, security & compliance, observability
• Design cloud infrastructure meeting technical requirements: Well-Architected Framework alignment, HA/fail-over design, resource flexibility, scalability, performance/latency, Gemini Cloud Assist, backup & recovery
• Design network, storage, and compute resources: on-prem/multicloud integration, Google Cloud AI/ML solutions (Gemini LLMs, Agent Builder, Model Garden, AI Hypercomputer), cloud-native networking (VPC, peering, firewalls, load balancers, shared VPC, Private Service Connect), data processing/storage type selection, mapping compute needs to platform products (GKE, Cloud Run), choosing compute resources (spot VMs, custom machine types)
• Create a migration plan: integrating with existing systems, assessing/migrating systems & data (Google Cloud Migration Center), migration methodologies/workload testing/network & dependency planning, software license & financial impact
• Envision future solution improvements: cloud/technology evolution, evolving business needs, cloud-first design approach

Domain 2 Section 2: Managing and provisioning a cloud solution infrastructure (17.5%)

• Configure network topologies: hybrid and multicloud extension, security protection (intrusion protection, access control, firewalls), VPC design and load balancing
• Configure individual storage systems: data storage allocation, processing/compute provisioning, security/access management, data transfer & latency, retention/lifecycle management, data growth planning, backup & recovery
• Configure compute systems: resource provisioning, compute volatility (spot vs standard), cloud-native network config for compute (Compute Engine, GKE, serverless, VMware Engine), infrastructure orchestration & patch management, container orchestration, serverless computing
• Leverage Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform for end-to-end ML workflows: Agent Platform Pipelines, data integration, AI Hypercomputer usage (GPUs/TPUs, large-scale model training)
• Configure prebuilt solutions or APIs with Agent Platform: Google AI APIs (Search, Conversation, Vision, Image, Video, Audio), Gemini Enterprise features (AI Agents, NotebookLM), integrating Model Garden models

Domain 3 Section 3: Designing for security and compliance (17.5%)

• Design for security: IAM, resource hierarchy (orgs/folders/projects), data security (key management, encryption, secret management), separation of duties
• Security controls: auditing, VPC Service Controls, context-aware access, organization policy, hierarchical firewall policy, Cloud KMS customer-managed keys
• Secure remote access: Identity-Aware Proxy, service account impersonation, Chrome Enterprise Premium, Workload Identity Federation; securing the software supply chain and securing AI (Model Armor, Sensitive Data Protection, secure model deployment)
• Design for compliance: legislation/regulation (health, children's, data privacy, sovereignty), commercial sensitive data (PCI, PII), industry certifications (e.g., SOC 2), audits and logs

Domain 4 Section 4: Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes (15%)

• Analyze and define technical processes: SDLC, CI/CD, troubleshooting/root cause analysis, testing & validation of software/infrastructure, service catalog & provisioning, disaster recovery
• Analyze and define business processes: stakeholder management (influencing/facilitation), change management, team assessment/skills readiness, decision-making processes, customer success management, cost/resource optimization (CapEx/OpEx), business continuity

Domain 5 Section 5: Managing implementation (12.5%)

• Advise development and operations teams on deployment: application & infrastructure deployment, API management best practices (Apigee), testing frameworks (load/unit/integration), data & system migration/management tooling, Gemini Cloud Assist
• Interact with Google Cloud programmatically: Cloud Shell Editor/Code/Terminal, Google Cloud SDKs (gcloud, gsutil, bq), cloud emulators (Bigtable, Spanner, Pub/Sub, Firestore), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), Google API best practices and client libraries

Domain 6 Section 6: Ensuring solution and operations excellence (12.5%)

• Understand and apply the operational excellence pillar of the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework
• Google Cloud Observability: monitoring and logging, profiling and benchmarking, alerting strategies
• Deployment and release management
• Assist with support of deployed solutions and evaluate quality control measures
• Ensure reliability of solutions in production: chaos engineering, penetration testing, load testing