PCAGoogle Cloud Professional Cloud Architect
What the exam covers
- Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture 51 practice questions 25%
- Managing and provisioning infrastructure 38 practice questions 17.5%
- Designing for security and compliance 44 practice questions 17.5%
- Analyzing and optimizing processes 30 practice questions 15%
- Managing implementation 25 practice questions 12.5%
- Ensuring solution and operations excellence 25 practice questions 12.5%
Study guide
From Google
About PCA
Architecture on Google Cloud, framed by business and technical requirements. Part of the exam is built around published case studies, so you need to reason from a company’s constraints to a design rather than recall product facts.
Who it's for. Architects who design Google Cloud solutions for real organisations.
How to prepare
- Read the official case studies before the exam and sketch an architecture for each one.
- Know the storage and database decision tree: Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, Spanner, Bigtable, Firestore, BigQuery.
- Reliability questions draw on SRE ideas such as SLOs, error budgets and blameless postmortems.
Sample PCA questions
Try these with the answers on the page, then practise the full bank.
- A shopping app keeps a cart for each anonymous visitor. Cart reads happen on every page view and must return in under a millisecond. If the cache restarts, shoppers can rebuild their carts, so the data does not need to survive a failure. Which managed service suits this? Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture
- A developer team stores a third-party API token that its Cloud Run service needs at runtime. The security team wants versioned storage, least-privilege access for the service account, and a record of each read. Which approach meets these needs? Designing for security and compliance
- A company with dozens of projects wants one console that inventories its cloud assets, surfaces misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, and shows findings mapped to compliance benchmarks across the whole organization. Which service provides this? Designing for security and compliance
- A seed-stage startup with three engineers wants every commit to be built, tested and promoted through staging to production on Google Cloud, with no servers for them to patch. Which pairing is the best fit? Analyzing and optimizing processes
- A payments ledger must recover within 45 minutes of a regional outage, and no committed transaction may be lost. Which disaster recovery design meets both targets? Analyzing and optimizing processes
- A nightly feature-engineering job processes about 10 TB and takes six hours on a fleet of standard VMs. It tolerates restarts as long as completed partitions are kept. Which change lowers cost without changing the results? Analyzing and optimizing processes
- Ad hoc analysts sometimes write queries that scan far more data than intended. The data platform lead wants any single query to fail instead of billing more than a fixed amount. Which setting provides that guardrail? Analyzing and optimizing processes
- A bank wants a developer portal, API product bundles with quotas, monetization plans, and analytics across APIs hosted on-premises and in several clouds. Which Google Cloud service is the best fit? Managing implementation
- All 25 sample questions
Questions people ask
Is this PCA practice exam free?
Yes. All 213 questions, the timed mock exam and the explanations are free, and there's no account to create.
Are these real exam questions?
No. Real exam questions are confidential under the Google Cloud candidate agreement. These are practice questions written to cover the same domains in the same scenario style, each with an explanation of why the answer is right.
How is the PCA mock exam scored?
Questions are drawn from every domain in proportion to the exam guide, and you get a raw percentage with a breakdown by domain. Google Cloud uses scaled scoring, so treat 75% or more here as a sign you're ready rather than a predicted score.
Where is my progress saved?
In your browser, on this device. Nothing is sent to us apart from the answers you check, and clearing site data resets it.