Last-minute Cheat Sheet for GCP Professional Cloud Architect Certification Exam

by L. Peng · July 5, 2020

This is section two of How to Pass GCP Professional Cloud Architect Certification. In this blog, I will share my last-minute cheat sheet before I heading into the exam. You may generate your last-minute cheat sheet based on your study and your practices.

Decision Trees

The following four decision trees will help you to choose the right services:

Storage and Database Decision Tree

The storage and database decision tree among Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Bigtable, and Cloud BigQuery:

Compute Decision Tree

The compute decision tree among Cloud Firebase, Cloud Functions, GCE, GAE and GKE:

The comparison among GCP compute and processing options:

	Infrastructure as a Service	Containers		Platform as a Service		Function as a Service
	Compute Engine (GCE)	Kubernetes Engine (GKE)	Cloud Run	App Engine Standard	App Engine Flexible	Cloud Functions
Deployment format	VM image	Cluster	Container	App	App or Container	Function
Language Support	Any			Python, Node.js, Go, Java, PHP	Python, Node.js, Go, Java, PHP, Ruby, .NET, Custom Runtimes	Python, Node.js, Go
Scaling	Server autoscaling	Cluster	Fully managed, Scale-to-zero	Autoscaling managed servers, Scale-to-zero	Autoscaling managed servers	Serverless(microservices architecture), Scale-to-zero
Background processes	Yes		No	Supports background tasks for basic and manual scaling modes	Yes and SSH debugging	No
Request timeout	None		15 minutes	1 minutes	60 minutes	9 minutes
Other Features	Persistent disks, Websockets, TPU/GPU access (Note: Container instances on GKE do not persist data upon shutdown. However, Compute Engine persistent disks can be mounted to container instances on GKE)		Serverless container, websocket only support on Cloud Run for Anthos	Milliseconds startup, no writing to local disk	Minutes startup, able to install third-party binaries
Primary Use Case	Lift&shift of on-premises and monolithic workloads	Container workloads		Scalable web applications, mobile backend applications		Event driven and data processing apps

Also Google Cloud serverless compute platforms decision tree:

Load Balancers Decision Tree

The load balancers decision tree has the following options:

Global versus regional load balancing: Global – HTTP(S), SSL Proxy, TCP Proxy; Regional – TCP/UDP, Internal HTTP(S)
External versus internal load balancing: External – HTTP(S), Network TCP/UDP, SSL Proxy, TCP Proxy; Internal: Internal TCP/UDP, Internal HTTP(S)
Traffic type: HTTP(S), TCP, UDP

Network Connections Decision Tree

The network connections decision tree has Cloud VPN, Cloud Interconnect (Dedicated Interconnect and Partner Interconnect), and Cloud Peering (Direct Peering and Carrier Peering):

GCE Storage Options

The comparison among persistent disks, SSD and Cloud Storage:

	Zonal standard persistent disks	Regional standard persistent disks	Zonal SSD persistent disks	Regional SSD persistent disks	Local SSDs	Cloud Storage buckets
Storage type	Efficient and reliable block storage	Efficient and reliable block storage with synchronous replication across two zones in a region	Fast and reliable block storage	Fast and reliable block storage with synchronous replication across two zones in a region	High performance local block storage	Affordable object storage
Maximum capacity per disk	64 TB	64 TB	64 TB	64 TB	375 GB	n/a
Maximum capacity per instance	257 TB	257 TB	257 TB	257 TB	3 TB (9 TB in beta)	Almost infinite
Scope of access	Zone	Zone	Zone	Zone	Instance	Global
Data redundancy	Zonal	Multi-zonal	Zonal	Multi-zonal	None	Regional, dual-regional or multi-regional
Encryption at rest	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom encryption keys	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Machine type support	All machine types	All machine types	Most machine types	Most machine types	Most machine types	All machine types

Difference between transfer appliance (on-premise -> GCP) and transfer services (GCP bucket, AWS S3, http(s) location -> GCP)

On-premise to GCP Replacement: SAN->Persistent disk, NAS->Filestore, GCS(the cheapest solution) or Persistent disk.

Big Data Analytics

You can learn the details in GCP Data Lifecycle. But I think understand the following Cloud Storage Data Lake Architecture will be good enough for the exam.