PCA 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

Virtual Private Cloud

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a global, software-defined private network in Google Cloud that connects resources across regions. PCA covers VPC design as part of network topology and infrastructure architecture.

Shared VPC

Shared VPC is a Google Cloud feature that lets multiple projects share a common VPC network hosted in a central project. PCA covers it when designing network topologies and the resource hierarchy.

Resource hierarchy

The resource hierarchy is the Google Cloud structure of organization, folders, and projects to which policies and permissions are applied. PCA covers it when designing for security, governance, and compliance.

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 bound to identities. PCA covers it as the core of designing for security.

Organization policy

An organization policy is a configurable constraint applied across the resource hierarchy to centrally enforce governance rules. PCA covers organization policies when designing for security and compliance.

Compute Engine

Compute Engine is Google Cloud's infrastructure-as-a-service offering that provides configurable virtual machines with options such as managed instance groups. PCA covers it when designing compute resources.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is Google Cloud's managed Kubernetes service for running containerized workloads. PCA covers it as a compute option when designing solution architectures.

Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a serverless platform that runs containers and scales automatically based on demand. PCA covers it among compute options for designing scalable, cost-efficient architectures.

Cloud Load Balancing

Cloud Load Balancing is Google Cloud's managed, scalable service for distributing traffic across backends, including global load balancing. PCA covers it when designing for high availability and performance.

Cloud Spanner

Cloud Spanner is Google Cloud's globally distributed, strongly consistent relational database that scales horizontally. PCA covers it when selecting storage and database services for a design.

Cloud SQL

Cloud SQL is Google Cloud's managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. PCA covers it when recommending relational storage in a solution architecture.

Cloud Key Management Service

Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS) is the Google Cloud service for creating and managing cryptographic keys, including customer-managed encryption keys. PCA covers it when designing data security.

Cloud Observability

Google Cloud Observability (formerly Operations Suite) is the set of monitoring, logging, and tracing tools for Google Cloud. PCA covers it when ensuring solution and operations excellence.

Site reliability engineering

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is Google's practice of applying software engineering to operations, using SLOs and error budgets. PCA covers its principles under operational excellence.