2 Simple Steps to Help You Pass the Google Cloud Certification Exams :

These tips and sample questions will help you to pass the exam in just a few weeks.

The main goal of an Architect is to create cost-effective solutions best suited for the client's requirements based on well-architected framework and best practices. Passing the various professional cloud architect certification exams is extremely important and enhance your ability to select the right cloud products and services for your clients.

Apart from the AWS cloud Architect exams, I recently passed two of the Google cloud certifications - Google Professional Cloud Architect and CDL. Through my experience, I learned a few tips and tricks I want to impart to you to help you pass the certifications as well.

Before I outline the two steps, it's important to note that various cloud providers including AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM use different terms to define the same concepts, and you must understand these varying terms and implementations.

Here are various examples of differences between cloud providers:

• A single Google Cloud VPC can span multiple regions, while AWS VPCs are limited to single region and VPCs have to be peered to communicate across regions with distinct, non-overlapping CIDR blocks.
• Google calls FaaS (Function as a Service) "Cloud Functions", while AWS calls it "Lambda".
• Google uses the term "cloud storage" for object storage, while AWS calls it "s3"
• Google uses "Cloud Deployment Manager" as an infrastructure deployment service that automates the creation and management of Google Cloud resources, while AWS uses "Cloud formation".

For a more comprehensive list of differences between various cloud providers, check out this link: https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/aws-azure-gcp-service-comparison

STEP 1: PRACTICE WITH MOCK EXAMS

As you know, Google has released an exam guide, training, and practice questions at this link: https://cloud.google.com/certification/cloud-architect

I've synthesized the certification information to create a streamlined mock exam that should help you learn the content more clearly. Please note that these are not the exact exam questions, but they contain the content that you will need to understand. In addition, you should be using the Google Cloud Console as a reference to answer these questions to prepare.

Here are the links for my Google Cloud Architect exam question and answers:

-Ravi Saraswathi - Google Architect Exam Notes

-https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT2qi3nQRDQz3jNr3LJ0O0vvI9Y74Krf2WMjdr03Fg02xUHdLTgCAFhmYaYWpidgjZg8AM-5MxrKB-m/pub

My top 50 questions for Google professional cloud exam are listed below: (Answers are in the link provided above)

