Topics of GCP Professional Cloud Architect exam

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Section 1: Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture

1.1 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets business requirements. Considerations include:

• business use cases and product strategy
• cost optimization
• supporting the application design
• integration
• movement of data
• tradeoffs
• build, buy or modify
• success measurements (e.g., Key Performance Indicators (KPI), Return on Investment (ROI), metrics)

1.2 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets technical requirements. Considerations include:

• high availability and failover design
• elasticity of cloud resources
• scalability to meet growth requirements

1.3 Designing network, storage, and compute resources. Considerations include:

• integration with on premises/multi-cloud environments
• identification of data storage needs and mapping to storage systems
• data flow diagrams
• storage system structure (e.g., Object, File, RDBMS, NoSQL, New SQL)
• mapping compute needs to platform products

1.4 Creating a migration plan (i.e., documents and architectural diagrams). Considerations include:

• integrating solution with existing systems
• migrating systems and data to support the solution
• licensing mapping
• network and management planning
• testing and proof-of-concept

1.5 Envisioning future solution improvements. Considerations include:

• cloud and technology improvements
• business needs evolution
• evangelism and advocacy

Section 2: Managing and provisioning solution Infrastructure

2.1 Configuring network topologies. Considerations include:

• extending to on-premises (hybrid networking)
• extending to a multi-cloud environment
• security
• data protection

2.2 Configuring individual storage systems. Considerations include:

• data storage allocation
• data processing/compute provisioning
• security and access management
• network configuration for data transfer and latency
• data retention and data lifecycle management
• data growth management

2.3 Configuring compute systems. Considerations include:

• compute system provisioning
• compute volatility configuration (preemptible vs. standard)
• network configuration for compute nodes
• orchestration technology configuration (e.g. Chef/Puppet/Kubernetes)

Section 3: Designing for security and compliance

3.1 Designing for security. Considerations include:

• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• data security
• penetration testing
• Separation of Duties (SoD)
• security controls

3.2 Designing for legal compliance. Considerations include:

• legislation (e.g., Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), etc.)
• audits
• certification (e.g., Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework)

Section 4: Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes

4.1 Analyzing and defining technical processes. Considerations include:

• Software Development Lifecycle Plan (SDLC)
• continuous integration / continuous deployment
• troubleshooting / post mortem analysis culture
• testing and validation
• IT enterprise process (e.g. ITIL)
• business continuity and disaster recovery

4.2 Analyzing and defining business processes. Considerations include:

• stakeholder management (e.g. Influencing and facilitation)
• change management
• decision making process
• customer success management

4.3 Developing procedures to test resilience of solution in production (e.g., DiRT and Chaos Monkey)

Section 5: Managing implementation

5.1 Advising development/operation team(s) to ensure successful deployment of the solution. Considerations include:

• application development
• API best practices
• testing frameworks (load/unit/integration)
• data and system migration tooling

5.2 Reading and writing application development languages. At a minimum, languages include:

• Java
• Python

Section 6: Ensuring solution and operations reliability

6.1 Monitoring/Logging/Alerting solution

6.2 Deployment and release management

6.3 Supporting operational troubleshooting

6.4 Evaluating quality control measure