On the 24th of October 2022 I successfully passed the “Google Cloud Professional Architect” certification and here I would like to share how I prepared for this exam, some pieces of advice on what to learn, and some of my thoughts on such kinds of exams in total.

I have already passed some certifications like Certified Kubernetes Administrator(valid till May 2023), “AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate”(expired on April 2021) and AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (expired on July 2020), and I didn’t have any intentions to get one more to myself. This year company where I’m working right now proposed to pass Google Cloud Professional Architect certification.

And here you are

What I used for preparation

“Google Cloud Professional Architect: Get Certified 2022” course on Udemy

link to the course

Pros:

• gives introduction from zero, so if you don’t have any experience in GCP and you don’t need to learn something new ahead
• if you already worked with GCP, the course cover details from most of the services and processes in GCP.

Cons:

• not all technologies are covered, so you need to find more sources for learning
• number of tests is pretty small, so you wouldn’t be able to practice tests

Summary: I can recommend buying this course as an initial step in preparation for certification. Also on Udemy from time to time, you can find such courses with discounts.

“Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect” course on whizlabs

link to the course

As I found out it was not so long before the exam, so I bought practice tests, so here is my feedback on tests.

Pros:

• questions are the same as on exams
• pretty big amount of questions to practice
• questions are divided into sets of 50 and also questions are grouped by topic, so if you need to practice single technology - it’s worse.
• wide range of technologies covered in questions.

Cons:

• couldn’t find

Summary: Those practice tests are a dump of official tests on exams, so working with them I prepared a lot. Topics on Hands-on Labs seem legit and probably can help you in understanding.

Suggestions to myself from the past

What I haven’t started doing from the beginning - I didn’t take notes and watched Coursera videos like some shows on Netflix. Without notes, I couldn’t differentiate for a long time between BigQuery and BigTable, or between Cloud DataProc, Cloud DataFlow and Cloud Data Fusion.

Thank you for still reading it.

My thoughts on such kinds of exams

I don’t like exams that try to trick you with wording, instead of checking your knowledge. The certification that I liked most of all - is “Certified Kubernetes Administrator”, which has practical tasks. Anyway from preparing for exams I found useful improvements to our current infrastructure.

What are your favorite/dislikable exams that you had after graduating?