1. What are the available deployment options for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)?? Explain each of the deployment options - ?Blue/green deployment, A/B testing, Rolling update and Canary deployment.
2. How to expose your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) services to Internet? What is the purpose of the Jupyter Notebook? How to mask data in GCP??
3. What service is to use for sentiment analysis in the Google Cloud??What service is available in Google for automation similar to AWS CloudFormation?
4. Explain different monitoring and operation services in Google Cloud and its use cases.??What are the options of on-prem to Google Cloud Connectivity??
5. What is the difference between Profiler, Trace and Error reporting??How to protect a GCP VM with an external IP Address??What are the best practices for securely connecting to Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instances? How to prevent Man in the Middle (MITM) attacks? ?
6. How to migrate MySQL from On-Prem??How to enable administrative access to VM instances that do not have external IP addresses??How to Connect, Manage, monitor and secure services in Google cloud? Can we utilize Google monitoring services for on-prem monitoring?
7. A Microservice has intermittent problems that bursts logs. How can you trap it for live debugging? How to expose Kubernetes services internally??
8. What is the difference between storage transfer service vs gsutil vs Transfer appliance vs? BigQuery Data Transfer Service, storage transfer service for on-prem??
9. What is the difference between IAM and the Identity platform??What are Folders in GCP??How to structure your organization?in GCP and what are the organization structure best practices?
10. What is a Managed Service???How to do a Cron job in Google Cloud (GCP)??
11. What are the criteria to select a load balancer - IPV4 vs IPv6? How to configure IPv6 for instances and instance templates?in GCP?
12. What is the difference between each of the following: 1). Nodepool vs Managed instance group 2). SAML vs Oauth?3). Apigee , Cloud endpoints vs API Gateway 4). SLi vs SLO 5) Push vs Pull for pub-sub 6) Regional vs Global resources ?7) Tasks vs pub/sub??8) VPC connector (Serverless VPC Access), VPC peering ,VPC sharing vs Private google access 9) Daemon set, Replica set vs Stateful set 10) Datafusion , Dataflow vs Dataproc 10) persistent disks vs Cloud Storage 11) Public GKE vs private GKE?12) Load Balancer vs Traffic director 13) Peering vs sharing 14) Declarative vs Imperative configuration 15) CloudRun, Cloud Functions, App Engine, Knative?, Workflow?vs. Eventarc.
13. List the Instance group Auto Scaling policies available in GCP. ?
14. Why do we need ACL ??Which Google services to use for:??Ddos and WAF, SA and Data masking?
15. What service is for storing Chat messages, Gamestate, JSON application data, synchronizes changes instantly across all connected devices?
16. Provides recommendations and insights for using resources on Google Cloud.
17. How to add recommendations to your website to deliver relevant content to your users, powered by Google machine learning.
18. How to access GKE Audit log??Ho to automatically starts a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) build whenever you make any changes to your source code?
19. How to automatically delete persistent disk associated with VM when instance??
20. What is the difference between Cloud run, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Cloud function?
21. What is the best way to migrate a MySQL database to GCP??
22. Explain different operation services in Google Cloud and its use cases.??
23. What is the difference between Profiler, Trace and Error reporting??
24. What is the difference between Uptime check, Readiness probe, Health check and Liveness probe?
25. How to monitor a website using Google Service??How to create identical VM’s groups in GCP?
26. Do you have ML Support for BigTable, if yes, what services to use for this?
27. Where is the snapshot stored??How to do Firewall Logging??
28. Create common configuration across all your clusters, including custom policies, and ensure that it is consistently applied
29. How to Test both Android and iOS apps in GCP?
30. impersonate Identity and Access Management (IAM) service accounts to access Google Cloud services.
31. How to group VMs for Load balancing? - Across the region, in-region and multi-zone?
32. How to restrict internet-facing external IP addresses on VMs?
33. How to Secure GKE? Explain the list and use cases of Google CI/CD services and products.
34. How to reduce latency for pub-sub? How to connect to VMs without external IP addresses??
35. What service to use for credit card data storage in Google Cloud?
36. Storing UserProfile, Product catalogs, Transactions based on ACID (NoSQL)?
37. How to mount cloud storage to the file system? What is the PAAS solution in Google?
38. How to speed up file transfer to cloud storage?
39. What is the difference between Snapshots and Images??
40. How to ramp up the request rate, choose object keys, and distribute requests to avoid temporary limits on your bucket?
41. How to keep your vm physically separate from other VMs in other projects. How to apply patches on GCP VMs automatically??
42. How to access On-prem from Google Cloud and restrict access?
43. Identify the optimum CPU and Memory for VM migrating from On-PRem?
44. Ho to automatically distribute traffic across multiple GKE in a different region? How to enforce the deployment approval before doing any deployment in GKE??
45. How to compare two files using gsutil? What are the Object Storage options for data access less than once in 30 days, quarter, year?
46. How to Connect App-Engine to an on-prem DB? What are the connectivity options from On-Prem to VPC? How to secure GCP access from BYOD devices??
47. How to Transfer on-prem data to cloud?, Transfer from another storage Service such as AWS S3 to Google Cloud Storage?
48. How to transfer more than 1 TB from On-prem? How to push Push your domain name to Global DNS?
49. How does Cloud Spanner work for HA? How applications don’t see any downtime but only see a brief increase in latencies during region failure??
50. What are the types of Audit logs available in Google cloud?

Apart from the questions listed below, please review the list of Exam questions by Google . Also www. examtopics.com has some excellent architect sample exam questions. Again, make sure you answer questions by researching on Google Cloud Console.

STEP 2: DO HANDS-ON LABS (USING THE QWIKLABS PLATFORM)

Qwiklabs is a Google-provided learning platform for Google cloud by following hands-on google cloud exercises and training. The Qwiklabs provides temporary credentials to Google Cloud Platform, so you can learn by doing, which is invaluable for understanding concepts and implementation. For each lab, you have access to a cloud console for the duration of the lab.

• Sign in to Qwiklabs using https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/users/sign_in.
• Select a few Qwiklabs quests relevant for the Google Architect exam and run through them until you feel comfortable with the material.

Two of the examples are linked here: Preparing for the professional Cloud Architect exam - Google Cloud Architecture Design and Implementation

Good luck everyone!