Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect 2025

Explore the Google Cloud professional cloud architect certification, covering design and provisioning of secure, compliant cloud solutions, case studies, and exam topics on core services, IAM, monitoring, and reliability.

Explore cloud migration strategies through two case studies, TerramEarth and Dress4win, highlighting IoT data collection, data analysis, predictive maintenance, and cost-aware cloud adoption.

Explore Google's global network backbone, including fiber optic links, submarine cable investments, and the point of presence that connects data centers and CDN locations, with premium charges for cross-region data.

Explore Google compute engine machine types, from general purpose to custom configurations, across N1, N2, and C3 generations with per CPU memory. Understand CPU architectures and GPU requirements, including drivers.

Explore compute engine disks, snapshots, and images to optimize storage choices. Compare local ssd, zonal and regional persistent disks, file storage in nfs, ram disk, and custom and public images.

Learn how instance templates define machine type, image, startup script, disks, and metadata for use by managed instance groups, enabling autoscaling, autohealing, rolling updates, and high availability with load balancers.

Explore Google Compute Engine pricing, including per-second disk charges, snapshot costs, geography-based pricing, and up to 80% discounts on preemptible VMs, sustained use, and committed use.

Understand Google Cloud load balancers: external global and regional HTTP/HTTPS, TCP, and UDP types with proxy or pass-through modes, anycast IPs, and Cloud Armor protection.

Demonstrates configuring a Google Cloud HTTP load balancer with regional instance templates and groups, health checks, and auto scaling to route traffic across Asia, Europe, and US West.

Explore how Google App Engine organizes apps into services, each with multiple versions and instances, and learn traffic splitting, scaling options, and basic monitoring and pricing.

Explain the App Engine standard environment as a sandbox with predefined runtimes and App Engine API, enabling scalable, secure isolation and deployment from Cloud SDK. Manage via Google Cloud Console.

Enable the App Engine security scanner, configure firewall rules to allow or deny traffic, run scans, and use logs, tracing, and reporting to debug and examine the source code.

Explain how ingress and ingress controller expose http and https routes from outside the cluster, route traffic to multiple services with routing rules, and use NGINX controller in GKE.

Describe how Cloud Run uses container instances and a concurrency value to scale traffic, including spin-up behavior, latency, and the associated cost tradeoffs.

Discover cloud run fully managed mode, scaling to zero or up to 1000 containers with no provisioning, plus pricing and free-tier limits.

Navigate Google Cloud data and storage services, from Cloud SQL and Spanner to Bigtable and Datastore, and from BigQuery to Dataflow and Dataproc.

Discover Cloud SQL basics for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server on Google Cloud, with managed instances, backups, encryption, and availability. Explore performance factors like storage type, IOPS, and read replicas.

Explore Cloud SQL for MySQL, a managed MySQL instance on Google Cloud Platform with encryption at rest and in transit, SSL, replication across zones, import/export, and backups with point-in-time recovery.

Learn how Cloud SQL backups work with automatic and on-demand backups, create and restore backups using seed backups, adjust backup windows, and explore point-in-time recovery and logging for reliability.

Learn high availability in Cloud SQL through synchronous replication to a primary, create failover and read replicas, and enable automatic switchovers across zones in the same region.

explore read replicas in cloud sql to offload read queries from the primary. create replicas across zones, understand lag in replication, and promote a replica to master when needed.

Explore a hands-on PostgreSQL demo in Google Cloud, creating and managing a cloud instance with machine type, IOPS, maintenance windows, passwords, and basic network settings.

Create and configure a cloud storage bucket with multi regional or dual region locations, standard storage class, fine grained access control, and enable versioning, retention, encryption, and observability.

Explore signed URLs, policy documents, and condition-based access to cloud storage; implement uniform bucket access, disable public access, and enforce IAM conditions for time-limited permissions.

Describe server side and client side encryption in Google Cloud storage, with Google managed keys or KMS/CSK. Explain bucket lock, retention policy, and admin and data access logs for monitoring.

Explore Cloud Firestore in Datastore mode, a backward-compatible, strongly consistent storage layer that extends Datastore with real-time updates, offline features, and increased scalability for mobile and web apps.

Learn BigQuery best practices for query performance and cost control, including bytes read, bytes passed to each stage, and partitioning for targeted data.

Master the basics of Google Cloud Dataproc by launching Spark and Hadoop clusters, configuring master and worker nodes, and integrating with other cloud services for scalable, cost-efficient analytics.

Explore Cloud Dataproc pricing and how it maps to compute engine configurations, with standard pricing varying by usage, then learn cluster, operations, workflow templates, and jobs.

Delete the Dataproc cluster on Google Cloud Platform to save your $300, releasing all computing resources. Select the cluster, choose delete, and confirm to complete the cleanup.

Understand cloud bigtable architecture: clients connect to front-end pools; nodes store metadata while data sits in the Colossus file system as SSTables, with automatic node balancing.

Discover how Google Cloud Dataflow pricing works, with per-second billing based on actual usage of batch and streaming jobs, memory, storage, and data processed, and how compute resources drive charges.

Create and publish to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic, then create a subscription to pull messages with acknowledgment and retention settings; explore snapshots and cloud storage notifications.

Explore the three VPC types, including default auto mode VPCs with precreated subnets and firewall rules, and custom VPCs with user-defined subnets, IP ranges, and routing.

Explore how projects host VPC networks, with a default VPC and up to five networks per project. Learn to plan for global networks, inter-network traffic, and internet egress charges.

Learn how VPC peering connects multiple networks across or within projects, with exclusive IP ranges, non-transitive routing, quotas on peering and VMs, and the shared VPC model for centralized management.

Explore vpc flow logs to understand how traffic flows, enabling network monitoring and real-time security analysis, and optimize expenses by exporting logs to a supported destination or cloud storage.

Learn hybrid connectivity between your data center and Google Cloud Platform using cloud interconnect, cloud VPN, and peering, with direct, partner, and internet options for secure, low-latency data exchange.

Assign roles to users to grant permissions, using primitive, predefined, and custom roles; combine permissions to create tailored roles, with examples like editor, owner, and compute engine instance admin.

Explore how cloud identity centralizes corporate, customer, and service identities, enabling single identity management and role-based access to Google Cloud services and third-party apps.

Learn how resource hierarchy and organization policies enforce rules across organizations, folders, and projects, with top-down constraint propagation and examples like resource location, allowed APIs, and trusted images.

Explore confidential computing with shielded VM in Google Cloud, defending against rootkits and bootkits while protecting secrets with TPM and Titan, through secure boot, measured boot, and integrity policy baselines.

Explore confidential computing in Google Cloud Platform, enabling a trusted execution environment that processes data in memory with keys in the processor on AMD EPYC CPU, offering isolation and attestation.

Understand PCI DSS standards for payment card processing and the roles of manufacturers, developers, and merchants, and implement controls like firewalls, data encryption, access restrictions, and regular security testing.