How I passed Google Professional Cloud Architect Certification in 2022

My personal experience preparing Google PCA Certification, in 2022. My 2-week learning path, resources and tips about the exam.

6 min readDec 5, 2022

I took my exam in mid 2022, and like the most of people I was very confused how to start and organize my learning path. There are a lot of tutorials, articles, posts and course about this certification, but they didn’t help me, none of them fits with my study method or was complete enough to explain me everything, so I decided to take my own path.

My background

I think that the background is important, because it can help you to learn quickly or maybe show you that you have to study more to fill the gap.

My starting point was:

I’m a architect — as architect you already should know how to a lot of technical things works and (most important) how to analyze use cases, understanding an existing solution, the requests of the customer, and how to implements it.
2+ year of experience on GCP — I was already familiarized with basic concepts like projects, global, regional and zonal resources, etc.
Core concept of Service Model — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Service_models
Docker — I already knew dockers and containers.
K8s — I already knew kubernetes and I was experienced about it.

If your starting point its different than mine (and probably is it), its not a problem, its just different so maybe you have to focus on topics that I just red or you already know something that I had to studied from scratch.

Learning time

My learning time was very quickly, I spent about two weeks to prepare myself to take the exam, but remember: everyone needs his time. For someone it may be too little and for others it may be too much, there isn’t a golden rule for this. For example at the beginning I decided to spent one month to study, and then I realized that was too much.

Exam tips: start your study journey, after one week make the point of the path, and book the exam. Give yourself a deadline. During the next week try to understand if you need more time or not.

Study quota

I scheduled my training phases and time, to push me to study harder and more, and testing my skills.

I organized my time in this way (1 day ~= 8–10 hours):

Studying on first book; (~7 days)
Filling the gap with others resources; (~ 3 days)
Trying with questions and quiz; (~2 days)
Studying on wrong answers; (~1 days)
Studying the official use cases; (~2 days)

Exam tips: start with a book or a course. They gives you a general overview of the study path and about study topics.

Resources

The main source

I started my learning path with a book. Previously I tried with a online course but was useless for me and my study method. I preferred a well structured book.

When I took my exam wasn’t released yet the “Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide — 2nd edition”, so I choose “Professional Cloud Architect Google Cloud Certification Guide”. This book is well structured and shows each element on GCP, providing a lot of exam tips. At the end of the book there are some quiz simulations and analysis of the exam use cases.

The book its very simple and in some cases adds extras explanations about techs to help you to understand (EG: there is a chapter about kubernetes as agnostic tech, in order to understand GKE).

I didn’t read the first book (PCA Study Guide), so I don’t know how is it, but a lot of my workmate started to study on it and then they change with “PCA Google Cloud Certification Guide”, because it was more easy to understand.

Note: I think that “PCA Google Cloud Certification Guide” its a little bit old on same techs, so if you choose to study on it, you should absolutely fill the gap.

Exam tips: doesn’t matter what book or source of study you choose, for each GCP product its important to understand:
- What the technology do.
- Understand the cloud service model (saas, iaas, faas, etc…).
- What are the best use-cases to use it (in particular for similar technologies).
- What is the pricing system. It’s not important to know the pricing table, but the mechanism of the pricing system, and the order of costs (cheaper, expensive, etc…).

Secondary sources

After the study on the main source you should be able to understand what are you point of strength and what you don’t know very well. In this case you should choose a secondary source of study. Can be a second book, a course, youtube videos, etc… for me was “decision trees” and Google use cases.

I found a lot of decision trees and I studied on them, but most of them was old so pay attention to not consider it as single source of truth, instead use as exercises: for example you can try to updates it.

Also, Google offers many articles on GCP use cases, unfortunately there is bad news: these articles are very hidden, so you have to search a lot.

Exam tips: focus on decision tree and Google best practices, are very useful during the exam.

Questions and exam simulations

At this point you should be able to test your abilities. Don’t be afraid to try and take wrong answer. It’s a very important step to understand your preparation.

For the exam simulations I used:

Quiz on the books;
Sample questions offered by Google;

Exam tips: try a quiz by timing yourself, mark how many answers are right and which are wrong. These data are good take benchmarks.

As second source for questions I red all quiz on examtopic, a site with a plenty of questions, similar to official questions. But in this site, answers are selected by the community and are not always good, so use it just to try to understand the kind of questions. This is not official database!

Exam tips: in examtopic you can read comments of the community about the answer, you can use it to study and understand the approach to the solution.

You can learn also from the questions. Questions container some keywords that can drive you to the answer. For example you can find words like “on budget” or “performance”, this means that the answer should accomplish the request in the question.

A right answer is not always the which one with best performance solution or the cheapest one, compare always the answer with the question constraints.

Exam tips: answers with non-Google solutions should be discarded, as well as those with unnecessary extra effort.

Wrong answer are your BFF

Wrong answer are useful. They show you what you miss, so study on it, read again and again and again. And then try again.

Exam tips: re-try failed simulations.

Official Use Cases

For me, official use cases was the harder part. Google provide you all documents about it, but is hard to understand what and how to study it.

I downloaded all use cases from official Google Cloud guide and I started to read it all. For each use case I wrote the existing solution of the customer, and I tried to guess further implementation, selecting products and searching in the Google use cases.

Exam tips: train yourself to provide multiple solution and remember that case study questions make up 20–30% of the exam and you can read all documents when you want, but its better if you study each of them before the exam.

Final tips

While you are booking the exam choose the part of the day that you prefer: you will stay two hours sit in the same place and you should be focus on the exam, with a free mind: you should be comfortable;
If you take the online-proctored exam, choose in advance the place: should be empty and quiet. Also, prepare your ID card;
During the exam you can mark answers as “review later”, use it, use it a lot. If you have some doubt about a question, mark it as “review later” and move forward, you’ll be back on it later;
If you not pass the exam at first try is not a problem, you can re-try again after 14 days and you can learn from this experience, because you will already know how the exam is.

I hope that this will help new PCAs, if you have any doubt or need some help, feel free to write me.

That’s all, folks!