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Certification - GCP PCA : Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect

These notes are the result of my preparation for the GCP PCA certification journey.

I studied the PCA learning path on CloudSkillsBoost
that offers a collection of courses, quests and labs that have been curated to boost your cloud skills.

Thanks to the GCP GET Certified program I was able to get a free 2 month subscriptions to cloudskillsboost.

Credential Holder Directory

Each completed Quest earns you a badge and you can publish your public profile ❤️

If you ❤️ pass ❤️ the certification exam, ther is this Google Credential Holder Directory.

Reminder

Since the exam is a 50 question MCQ, technical knowledge alone is not enough, especially since this exam requires
a very broad knowledge of GCP products and services but not necessarily deep knowledge at all levels.

Useful links/tools for preparation and more :

Preparation Progress

During the preparation, I took notes by product category.

All examples of gcloud cli commands are in gcloud page.

  • Compute
  • Network
  • Storage
  • Database
  • Operations & Monitoring
  • Data Analytics
  • Devops CI/CD
  • Management Tools
  • Identity & Security
  • Application Integration
  • Migration to Google Cloud

You can also use this file https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ to check your readiness

I also passed the PCD (Professional Cloud Developer) certification exam 2 weeks after getting PCA certification by taking advantage of PCA preparation.

GCP Resources Tree

The organization resource is the root node in the GCP resource hierarchy.

  • Organization > Folders(Optional) > Projects > Resource

Organization

  • Admin : Full control over all resources.
  • Viewer : View access to all resources.

Folders : Can contain recursive folders, allow delegation of administration rights.

  • Admin : Full control over folders.
  • Creator : Browse the hierarchy and create folders.
  • Viewer : View folders and projects below a resource.

Project

  • Creator : Create new projects, making that user automatically the owner.
  • Deleter : Delete projects.

Projects and folders provide levels of segregation for resources. But what if you want more granularity, that's where labels come in.

  • Labels are utility for organizing Google Cloud resources.
  • Labels are key value pairs that you can attach to your resources, like VMs, disks, snapshots and images. Each resource can have up to 64 labels.

Label Vs Tag

Unlike the label, tags are applied to instances only, are primarily used for networking ( for applying firewall rules).
It is user-defined strings.