CDL cheat sheet

Exam at a glance

Domain weightings

How much of the exam each domain covers. Spend your study time in proportion — the heavier the domain, the more questions you'll see.

Key terms

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computing resources such as compute, storage, and networking over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. CDL covers it among fundamental cloud concepts.

Total cost of ownership

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is the complete cost of a solution including direct and indirect costs over its lifetime, used to compare on-premises with cloud. CDL covers it when explaining the business value of cloud.

Capital expenditure

Capital expenditure (CapEx) is up-front spending on fixed assets such as servers, contrasted in the cloud with operating expenditure (OpEx) that is paid as you consume. CDL covers this shift as a benefit of cloud.

Shared responsibility model

The shared responsibility model is a framework that divides security and operational duties between Google Cloud and the customer depending on the service type. CDL covers it as a fundamental cloud concept.

BigQuery

BigQuery is Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless data warehouse for large-scale analytics using SQL. CDL covers it as a solution for making data useful and accessible.

Data warehouse

A data warehouse is a central repository of integrated, structured data optimized for analytics and reporting. CDL covers it, alongside databases and data lakes, among Google Cloud data management solutions.

Data lake

A data lake is a storage repository that holds large amounts of raw data in its native format until it is needed. CDL covers it as one of Google Cloud's data management solutions.

Vertex AI

Vertex AI is Google Cloud's unified platform for building, deploying, and managing machine learning and generative AI models. CDL covers it among Google Cloud's AI and ML solutions.

Gemini

Gemini is Google's family of multimodal generative AI models, offered across Google Cloud for building AI-powered solutions. CDL covers generative AI options in the innovating-with-AI domain.

Compute Engine

Compute Engine is Google Cloud's infrastructure-as-a-service offering that provides configurable virtual machines. CDL covers it as a computing option in the modernization domain.

Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a serverless platform that runs containerized applications and scales automatically, including to zero. CDL covers it as a serverless computing option.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is Google Cloud's managed Kubernetes service for deploying and operating containerized applications. CDL covers containers in the cloud within the modernization domain.

Identity and Access Management

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the Google Cloud service that controls who can do what on which resources through roles and policies. CDL covers it as part of Google's trusted infrastructure.

Site reliability engineering

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is Google's discipline that applies software-engineering practices to operations to run reliable services at scale. CDL covers it under operational excellence and reliability.