PCDE 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

Site reliability engineering

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is Google's discipline that applies software-engineering practices to operations to run reliable services at scale. PCDE covers SRE practices as a dedicated exam domain.

Service level objective

A service level objective (SLO) is a target value for a service level indicator that defines the reliability a service aims to meet. PCDE covers defining and managing SLOs and SLIs.

Service level indicator

A service level indicator (SLI) is a quantitative measure of some aspect of a service's level, such as latency or availability. PCDE covers SLIs as the basis for SLOs and alerting.

Error budget

An error budget is the acceptable amount of unreliability a service can incur before action is required, derived from its SLO. PCDE covers error budgets for balancing change velocity with reliability.

Cloud Build

Cloud Build is Google Cloud's managed service for running continuous-integration and continuous-delivery builds. PCDE covers it for building and implementing CI/CD pipelines.

Cloud Deploy

Cloud Deploy is a managed continuous-delivery service that automates deployments to Google Kubernetes Engine and other runtimes with promotion between environments. PCDE covers it in the CI/CD domain.

Artifact Registry

Artifact Registry is Google Cloud's service for storing and managing build artifacts and container images. PCDE covers it, with Binary Authorization, for securing the software supply chain.

Binary Authorization

Binary Authorization is a Google Cloud service that enforces deploy-time policies requiring images to be signed and attested. PCDE covers it for securing CI/CD and the software supply chain.

Terraform

Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool, supported on Google Cloud, for declaratively provisioning and managing resources. PCDE covers managing infrastructure as code when bootstrapping an organization.

Resource hierarchy

The resource hierarchy is the Google Cloud structure of organization, folders, and projects to which policies are applied. PCDE covers designing it when bootstrapping and maintaining an organization.

Cloud Monitoring

Cloud Monitoring is Google Cloud's service for collecting metrics, building dashboards, and alerting on service health. PCDE covers it as central to implementing observability practices.

Cloud Logging

Cloud Logging is Google Cloud's managed service for storing, searching, and analyzing log data, with options for filtering, sampling, and exclusions to manage cost. PCDE covers it in the observability domain.

Cloud Trace

Cloud Trace is a distributed-tracing system that collects latency data from applications to find performance bottlenecks. PCDE covers it, with logging and monitoring, for observability and troubleshooting.

Service account

A service account is a special Google Cloud identity used by workloads and automation rather than people. PCDE covers creating and managing service accounts when bootstrapping an organization.