GCP Professional Cloud Architect Exam Guide

The PCA is the highest-level cloud architecture certification from Google Cloud, validating advanced design and management skills.

Exam Overview

Detail	Value
Provider	Google Cloud
Questions	50-60 (case studies + multiple choice)
Length	2 hours
Price	~$200 USD

Domains

Domain	Weight
Design and Plan a Cloud Solution Architecture	24%
Manage and Provision the Cloud Solution	18%
Design for Security and Compliance	20%
Analyze and Optimize Technical and Business Processes	16%
Manage Implementation of Cloud Architecture	12%
Ensure Solution and Operations Reliability	10%

Key Design Areas

Architecture Design

• Compute (GCE, GKE, Cloud Run, App Engine), Storage (GCS, Filestore, Persistent Disk)
• Networking (VPC, Shared VPC, Cloud Interconnect, VPN, CDN, Load Balancing)
• Hybrid/multi-cloud (Anthos, GKE Enterprise, BigQuery Omni)
• Migration (Migrate for Compute Engine, Transfer Service, Database Migration Service)

Security

• IAM (primitive, predefined, custom roles, service accounts, policies)
• Data protection (DLP, Cloud KMS, Cloud HSM, CMEK, CSEK)
• Network security (VPC firewall, Cloud Armor, BeyondCorp, IAP)
• Compliance (Assured Workloads, Access Transparency, VPC SC)

Reliability

• HA architecture (multi-region, multi-AZ, global load balancing)
• DR design (managed instance groups, Cloud SQL HA, Spanner)
• Scalability (autoscaling, HPA, Cloud CDN, Cloud Memorystore)

Case Study Topics

Each exam includes case studies. Key scenarios:

• Mountkirk Games: Game backend on GKE, global traffic
• Dress4Win: Legacy migration to cloud, microservices
• JencoMart: Retail, e-commerce, BigQuery analytics
• HipLocal: Real-time bidding, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Bigtable

Access PCA practice questions →