Hi, welcome to this course, Preparing for the Professional Cloud Architect Exam. I'm a technical curriculum developer with Google, my name is Tom Stern. The place where certification and training intersect is at the job itself. The certification exam is designed to evaluate whether you have the skills and knowledge expected of someone in a role of a cloud architect. Therefore, the best way to prepare for the exam is to be a confident, professional cloud architect. The approach in this course is to review many items that a cloud architect should know because that information could be on the exam. So this course focuses on the skills you need to know for the job. Being prepared to be a professional cloud architect is the best way to be prepared for the exam. If you go to cloud.google.com/certification, you'll see a list of our professional certifications. And if you click on cloud architect, you'll see several valuable resources. The most important one is a certification exam guide. It's a list of all the areas covered in the exam. The tips section of this course are organized around Cloud Architect Exam Guide Outline. The outline divides the exam into sections that focus on specific priorities and information about the job role. So this course follows the outline, explaining each section of the course, providing tips, and highlighting information that would be useful to know. Some items in the outline are important to the job of a professional cloud architect, but they're not technical or maybe they're not specific to Google. For example, a cloud architect needs to know how to present solution proposals to customers and to communicate with executive staff. That isn't something we currently teach, but you should know it from experience or learn it on your own. I'll identify these items when they appear on the outline. These are the sections of the exam. The first part of the exam about design and the second part about provisioning are more inclined towards product and feature knowledge and basic design. Where and how to use each product in specific cases. The middle two parts on security and optimizing are about getting specific qualities into the solution. For example, in the first two parts, you might make something function, in the second two parts, you might make it secure and cost-effective. The last two parts are about operating the solution and all the procedures and features that can make the solution continue to operate reliably and to adopt and to change overtime. Notice the gradation between products and procedures. Have you heard of the the four P's? That's product, people, policy, and process. The cloud architect exam is not all about product. People sometimes go into the exam expecting only questions about product, like how to do a particular thing or why a capability is useful. You should understand that the questions on the exam can be about the other three P's as well. There's a lot of ground to cover today. You'll begin by learning what the certification is about, where it's positioned relative to other certifications, and more specifically, how it's designed relative to your job role and experience in the industry. Next, you'll explore the sample case studies, provided to help prepare for the exam. These case studies are also available on the cloud.google.com/certification site. Some of the questions on the exam can key to these case studies. If you've read and studied them in advanced, you'll already be familiar with them. And that means you'll effectively have more time to answer questions during the exam. Most of these case studies focus on business requirements, as well as technical requirements. The business requirements are just as important as the technical requirements to passing the exam. You'll spend most of the day reviewing and getting preparation tips in specific subject areas. And at the end, you'll get pointers to resources and next steps to continue your preparation. I think it seems pretty obvious from this list, but it should be called out that you can't learn everything you need to know for the certification exam in one class. So the goal here is to help you prepare, but you won't be able to pass the exam based only on attending this course. By the end of this class, if you've already been preparing for the examination, you'll have a good sense of what else you need to study or do to prepare or whether you're ready to give it a shot.
