Google Cloud Professional Cloud ArchitectStudy guide

Understand eliciting business and technical requirements and translating them into a Google Cloud architecture, designing the resource hierarchy (Organization → Folder → Project), reflecting stakeholder expectations and compliance constraints, and making design decisions based on success metrics (KPIs/SLOs).

Understand choosing Google Cloud compute (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions) by use case, storage (Cloud Storage classes, Persistent Disk, Filestore), and databases (Cloud SQL, Spanner, Firestore, Bigtable, BigQuery).

Understand availability levels (zonal/regional/multi-regional), elasticity via managed instance groups (MIGs) and autoscaling, traffic distribution via load balancers, and disaster recovery strategies (backup-and-restore, warm/hot standby) based on RTO/RPO.

Understand choosing migration strategies (lift-and-shift, improve-and-move, refactor), migration tools (Migrate to Virtual Machines, Database Migration Service, Storage Transfer Service, Transfer Appliance), hybrid/multi-cloud connectivity (Cloud VPN, Cloud Interconnect), and phased migration planning.

Understand reproducible provisioning with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Infrastructure Manager), state management and modularization, integration into CI/CD, and avoiding manual clickops to gain consistency and reviewability.

Understand designing VPCs/subnets/firewall rules, centralized management via Shared VPC, Cloud Load Balancing types (global/regional, L7/L4), outbound via Cloud NAT, and secure connectivity via Private Google Access and VPC Service Controls.

Understand Compute Engine machine types/MIGs/instance templates, GKE Autopilot/Standard with node pools/workloads, Cloud Run revisions and traffic splitting, and cost-efficient configuration with Spot VMs and committed-use discounts.

Understand configuring managed databases (Cloud SQL HA and read replicas, Spanner scaling), Cloud Storage lifecycle and access control, and operations via Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, and alerts with SLO-based reliability management.

Understand designing least privilege with IAM (avoid basic roles; predefined/custom roles), service accounts and Workload Identity Federation, enforcing constraints with organization policies, and designing permission inheritance and guardrails along the resource hierarchy.

Understand encryption at rest/in transit and key management (GMEK/CMEK/CSEK/Cloud KMS), discovering and protecting sensitive data (Sensitive Data Protection / Cloud DLP), data residency and sovereignty, and regulatory compliance via Assured Workloads and audit logs.

Understand cost visibility (billing reports, budgets and alerts), optimization levers (committed-use discounts, Spot VMs, Active Assist recommendations, lifecycle), cost allocation via labels, and aligning with business goals/KPIs and continually revisiting stakeholder requirements.

Understand site reliability engineering operations (SLIs/SLOs/error budgets), safe delivery via CI/CD with deployment strategies (canary, blue/green, rollback), incident response and postmortems, and optimizing cross-team collaboration and decision-making.