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Complete List of Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architecture Skills

Christopher GodwinGoogle CloudTechnologystudy guideGoogle cloudgcpGCCPCACloud computingbusiness and financecomputing and information technologysoftware science and technologyAbout 6 min

Complete List of Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architecture Skills

Ability to Design for Business

Business Use-Cases

When it comes to designing a cloud for business use-cases, there are a few key considerations that need to be taken into account.

Product Strategies

Product strategies have a big impact on cloud architecture design.

Go-live Strategies

Cloud-based launches require careful planning to ensure a successful outcome.

Application Design

Applications that are designed to run in the cloud must be able to take advantage of the functionality, scalability and flexibility that the cloud offers.

Cost Considerations

For every cost-effective option for running an application, there are at least two other cost-ineffective ways to accomplish the same thing in a cloud.

Systems Integration

Key considerations for communicating between cloud and on-premises networks and applications.

Data Handling and Management

Keeping your data safe and secret is the goal of proper data handling, especially production and sensitive data.

Compliance, Regulations, Access Restrictions

Designing cloud architecture requires staying within industry compliance, legal regulation, and policy access restrictions. That involves careful consideration and arduous planning.

Security

Trust no file, no connection, no application. Treat everything as untrusted as a potential layer of breach, act according to that and you'll be fine.

Measures of Success

Does our proof of concept have any measures of success other than a successful healthcheck? It should. What else are we missing?

Ability to Design Around Technical Needs

Technical Debt Reconciliation

Technical debt is the amount of time and effort required to fix or improve software that is not up to date or is poorly designed. It can accumulate over time as a result of shortcuts taken during development, such as using quick and dirty solutions instead of taking the time to do things properly.

Availability

What is required to ensuring high-availability in the cloud. Is availability one of your business needs?

Scaling Resources

Ensuring that the scaling process is efficient and cost effective and elastic.

Reliability Engineering

Working to identify and mitigate potential sources of failure.

Ability to Design Compute Architecture

Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a cloud computing service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure.

Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE)

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a managed, production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications.

Anthos

A platform that enables runs containerized applications in hybrid or multi-cloud environment, whether they are deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions is a serverless computing platform that allows you to run code in the cloud without having to manage a server or cluster.

Configuration

Handling Application configuration.

Management

Considering infrastructure management tasks such as log rotation.

States

Stateful applications, application states, statelessness.

Data flows

Message queuing, bottlenecks and performance.

Data Integrity

Maintaining the accuracy and consistency of data over its entire lifecycle.

Monitoring and Alerting

Set up alerts and view monitoring data for your projects via dashboards.

Ability to Design Storage Architecture

Object Storage

Object storage is a type of storage that is well-suited for storing large amounts of data that is unstructured or semi-structured.

Network Storage

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a managed network attached storage (NAS) service called Filestore and volumes attached to compute based services such as GKE.

Databases

Knowledge of relational database creation, maintenance, backup, and related processes.

Cloud SQL

Managed relational databases meet certain needs that compute database engines do not.

Cloud Spanner

Google Cloud Spanner is a relational database service that offers global horizontal scaling, strong consistency, and high availability. Basically Managed Vitesse.

Big Query

Google BigQuery is a cloud-based big data analytics web service for processing very large read-only data sets.

Cloud Firestore

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps.

Bigtable

Google Big Table is a distributed storage system for low-latency access to large amounts(petabytes) of structured data.

Data Retention and Lifecycles

As data doesn't need to be access as frequently, it can be time partitioned for cost-effective solutions.

Latency Issues

Latency is a key consideration for accessing data in any kind of storage. Regional, zone, and CDN considerations must be made.

Ability to Design Network Architecture

Virtual Private Cloud(VPC) Basics

IP Addressing, CIDR ranges, Firewall Rules and Routers. Cloud Router, Cloud Armor, VPC subnet and VPC sharing.

Hybrid Cloud Networking

Knowledge of how hybrid cloud networking a mix of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud services are setup and maintained.

CDN, DNS Zones, Zone Peering, Service Registry

Additional services provided in GCP Networking.

Load Balancing(LB)

Regional and Global Load Balancing have different use-cases. How GKE and provisions LBs.

Identity and Access Management(IAM)

All access is managed through IAM, it is relevant to every gcp service.

Encryption

Storage Encryption

Understanding GCP's encryption at-rest schema.

Connection Encryption

Understanding encryption in transit in GCP.

Key Management

Ability to ascertain the needs of projects which need to control their own key management for data encryption.

Security Evaluation

Penetration Testing & Iam Policy Auditing

Security Design Principles

Full understanding of concepts like separation of duties, least privilege and Defense in Depth.

