GCP Series Part 2: How to pass GCP Professional Cloud Architect (November 2020) certification exam?

In Part 1 of the GCP series, I wrote about how to prepare for the GCP Professional Data Engineering certification. Here, in Part 2, I’ll focus on passing the GCP Cloud Architect certification exam which I did earlier this month (November 2020), based on lessons learnt, mistakes made and most importantly, content required to pass the exam. The key audience I have in mind, are those who are planning to take the exam for the very first time, just like I did. Having spent a few months on it, here is my list of the preparation material which should suffice for clearing the exam.

Linux Academy (LA) course: I have said this before and have no qualms repeating it. LA offers the best content on GCP certifications. Matthew Ulasien, the instructor, uses a lucid chart which is super useful as it not only serves the purpose of handy notes in a bullet-points format, but also highlights what to expect from an exam perspective. e.g. stuff which we need to memorize and other concepts where we need to understand and build a high-level intuition, instead.

A Cloud Guru (ACG) course: LA was acquired by ACG. The best part is that once we subscribe to LA, we get access to all ACG courses as well. And that too, at no extra cost. Apart from LA one, I did spend time going through ACG course on this certification as well and here is my verdict on comparison between the two:

1. On case-studies (which collectively cover about 10–15 questions in the exam), ACG shows the overall perspective and the generic thought process on how to approach any new situation (set of requirements, existing pain points, objectives and constraints), while LA does a better job at confining itself to practical exam-related content on existing case studies.
2. If you come from an AWS background, I suggest you go for ACG one, since it starts almost every lesson by comparing that specific GCP service/API to its AWS counterpart. e.g. ‘GCS is to GCP, what S3 is to AWS’. For someone already familiar with AWS stack, this will certainly help put things in the right context.
3. LA course includes lucid-chart (a big USP) and hands-on labs (similar to qwiklabs), while ACG makes good use of flowcharts.

The book by Dan Sullivan, covers the content very well and this is arguably the only official one for this certification. I personally didn’t have time to go through the entire book, so I gave priority to last few pages of each chapter i.e. chapter summary and multiple-choice questions. If you want to assess whether your understanding of a topic is good enough, these chapter-wise questions are the best source out there. Answer-key goes a lot more into detail as to why (say) B is the most appropriate answer and how others (A, C and D) are either wrong or less appropriate for a particular scenario.

YouTube: Within the official GCP channel, there is a playlist named Cloud Bytes, where a lot of key concepts in GCP have been explained in a minute (alright I concede, sometimes two). Given the fact that an audio-visual medium usually makes more impact than reading text, this is an amazing source to get the gist of a concept in very little time.

Here are some useful extremely useful websites featuring GCP-based content:

1. CloudGirl by Priyanka Vergadia, a Developer Advocate at Google: It has excellent sketch-notes on pretty much every service in GCP. So handy as a ready reckoner. Here is a snapshot of one on different compute options..

2. GCP loves flowcharts (Decision Trees) and they are a nice tool to de-clutter the mind and have a bird’s eye view of what is going on. Find one on almost every GCP service, on this website. Since exam questions are typically scenario-based (Which GCP service or combo will you choose, given this situation?), this content is very helpful. Even if some flowcharts come from official GCP website, no one has put them together in one place better than what you’ll find here. Here is one on selecting the appropriate storage type:

3. Though not specifically for the Cloud Architect exam, this blog by Dmitri Lerko has great content on GCP in general. Miss it at your own peril.

A couple of other individuals worth mentioning here. Sathish VJ frequently shares good content on LinkedIn and he has a YouTube channel named AwesomeGCP with separate playlists for different GCP certifications. Same goes for Mahesh Kumar and his YouTube channel Learn GCP with Mahesh.

Since it was Thanksgiving last week, I want to convey my gratitude to the authors of these blogs, for sharing great content so frequently and most importantly, doing it in a manner which makes it so much fun.

Mock exams: Take as many as you can. Start with the most authentic source: sample questions on GCP certification website itself. Then move on to mock tests in LA/ACG combo. Dan Sullivan’s book has an Assessment test too (with only 25 questions though, instead of the full 50). Don’t hesitate to attempt them more than once, especially the online ones, since some of the questions often vary from one mock-test to another.

I’ll conclude by some exam tips I wish I had paid heed to earlier. Though I passed, it would have saved me lot of efforts and time:

Contrary to what we are often told, there is no need to mug up every single word of the 3 case studies despite their high weightage in the exam. And for good reason: While taking the exam, you’ll have quick and easy access to each one of them at the click of a mouse, and that too, without even opening another browser window. Of course, go through each one of them and understand them well while preparing for the exam, but focus on the bigger picture and finding answers to the key problems (e.g. Which GCP service is most suitable for a given situation? and Why?), instead of wasting your time on mugging things up which I regrettably ended up doing.

On the day of the exam, make sure you have admin rights on the machine you’ll be using, even if you have already installed the required software (Sentinel) beforehand. Better have a power back-up or a fully-charged laptop battery, just in case of an outage. [It’s a Third world problem.. yeah, I know.]

Key exam topics: Apart from the usual suspects (IAM, Storage and Compute options), expect situation-based questions on auto-scaling, K8S, load balancers etc. Also, migration from on-prem to the cloud and related topics (hybrid networks) seem important in the exam. For some reason, questions on relatively recent developments (like Anthos, Cloud Run) were few (read None).

This exam is more about knowing a little bit of everything in the GCP, rather than going very deep into any one or two services. So, prepare accordingly. I shared my own experience hoping that you don’t commit the same mistakes I did, and rather build on top of what I learnt (more so after passing the exam, with the benefit of hindsight). Hope some of this was helpful. Needless to say, feel free to reach out to me, in case you have any follow-up questions after reading this. Or there is something I missed out on.

Wish you all the best.. And let us all keep learning anyway. :)