Google Cloud Digital LeaderStudy guide

Understand digital transformation, the difference between on-premises and cloud, the shift from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operating expenditure (OpEx), total cost of ownership (TCO), and the core value of cloud—agility, scalability, and cost efficiency—from a business perspective.

Understand the three cloud service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and when to use each, the shared responsibility model that splits duties between the cloud provider and the customer, and deployment models: public, private, hybrid, and multicloud.

Understand the value of data as fuel for business decisions and AI, the difference between structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, batch vs streaming processing, and the data lifecycle from generation to value.

Understand the roles and selection of Google Cloud’s key data services: relational databases (Cloud SQL, Spanner), NoSQL (Firestore, Bigtable), object storage (Cloud Storage), data warehouse (BigQuery), data pipelines (Dataflow, Pub/Sub), and business intelligence (Looker).

Understand the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and generative AI; the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning; how the quality and quantity of training data drive results; and the importance of responsible AI such as fairness, accountability, and privacy—from a business perspective.

Understand the roles and selection of Google Cloud AI/ML solutions: Vertex AI for building and using AI/ML, Gemini at the core of generative AI, ready-to-use pretrained APIs (Vision, Speech-to-Text, Natural Language, Translation), BigQuery ML for SQL-based machine learning, Document AI for document processing, and Conversational Agents for customer service.

Understand the main cloud migration approaches (lift-and-shift, move-and-improve, rebuild) and their trade-offs, the motivations for migration, and the basics of cloud computing starting with Compute Engine, which provides virtual machines.

Understand containers and managed Kubernetes (GKE), the selection of serverless options (Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, App Engine), the value of connecting systems with APIs and Apigee, and GKE Enterprise (Anthos) for hybrid and multicloud.

Understand the security basics of confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA), common threats, defense in depth, encryption at rest and in transit, zero trust (BeyondCorp), and Cloud IAM for least-privilege access control—from the perspective of Google’s secure infrastructure.

Understand data residency and sovereignty, industry and regional compliance certifications, Google’s transparency and privacy principles, and security operations services such as Security Command Center for visualizing cloud-wide risk and Sensitive Data Protection for protecting sensitive data.

Understand the resource hierarchy (organization, folders, projects) and billing accounts, cost visibility and control via budgets and alerts, discounts such as committed use discounts (CUD) and sustained use discounts (SUD), and the basics of cost optimization.

Understand site reliability engineering (SRE), availability and scalability, monitoring and logging with Google Cloud Observability (Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging), and Google Cloud’s sustainability efforts (carbon neutral/carbon free).