Another postmortem: Passing the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Exam — My Experience & Tips

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This article is going to be a ‘postmortem’ of my experience after passing the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect exam and then some tips & thoughts to help others prepare and hopefully pass as well 🥳. (P.s — A link to my profile on the certified registry). This is a sequel or follow-up to my previous article Passing the Cloud Associate Engineer Exam.

Disclaimer: All suggestions are purely my own and were used by me during my exam preparation. No one has paid me to promote a specific course(s) &/or product(s).

Overall Impression

I thought the exam was fairly challenging. In comparison to the ACE exam, it throws a completely different angle to the types of questions you can expect along with the additional case studies to prepare for. Depending on your GCP experience and your current career this may or may not be a challenge for you.
I’ve been working on GCP as a platform engineer/solutions architect for the best part of 2 years now and I've been fortunate enough to have hands-on experience with most (not all) of the products and services. The architecting side of my role is fairly new but I have been asked to propose and come up with solutions on GCP for a lot of different business use cases. So, sitting this exam became a sort of natural progression for me. If you are purely an engineer who writes a lot of code (I still write a fair amount in all honesty), then I think changing your mindset to think “Big Picture” may be a challenge. But it's an interesting challenge and I think worth the seal of approval. It's given me a lot of confidence now knowing that when I'm proposing solutions I’ve got that seal of approval behind me!
Let’s talk about prep 😊

Preparation

From my previous article, I mention the importance of having a study guide and allocating the necessary time each day to revise and challenge yourself. This time around I took a very hard deadline with two weeks between booking and taking the actual exam.
This meant I really had to dive deep and schedule the time to revise properly each and every day before the exam date. Admittedly, I had already done some prior studying via Pluralsight and with a book that I purchased and read a few months back. However, most of that was now a vague recollection of disjointed bits of information that occasionally came back to me in my latest study attempt.

Learning resources

As with my ACE article, I will post a series of links below containing helpful resources I used for my learning and rating them out of 10 in terms of what I found most useful:

• (New)Google Cloud Architecture Tool — This is a really recent release from Google, but the premise remains the same as what I was using on draw.io for my architecture diagrams. Specifically, with the case studies, I took the time to draw out what I thought was the recommended architecture to fit each scenario and then export it as a JPG to keep going back to. With a similar UI and up-to-date icons and services, it’s my go-to now for all diagramming. 10/10
• Google Cloud Architecture Framework — A great resource for all general tips and guidance with architecture on GCP, even if you feel confident I would recommend a quick read-through on this (admittedly it does become a bit of spider’s web with all the links to other links) for the re-assurance. 8/10
• Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect All-in-One — After my previous experience with the Dan Sullivan books (and them now the best part of 2+ years out of date), I thought I’d try out this book by Iman Ghanizada; it was OK from what I remember. It does cover the basics and has some nice questions at the end of each chapter, I didn't try out the only test bank but it has those as well. 6/10
• Certified Professional Cloud Architect (Whizlabs) — Through my work, I have a Pluralsight license; I was going through all of the architect video series provided by Google and felt it was pretty poor. So after searching and talking to a few people, they recommended Whizlabs. The practice exams are a fantastic resource, and the video content is again another nice refresher on top (although some of it was slightly outdated). 9/10
• SunSea&You Youtube Channel — There is so much content to read from the Google Docs, Exam Guide, and then to top it off we have the case studies to decipher. Coming across these Youtube videos helped me by having a reference point for my diagrams and then it was interesting to see the differences between our solutions (and the similarities). I do recommend reading the case studies first and then comparing once you have something. All case studies were explained very well and I highly recommended 8/10
• Exam Guide — I included this in my previous article and I will include it again! It's broader than the previous ACE exam guide, but in general, this exam is. Here, it's key to remember you that don't need to know everything, the fundamentals on each section and bullet point can get you by pretty well. 8/10

Final Thoughts

The exam is tough. Coming from my engineering background to thinking big picture was a challenge. Removing the detail and focusing on the outcomes and requirements gathering was a different experience. Remember the keywords to look for in the questions. The questions are mostly “wordier” than content from the ACE exam, so being able to decipher the important phrases from the filler is a necessary skill.

As always, take your time, don’t get hung up on questions you are not sure about, tick that “for review” box, and move on. I probably had maybe 20 for review by the time I got to the end exam; I reviewed all with around half an hour left and submitted. (Although due to a bug I didn’t get my confirmation result from Google for about 2–3 weeks which was an anxious wait!)

Finally, I hope that you find my experience helpful and thanks for taking your time to read my article, I appreciate the support 😁!