Professional Cloud Architect
Free Google Cloud Certified - Professional Cloud Architect Practice Test
12 exam-style questions with full explanations — no sign-up. Score yourself, then close your gaps with the full course.
Exam fee ~$2006 exam domainsLevel Advanced2 timed practice tests in the course
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A financial services company runs a critical PostgreSQL database and must meet an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 1 hour in case of a regional outage. The operations team wants a fully managed solution with minimal operational overhead to configure and maintain. Which approach BEST meets these requirements?
Cloud SQL cross-region read replicas replicate continuously with very low lag, easily meeting a 15-minute RPO, and can be promoted to a standalone primary quickly to meet a 1-hour RTO, all while being fully managed by Google.
A company has a central networking team that must control all subnets, routes, and firewall rules, while separate application teams (dev, test, prod) need to deploy Compute Engine and GKE resources into isolated projects without networking privileges. The application teams' resources must still communicate over private RFC 1918 IP space. Which topology BEST meets these requirements?
Shared VPC lets a host project (owned by the networking team) centrally control subnets, routes, and firewall rules while service projects (owned by app teams) deploy resources into those shared subnets, giving private connectivity without granting network admin rights to app teams.
A financial services company runs workloads on GKE and needs those workloads to call Google Cloud APIs (e.g., Cloud Storage, BigQuery) without storing any downloadable service account keys in the cluster, due to a security audit requirement that prohibits long-lived credentials. Which approach BEST meets this requirement?
Workload Identity (Federation) lets Kubernetes service accounts impersonate Google service accounts using short-lived, automatically rotated credentials obtained via the metadata server — no exportable JSON keys are ever created or stored, satisfying the audit requirement.
A retail company suffers a major production outage caused by a bad deployment. Leadership wants to learn from the incident and prevent it from recurring without discouraging engineers from taking ownership of future releases. Which process should the cloud architect recommend?
A blameless postmortem focuses on identifying systemic root causes and generating concrete action items, which improves reliability while preserving a healthy engineering culture and encouraging future incident reporting.
A company needs to deploy identical Google Cloud infrastructure across separate dev, staging, and production projects. Leadership requires a full audit history of every infrastructure change and the ability to roll back to a previous known-good state quickly. Which approach BEST meets these requirements?
Terraform configs in version control give a declarative, auditable change history (via commit log) and let you roll back by reverting to a prior commit and re-applying, satisfying both requirements while remaining repeatable across projects.
A financial services company runs a critical workload on Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. The business requires an RPO of 5 minutes and an RTO of 10 minutes in the event of a full regional outage. Which configuration BEST meets these requirements?
A cross-region read replica keeps a continuously updated copy of data in another region (satisfying the tight RPO), and an automated, tested promotion runbook/script can bring it online as the new primary well within a 10-minute RTO. This is the standard Cloud SQL pattern for regional DR.
A company needs to connect its on-premises data center to its Google Cloud VPC with a dedicated 10 Gbps link, low and predictable latency, and a requirement that traffic never traverse the public internet. The company has the ability to co-locate equipment at a facility with direct access to Google's network. Which connectivity option should be selected?
Dedicated Interconnect provides a direct physical connection between the on-premises network and Google's network at a colocation facility, supporting 10 Gbps or 100 Gbps circuits with private, predictable-latency connectivity that never touches the public internet.
A data engineering team ingests 50 TB of clickstream events daily and needs to run ad-hoc SQL analytics across the full historical dataset with minimal operational overhead and no need to manage servers or storage capacity in advance. Which Google Cloud service should they use?
BigQuery is a serverless, fully managed data warehouse built for petabyte-scale SQL analytics with no infrastructure provisioning, matching the ad-hoc SQL and no-ops requirements exactly.
A healthcare company must ensure that all new Cloud Storage buckets and Compute Engine resources created anywhere in its GCP organization are restricted to the us and europe-west multi-regions only, to satisfy data residency requirements. Which mechanism should the architect configure at the Organization node?
The gcp.resourceLocations Organization Policy constraint restricts where resources can be created across the entire org hierarchy, enforcing data residency at resource-creation time regardless of who creates it.
A company runs a steady-state production workload on Compute Engine 24/7 and is willing to commit to a 3-year usage term in exchange for the maximum possible discount on that predictable capacity. Which purchasing option should the architect recommend?
Committed use discounts require a 1- or 3-year commitment to a specific amount of vCPU/memory or spend, and provide the largest discount (up to ~70%) for predictable, steady-state workloads.
A development team wants an automated pipeline that builds a container image whenever code is pushed to a Cloud Source Repositories repo, and then deploys the new image to GKE. Which Google Cloud service should orchestrate this build-and-deploy pipeline?
Cloud Build is Google Cloud's CI/CD service that supports triggers on repo pushes, builds container images, and can deploy them to GKE as part of a defined build pipeline (cloudbuild.yaml).
A team runs services on App Engine and GKE and wants unhandled application exceptions to be automatically detected, deduplicated, and grouped by stack trace across all services, without writing custom log queries. Which Cloud Operations tool should they use?
Error Reporting automatically analyzes and aggregates application errors from logs across App Engine, GKE, Compute Engine, and Cloud Functions, grouping them by stack trace signature with no custom query configuration required.
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How much does the Professional Cloud Architect exam cost?
The exam fee is approximately $200 and varies by region — confirm current pricing with the certification vendor before you book.
What topics are on the exam?
It covers 6 domains: Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture (~24%), Managing and provisioning a solution infrastructure (~15%), Designing for security and compliance (~18%), Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes (~18%), Managing implementation (~11%), Ensuring solution and operations reliability (~14%). The full course has a dedicated chapter, lab and practice-test coverage for each.
Is this practice test really free?
Yes — all questions on this page are free with explanations and no sign-up. The paid Udemy course adds two full-length timed exams, video lessons and hands-on labs.
How do I get the discount?
Use code A5F51EAB51242FE60905 at checkout for $34.99 (list undefined) through Sep 23 — the enroll button applies it automatically.
Will this prepare me for the real exam?
The questions mirror the real exam's style and are mapped to the official domains. This is exam-focused preparation — combine the free test with the full course's timed simulations to gauge your readiness.