Major Regulations

Information Technology Infrastructure Library Framework

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework that provides a set of best practices for managing IT services.

HIPPA/HITECH

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is a federal law that was enacted in 199 HIPAA protects the privacy of patients' health information and establishes national standards for the security of electronic health information. The HITECH Act is a federal law that promotes the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology.

GDPR

GDPR applies to any company that processes the personal data of EU citizens, regardless of where the company is located. It strengthens EU data protection rules by giving individuals more control over their personal data, and establishing new rights for individuals.

SOX Compliance

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in 2002 in response to the Enron scandal. The Act includes provisions to protect investors from fraudulent accounting practices and to improve the accuracy and transparency of corporate disclosures. The Act also created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to oversee the auditing of public companies.

COPPA

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is a law that requires companies to get parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under 1 COPPA also gives parents the right to review and delete their child's personal information, and to refuse to allow companies to collect or use it.

Ability to Design for Reliability

Stackdriver

Stackdriver is a cloud monitoring tool that provides comprehensive monitoring and logging for cloud-powered applications. It offers powerful features like monitoring dashboards, alerting, log management, and tracing. Stackdriver is a great tool for keeping track of the health and performance of your cloud-based applications.

Continuous Deployment

Just use Harness. Cloud Deploy in GCP is $15 per pipeline per month.

Continuous Integration

Cloud build basics.

Reliability Engineering

Reliability engineering via Cloud Ops: Logging, Monitoring, Alerting, Etc.

Overloads, Cascading Failure and Testing

Designs need to deal with capacity overloads, they need to fail in a cascading manor, and reliability testing.

Incident Management, Analysis, and Reporting

Identify Incident cause, Plan for fix remediation, and log the actions taken.

Technical Process Introspection

Lifecycle Planning

Create and Understand Software Development Lifecycle plans.

Troubleshooting

Fixing your technical processes by revisiting your Incident Response and Post-Mortem Culture

Enterprise IT Processes

Fit your Technical Processes into the IT processes of your wider group. For example, creating AD groups and syncing them to GCP for IAM federation.

Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery

Architects wil be asked to help teams to be better prepared to run their app in a new environment from scratch.

Business Process Introspection

Stakeholder Management

The ability to deliver and set expectations with people who have an interest in the project you're designing.

Change Management

Understanding of Plan, Do, Study, Act.

Team Skill Management

Help develop internal skill-sets among the team.

Customer Success Management

Helping customers to get the most value from your services.

Cost Management

Resource planning, Cost estimation, budgeting, and cost control.

Cost Optimization

Familiar with HR Costs, Infrastructure costs, Operational Costs, and Capital Costs. Can contribute to optimizing these costs.

Development and Operations Design

Create Development-and-Redevelopment-for-Cloud Strategies

Ability to guide app developers to plan for redeveloping applications for cloud specific services.

API Best Practices

Understanding APIs, RESTful and RPC. API Security familiarization and comprehension of resource limiting.

Testing Frameworks

Vulnerability Testing, Unit Testing, Regression Testing, WebDriver Testing, HTTP and Healthcheck verifications.

Secrets Integration for Third Party Apps

Strategy for storing sensitivity data in the cloud.

Google Cloud SDK

gcloud, gsutil, bq, cbt, kubectl, pubsub emulator...

Cloud Emulators

Awareness in local emulators for development reduction. Bigtable, Datastore, Firestore, Pub/Sub, Spanner.

Migration Strategies

Lift and Shift, Move and improve, or Rip and restore?

Tools

Storage Transfer Service, gsutil, Google Cloud Database Migration, Google Transfer Appliances, and 3rd party options.

Migration Cost/Time Optimization

Data Size, Redevelopment Time, Migration Time, Planning Time.

Migration Planning

Integrating Cloud Systems with Existing Services

Migrating Applications and Data to Support a Solution

Planning Changing code and configuration to support shifts in platform differences.

Planning for Data Migration

Consider the size and type of data being migrated, the workload requirements, and the available budget. Other restrictions.

Governance of Data and Migrations

Ensuring that data is managed to stay in-compliance effectively and consistently across a migration.

Migrating Object Storage

Bucket structure, Roles and Access Controls. Time and Cost comprehension, transfer sequence, transfer methods.

Migration Relational Data

Volume considerations, downtime considerations, replicate in the cloud for no-downtime migrations.

Software License Mapping

Understanding of BYOL models and pay-as-you-go models.

Network Planning

Planning Shared Networks in Tiered Projects, Planning VPCs, Planning Network Access Standards, Scaling & Performance Testing, Connectivity

Official Resources