GCP-PCA · Google Cloud
Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect
The capstone of the Google Cloud track, and a design exam that reads like a consulting brief rather than a service quiz.
The professional-level Google Cloud certification, and the GCP counterpart of SAP-C02. It assumes you have already designed and run real systems: the questions are long, multi-constraint scenarios where several answers work and only one fits every stated requirement. Built for exam guide v6.1 (October 2025), and that matters more here than on any other exam in this catalog. Google replaced the case studies. The four current ones are EHR Healthcare, Altostrat Media, Cymbal Retail and KnightMotives Automotive, and all four are covered here. Mountkirk Games, TerramEarth and Helicopter Racing League were retired - most material still on the market is built around those three, so a bank that still teaches them is teaching an exam that no longer exists. Around a third of the questions are case-study based, matching the shape of the real exam, and the bank mixes single-answer questions with multiple-select ones. Please note: Google does not publish an official passing score for this exam. The 70% threshold used here is a widely cited community estimate.
Who sits this exam
Architects who already run workloads on Google Cloud. Around a third of this bank is case-study material - Google publishes four fictional companies and expects you to answer inside their stated constraints, so the skill being tested is reading a requirement carefully, not recalling a product. GCP-ACE comes first if gcloud is still unfamiliar.
What it covers
Each domain below is weighted the way the real exam weights it, and scored separately, so you can see which one is holding the total down.
- 01Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture
- 02Managing and provisioning a solution infrastructure
- 03Designing for security and compliance
- 04Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes
- 05Managing implementation
- 06Ensuring solution and operations excellence
How you will practise
- Review
- Practice with answers explained immediately.
- Section
- Review one domain at a time.
- Timed
- A timed set with results at the end.
- Final
- The full exam simulation — every question, timed.
What passing proves
That you can take a business's actual constraints - budget, latency, residency, an existing data centre, a compliance regime - and land on the one Google Cloud design that satisfies all of them, then say what you traded away to get there.