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An indispensable guide to the newest version of the Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect certification
The newly revised Second Edition of the Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide delivers a proven and effective roadmap to success on the latest Professional Cloud Architect accreditation exam from Google. You'll learn the skills you need to excel on the test and in the field, with coverage of every exam objective and competency, including focus areas of the latest exam such as Kubernetes, Anthos, and multi-cloud architectures. The book explores the design, analysis, development, operations, and migration components of the job, with intuitively organized lessons that align with the real-world job responsibilities of a Google Cloud professional and with the PCA exam topics. Architects need more than the ability to recall facts about cloud services, they need to be able to reason about design decisions. This study guide is unique in how it helps you learn to think like an architect: understand requirements, assess constraints, choose appropriate architecture patterns, and consider the operational characteristics of the systems you design. Review questions and practice exams use scenario-based questions like those on the certification exam to build the test taking skills you will need.
In addition to comprehensive material on compute resources, storage systems, networks, security, legal and regulatory compliance, reliability design, technical and business processes, and more, you'll get:
The ideal resource for anyone preparing for the Professional Cloud Architect certification from Google, Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide, 2nd Edition is also a must-read resource for aspiring and practicing cloud professionals seeking to expand or improve their technical skillset and improve their effectiveness in the field.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAN SULLIVAN is a software architect specializing in data analytics, machine learning, and cloud computing. He is the author of Google Cloud certification study guides for the Professional Architect, Professional Data Engineer, and Associate Cloud Engineer exams. Dan is also an instructor with LinkedIn Learning, where he develops courses on data science, machine learning, and data management as well as with Udemy where he provides Google Cloud certification preparation courses.
Introduction xxiii
Assessment Test xxix
Answers to the Assessment Test xxxv
Chapter 1 Introduction to the Google Professional Cloud Architect Exam 1
Exam Objectives 2
Analyzing Business Requirements 3
Reducing Operational Expenses 3
Accelerating the Pace of Development 4
Reporting on Service-Level
Objectives 5
Reducing Time to Recover from an Incident 5
Improving Compliance with Industry Regulations 6
Analyzing Technical Requirements 8
Functional Requirements 8
Exam Case Studies 11
EHR Healthcare 12
Helicopter Racing League 13
Mountkirk Games 14
TerramEarth 15
Summary 16
Exam Essentials 16
Review Questions 18
Chapter 2 Designing Solutions to Meet Business Requirements 23
Business Use Cases and Product Strategy 24
EHR Healthcare 25
Helicopter Racing League 26
Mountkirk Games Strategy 26
TerramEarth Strategy 27
Application Design and Cost Considerations 27
Managed Services 28
Reduced Levels of Services 30
Data Lifecycle Management 32
Systems Integration and Data Management 33
Systems Integration Business Requirements 33
Data Management Business Requirements 36
Compliance and Regulation 38
Privacy Regulations 38
Data Integrity Regulations 39
Security 39
Confidentiality 40
Integrity 40
Availability 41
Success Measures 41
Key Performance Indicators 41
Return on Investment 42
Summary 43
Exam Essentials 43
Review Questions 45
Chapter 3 Designing Solutions to Meet Technical Requirements 51
High Availability 52
Compute Availability 54
Storage Availability 56
Network Availability 60
Application Availability 60
Scalability 61
Scaling Compute Resources 62
Scaling Storage Resources 64
Network Design for Scalability 64
Reliability 65
Measuring Reliability 65
Reliability Engineering 65
Summary 66
Exam Essentials 66
Review Questions 68
Chapter 4 Designing Compute Systems 73
Compute Services and Use Cases 74
Compute Engine 75
App Engine 80
Cloud Functions 82
Cloud Run 84
Kubernetes Engine 84
Anthos 90
Overview of Anthos 91
Anthos Service Mesh 91
Anthos Multi Cluster Ingress 92
Anthos Deployment Options 92
AI and Machine Learning Services 93
Vertex AI 94
Cloud TPU 94
Data Flows and Pipelines 94
Cloud Pub/Sub Pipelines 95
Cloud Dataflow Pipelines 96
Cloud Dataproc 96
Cloud Workflows 96
Cloud Data Fusion 96
Cloud Composer 97
Compute System Provisioning 97
Additional Design Issues 97
Managing State in Distributed Systems 98
Synchronous and Asynchronous Operations 99
Summary 100
Exam Essentials 101
Review Questions 102
Chapter 5 Designing Storage Systems 107
Overview of Storage Services 108
Object Storage with Google Cloud Storage 109
Organizing Objects in a Namespace 109
Cloud Storage FUSE 110
Storage Tiers 110
Cloud Storage Use Cases 111
Network-Attached
Storage with Google Cloud Filestore 112
Cloud Filestore Service Tiers 112
