Refer the Professional Cloud Architect Certification exam guide click here.

Section 1. Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture
1.1 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets business requirements. Considerations include:
    - Business use cases and product strategy
    - Cost optimization
    - Supporting the application design
    - Integration with external systems
    - Movement of data
    - Design decision trade-offs
    - Build, buy, modify, or deprecate
    - Success measurements (e.g., key performance indicators [KPI], return on investment [ROI], metrics)
    - Compliance and observability

1.2 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets technical requirements. Considerations include:
    - High availability and failover design
    - Elasticity of cloud resources with respect to quotas and limits
    - Scalability to meet growth requirements
    - Performance and latency

1.3 Designing network, storage, and compute resources. Considerations include:
    - Integration with on-premises/multi-cloud environments
    - Cloud-native networking (VPC, peering, firewalls, container networking)
    - Choosing data processing technologies
    - Choosing appropriate storage types (e.g., object, file, databases)
    - Choosing compute resources (e.g., preemptible, custom machine type, specialized workload)
    - Mapping compute needs to platform products
1.4 Creating a migration plan (i.e., documents and architectural diagrams). Considerations include:
    - Integrating solutions with existing systems
    - Migrating systems and data to support the solution
    - Software license mapping
    - Network planning
    - Testing and proofs of concept
    - Dependency management planning
1.5 Envisioning future solution improvements. Considerations include:
    - Cloud and technology improvements
    - Evolution of business needs
    - Evangelism and advocacy

Section 2. Managing and provisioning a solution infrastructure
2.1 Configuring network topologies. Considerations include:
    - Extending to on-premises environments (hybrid networking)
    - Extending to a multi-cloud environment that may include Google Cloud to Google Cloud communication
    - Security protection (e.g. intrusion protection, access control, firewalls)
2.2 Configuring individual storage systems. Considerations include:
    - Data storage allocation
    - Data processing/compute provisioning
    - Security and access management
    - Network configuration for data transfer and latency
    - Data retention and data life cycle management
    - Data growth planning
2.3 Configuring compute systems. Considerations include:
    - Compute resource provisioning
    - Compute volatility configuration (preemptible vs. standard)
    - Network configuration for compute resources (Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, serverless networking)
    - Infrastructure orchestration, resource configuration, and patch management
    - Container orchestration

Section 3. Designing for security and compliance
3.1 Designing for security. Considerations include:
    - Identity and access management (IAM)
    - Resource hierarchy (organizations, folders, projects)
    - Data security (key management, encryption, secret management)
    - Separation of duties (SoD)
    - Security controls (e.g., auditing, VPC Service Controls, context aware access, organization policy)
    - Managing customer-managed encryption keys with Cloud Key Management Service
    - Remote access
3.2 Designing for compliance. Considerations include:
    - Legislation (e.g., health record privacy, children’s privacy, data privacy, and ownership)
    - Commercial (e.g., sensitive data such as credit card information handling, personally identifiable information [PII])
    - Industry certifications (e.g., SOC 2)
    - Audits (including logs)

Section 4. Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes
4.1 Analyzing and defining technical processes. Considerations include:
    - Software development life cycle (SDLC)
    - Continuous integration / continuous deployment
    - Troubleshooting / root cause analysis best practices
    - Testing and validation of software and infrastructure
    - Service catalog and provisioning
    - Business continuity and disaster recovery
4.2 Analyzing and defining business processes. Considerations include:
    - Stakeholder management (e.g. influencing and facilitation)
    - Change management
    - Team assessment / skills readiness
    - Decision-making processes
    - Customer success management
    - Cost optimization / resource optimization (capex / opex)
4.3 Developing procedures to ensure reliability of solutions in production (e.g., chaos engineering, penetration testing)

Section 5. Managing implementation
5.1 Advising development/operation team(s) to ensure successful deployment of the solution. Considerations include:
    - Application development
    - API best practices
    - Testing frameworks (load/unit/integration)
    - Data and system migration and management tooling
5.2 Interacting with Google Cloud programmatically. Considerations include:
    - Google Cloud Shell
    - Google Cloud SDK (gcloud, gsutil and bq)
    - Cloud Emulators (e.g. Cloud Bigtable, Datastore, Spanner, Pub/Sub, Firestore)

Section 6. Ensuring solution and operations reliability
6.1 Monitoring/logging/profiling/alerting solution
6.2 Deployment and release management
6.3 Assisting with the support of deployed solutions
6.4 Evaluating quality control measures

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