Thanks to my employer, Netconomy, I had the chance to take part in the Google Cloud Architect certification program earlier this year. It all started with two coworkers and myself going to Munich for a 3-day training course at TÜV Rheinland. Similar to other trainings this one was quite practical and extremely broad. In total there were 16 chapters ranging from IaaS-topics like GCP networking all the way to completely hosted solutions like Cloud Functions or even BigQuery. There was also a chapter about Google’s hosted Kubernetes environment, which we mostly skipped as all attendees were already quite familiar with Kubernetes.

Sadly, due to KubeCon and some other work-related responsibilities we couldn’t do the actual certification exam close to that training. After pushing past the unavoidable post-conference-depression I started learning for the exam which we had scheduled for June 4 at a certification facility in Graz. My usual “learn the slides 3 times and look at some examples” strategy paid off and I passed the certification exam in my first attempt. So, I can now call myself a “Professional Cloud Architect” for the Google Cloud 😅

Profession Google Cloud Architect certificate

That being said, the exam was quite hard. The questions were extremely practical in nature and required some decent understanding of larger IT systems and how they should be architected properly to satisfy not only the requirements but also your customers. Obviously you need to know at least the broad feature-set of all the services that were discussed during the training but that alone wouldn’t have been enough.

In general I quite liked the experience around this certification. The training was good, the infrastructure for learning about the platform was very well set up and the certification exam itself was challenging in all the right ways 👍