Cloud Filestore Networking 113
Cloud Filestore Access Controls 113
Databases 113
Relational Database Overview 114
Cloud SQL 115
Cloud Spanner 117
Analytical Database: BigQuery 117
NoSQL Databases 120
Caching with Cloud Memorystore 121
Data Retention and Lifecycle Management 122
Networking and Latency 123
Summary 124
Exam Essentials 125
Review Questions 127
Chapter 6 Designing Networks 131
IP Addressing, Firewall Rules, and Routers 133
IP Address Structure 133
Public vs. Private Addressing 134
Firewall Rules 134
Cloud Router 135
Cloud Armor 135
Virtual Private Clouds 136
VPC Subnets 136
Shared VPC 137
VPC Network Peering 137
Hybrid-Cloud
Networking 138
Hybrid-Cloud
Design Considerations 138
Hybrid-Cloud
Implementation Options 139
Service-Centric
Networking 141
Private Service Connect for Google APIs 141
Private Service Connect for Google APIs with Consumer HTTP(S) 142
Private Google Access 142
Private Google Access for On-Premises Hosts 142
Private Service Connect for Published Services 142
Private Service Access 142
Serverless VPC Access 142
Load Balancing 143
Regional Load Balancing 143
Global Load Balancing 144
Additional Network Services 145
Service Directory 145
Cloud CDN 145
Cloud DNS 145
Summary 146
Exam Essentials 146
Review Questions 148
Chapter 7 Designing for Security and Legal Compliance 153
Identity and Access Management and Related Access Control Services 154
Identities and Groups 154
Resources 155
Permissions 156
Roles 156
Policies 158
Cloud IAM Conditions 160
IAM Best Practices 160
Identity-Aware Proxy 161
Workload Identity Federation 161
Organization Constraints 162
Data Security 162
Encryption 163
Key Management 164
Cloud Storage Data Access 166
Security Evaluation 166
Penetration Testing 167
Auditing 167
Security Design Principles 168
Separation of Duties 168
Least Privilege 169
Defense in Depth 170
Major Regulations 171
HIPAA/HITECH 171
General Data Protection Regulation 172
Sarbanes-Oxley Act 172
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act 173
ITIL Framework 173
Summary 174
Exam Essentials 174
Review Questions 177
Chapter 8 Designing for Reliability 181
Improving Reliability with Cloud Operations Suite 182
Monitoring with Cloud Monitoring 183
Alerting with Cloud Monitoring 186
Logging with Cloud Logging 187
Open Source Observability Tools 188
Release Management 188
Continuous Delivery 189
Continuous Integration 192
Systems Reliability Engineering 193
Overload 193
Cascading Failures 196
Testing for Reliability 197
Incident Management and Post-Mortem Analysis 198
Summary 199
Exam Essentials 199
Review Questions 201
Chapter 9 Analyzing and Defining Technical Processes 205
Software Development Lifecycle Plan 206
Analysis 206
Design 208
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery 211
Business Drivers to Adopt CI/CD 211
CI/CD Building Blocks 212
Troubleshooting and Post-Mortem Analysis Culture 213
Incident Post-Mortems 214
Project Post-Mortems 215
IT Enterprise Processes 216
Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery 217
Business Continuity Planning 217
Disaster Recovery 218
Summary 219
Exam Essentials 220
Review Questions 222
Chapter 10 Analyzing and Defining Business Processes 227
Stakeholder Management 228
Interests and Influence 228
Projects, Programs, and Portfolios 229
Stages of Stakeholder Management 230
Change Management 231
Reasons for Change 231
Change Management Methodologies 232
Team Skill Management 233
Customer Success Management 234
Cost Optimization/Resource Optimization 235
Summary 236
Exam Essentials 236
Review Questions 238
Chapter 11 Development and Operations 243
Application Development Methodologies 244
Waterfall 244
Spiral 245
Agile 246
Technical Debt 247
API Best Practices 248
Resources and Standard Methods 248
API Security 249
Testing Frameworks 251
Testing Framework Models 251
Automated Testing Tools 252
Data and System Migration Tooling 253
Types of Cloud Migrations 253
Migration Services and Tools 254
Interacting with Google Cloud Programmatically 255
Google Cloud SDK 256
Google Cloud Shell 256
Cloud Emulators 257
Summary 257
Exam Essentials 257
Review Questions 259
Chapter 12 Migration Planning 263
Integrating Cloud Services with Existing Systems 264
Migrating Systems and Data to Support a Solution 266
Planning for Systems Migrations 266
Planning for Data Migration 268
Software Licensing Mapping 269
Network Planning 271
Virtual Private Clouds 271
Network Access Controls 272
Scaling 273
Connectivity 273
Summary 273
Exam Essentials 274
Review Questions 276
Appendix Answers to the Review Questions 279
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Google Professional Cloud Architect Exam 280
Chapter 2: Designing Solutions to Meet Business Requirements 282
Chapter 3: Designing Solutions to Meet Technical Requirements 285
Chapter 4: Designing Compute Systems 287
Chapter 5: Designing Storage Systems 290
Chapter 6: Designing Networks 293
Chapter 7: Designing for Security and Legal Compliance 295
Chapter 8: Designing for Reliability 297
Chapter 9: Analyzing and Defining Technical Processes 298
Chapter 10: Analyzing and Defining Business Processes 301
Chapter 11: Development and Operations 303
Chapter 12: Migration Planning 305
Index 309
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