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A provider-deep tour of Google Cloud Platform for solutions and cloud architects. Walks the full service landscape - compute, storage, databases, networking, identity (IAM), data and analytics (BigQuery) - then layers on infrastructure-as-code, containers (GKE), operations, security and the Architecture Framework, and finishes with the architecture deep-dives and behavioral themes GCP architect loops grade against.
Build a working map of the core families: compute (Compute Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, GKE, App Engine), storage (Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Filestore), databases (Cloud SQL, Spanner, Bigtable, Firestore, Memorystore), analytics (BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub), and the glue (Pub/Sub, Workflows, Eventarc). This category is the spine of the path.
Anchor the GCP networking model: VPC (global by default), subnets, firewall rules, Cloud NAT, Shared VPC, VPC peering, Cloud Interconnect, Cloud DNS, and Cloud CDN / global load balancing before the design rounds.
Work through relational (Cloud SQL) vs globally-consistent (Spanner) vs wide-column (Bigtable) vs document (Firestore) trade-offs, then the analytics path that GCP is known for - BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub - and Memorystore caching.
Build fluency in declarative provisioning (Terraform is the GCP standard; also Config Connector / Deployment Manager) and the container stack (GKE, Cloud Run) that runs most modern GCP workloads.
Cover Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging (the Operations Suite, formerly Stackdriver), Cloud Build / Cloud Deploy pipelines, and the deployment-safety patterns architects bake in.
The pillars architects are graded on: IAM least privilege, Cloud KMS, the resource hierarchy (Organization / Folders / Projects) and Organization Policy for governance, plus the Google Cloud Architecture Framework (operational excellence, security, reliability, cost, performance).
Bounded designs that exercise the conversations GCP architects lead - decoupling with Pub/Sub, consistency across services, throttling, and payment-grade reliability.
Architect rounds screen for driving decisions across teams you don't manage and making pragmatic cost/resilience trade-offs. Have a story per theme with concrete business impact.
Original scenario-style practice exams written from the public Google Cloud exam guides, with a timed simulator and per-domain scoring. Cloud Digital Leader is free for registered users; Associate Cloud Engineer is the working baseline, and the five professional exams below split by specialism.
Tradeoffs and IaC - the two sheets worth having open while you work through the design topics above.
21 role-targeted paths are live, from new-grad and backend through SRE, security, data and engineering management. If you have a role you want covered, let us know.
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