Pass the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Exam (2023)

4 min readFeb 23, 2023

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Hey everyone, I hope you all are doing well. Recently, I passed the very famous Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certification exam and recertified myself after two years. In this article, I will share the strategy and resources that helped me crack the exam and some key topics you need to focus on to pass the exam.

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About the exam

The Professional Cloud Architect exam assesses your ability to:

Design and plan a cloud solution architecture
Manage and provision the cloud solution infrastructure
Design for security and compliance
Analyze and optimize technical and business processes
Manage implementations of cloud architecture
Ensure solution and operations reliability

The exam price is $200 and the duration is 2 hours. You can expect 50 questions to be answered within the given time.

My Background

I have been tinkering with Google Cloud services for the past 2 years. Currently, I’m working as a Customer Engineer where I handle the presales side of things. I had worked as an Infrastructure Engineer and DevOps Engineer in the past. This ensured that my work experience also contributed to the knowledge base I possess which helped me understand Google Cloud at a detailed level. Moreover, I passed the exam back in 2021, while I was still in college.

Preparation Strategy

Last time when I wrote the exam, I didn’t have much hands-on knowledge or any industry experience. I was focusing on how things are done practically than just learning theoretical concepts. But now, it was different. I had 2 years of experience working on GCP and it brought a big change in how I saw things.

I actually didn’t prepare for the exam this time. It was a quick decision to go with the flow. But if you are starting to prepare, here’s how you should get started.

Visit the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect page on Google. This will give you an overview of the exam and what is required to complete the certification.
Visit the exam guide to see the contents in detail. You will get a solid understanding of the content you will need to prepare for the exam.
Visit the official Google Cloud Platform documentation to understand each of the GCP services clearly.

These would make up your GCP knowledge but you still have another essential factor to cover: “Hands-on experience”.

“No technical certification in the world will be useful for you if you don’t know how to implement it in the real world scenario.”

Exam Experience

The last time I attempted the exam, I was relying on the theory I learned and some hands-on tasks I did till then and was hoping to pass. But this time I felt the exam to be fairly easy. I felt the questions to be lighter than the last time and I also got a few straightforward questions.

Surprisingly, I only had questions from two of the four case studies. I’m not sure if that’s the norm nowadays but I clearly felt that the pattern has changed since the last time I took the exam. Most of the questions were fairly simple to me, maybe because I had been working on those services for quite some time now. I must admit that my working knowledge brought a huge advantage in making the exam experience easy.

It took me around one hour to finish all the questions and I spent another five minutes reviewing them. Once I was done with the review, I submitted it. It was quite a relief after I finished the exam because I was unsure if I would pass, just like every time. Overall, it was a good exam with not so many changes as the last time, except for the modification of case studies.

Most Important Topics

Case Studies — (Important)

Resources

Practice, practice, and practice

Result

Once I clicked submit, I got the result as PASS. After one day, I got the certificate from Google Cloud.

Here’s my certificate:

For other certification study guides: Click here!

I hope this helps you in your preparation and to pass your exam. Thank you for reading. Perform well, and all the best!