How many questions are on the GCP Professional Cloud Architect exam?

The GCP PCA exam contains 50 questions in 120 minutes. Approximately 40% of questions are tied to 4 official case studies (EHR Healthcare, Helicopter Racing League, Mountkirk Games, TerramEarth).

What is the passing score for the GCP Professional Cloud Architect?

Google Cloud does not disclose a specific passing score for the Professional Cloud Architect exam.

Are the GCP PCA case studies published in advance?

Yes — Google publishes the 4 official case studies on the exam guide page. Candidates are expected to study them before the exam, as questions reference these companies directly.

How long is the GCP Professional Cloud Architect certification valid?

GCP Professional certifications are valid for 2 years.

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GCP Professional Cloud Architect

GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Exam 5

50 free questions · No sign-up required to browse

Professional-level practice exam for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certification. Tests advanced architectural knowledge, business case analysis, and enterprise solution design across 5 domains, including 4 detailed case studies.

Questions

Mixed

Difficulty

70%

Pass mark

Difficulty breakdown

Easy(8)

Medium(26)

Hard(16)

Topics covered

Browse all topics →

Subtask 1.1: Business Requirements Subtask 1.2: Technical Requirements Subtask 1.3: Network, Storage, Compute Subtask 1.4: Migration Plan Subtask 2.1: Network Topology Subtask 2.2: Storage Systems Subtask 2.3: Compute Systems Subtask 3.1: Security Design Subtask 3.2: Compliance Design Subtask 4.1: Technical Processes Subtask 4.2: Business Processes Subtask 4.3: Resilience Procedures Subtask 5.2: Reliability Subtask 5.3: Cost Optimization

Sample questions

Q01Hard1 mark

CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming
Overview: Gaming company, 500 employees, $100M revenue. 200 on-prem servers (US/EU), MySQL 5TB. 2M peak users. $150K/mo cost.
Business Req: Reduce cost 40%, 5x growth, 3 new regions, daily deployments.
Execs: CEO wants scale; CFO caps budget at $100K/mo; CTO needs 99.95% uptime, notes team has limited cloud skills.
Tech Req: <100ms global latency, real-time analytics, 5x seasonal spikes, EU data residency, DDoS protection.
Constraints: 12-month migration, max 4-hour downtime.

QUESTION:
Which migration strategy should you recommend for the legacy gaming application to meet the 12-month timeline and team skill constraints?

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Q02Medium1 mark

QUESTION:
To meet the requirement for <100ms global latency and DDoS protection, which networking solution should you implement?

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Q03Medium1 mark

QUESTION:
Which database migration strategy meets the 4-hour downtime constraint and EU data residency requirement?

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Q04Medium1 mark

QUESTION:
To support the requirement for real-time analytics on player behavior, which architecture should you recommend?

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Q05Easy1 mark

QUESTION:
How should you address the CTO's concern about the team's limited cloud experience while achieving the goal of daily deployments?

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All 50 questions with worked answers, mark schemes, and AI tutoring.

All questions (50)

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Q01CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming Overview: Gaming company, 500 employees, $100M revenue. 200 on-prem servers (US/EU), My...Hard Q02CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming Overview: Gaming company, 500 employees, $100M revenue. 200 on-prem servers (US/EU), My...Medium Q03CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming Overview: Gaming company, 500 employees, $100M revenue. 200 on-prem servers (US/EU), My...Medium Q04CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming Overview: Gaming company, 500 employees, $100M revenue. 200 on-prem servers (US/EU), My...Medium Q05CASE STUDY: TechStream Gaming Overview: Gaming company, 500 employees, $100M revenue. 200 on-prem servers (US/EU), My...Easy Q06CASE STUDY: ShopGlobal Overview: Retailer, 2000 employees, $500M revenue. US-Central co-lo, Java/Tomcat monolith, Ora...Medium Q07CASE STUDY: ShopGlobal Overview: Retailer, 2000 employees, $500M revenue. US-Central co-lo, Java/Tomcat monolith, Ora...Medium Q08CASE STUDY: ShopGlobal Overview: Retailer, 2000 employees, $500M revenue. US-Central co-lo, Java/Tomcat monolith, Ora...Hard Q09CASE STUDY: ShopGlobal Overview: Retailer, 2000 employees, $500M revenue. US-Central co-lo, Java/Tomcat monolith, Ora...Medium Q10CASE STUDY: ShopGlobal Overview: Retailer, 2000 employees, $500M revenue. US-Central co-lo, Java/Tomcat monolith, Ora...Easy Q11CASE STUDY: AeroMech Overview: Aviation manufacturer, 5000 employees, $2B revenue. 100 engines, 10k sensors/engine, 1...Hard Q12CASE STUDY: AeroMech Overview: Aviation manufacturer, 5000 employees, $2B revenue. 100 engines, 10k sensors/engine, 1...Easy Q13CASE STUDY: AeroMech Overview: Aviation manufacturer, 5000 employees, $2B revenue. 100 engines, 10k sensors/engine, 1...Medium Q14CASE STUDY: AeroMech Overview: Aviation manufacturer, 5000 employees, $2B revenue. 100 engines, 10k sensors/engine, 1...Medium Q15CASE STUDY: AeroMech Overview: Aviation manufacturer, 5000 employees, $2B revenue. 100 engines, 10k sensors/engine, 1...Hard Q16CASE STUDY: MediSecure Overview: Telehealth provider, 1500 employees, $300M revenue. Core app on AWS, 3 acquired clin...Medium Q17CASE STUDY: MediSecure Overview: Telehealth provider, 1500 employees, $300M revenue. Core app on AWS, 3 acquired clin...Hard Q18CASE STUDY: MediSecure Overview: Telehealth provider, 1500 employees, $300M revenue. Core app on AWS, 3 acquired clin...Hard Q19CASE STUDY: MediSecure Overview: Telehealth provider, 1500 employees, $300M revenue. Core app on AWS, 3 acquired clin...Medium Q20CASE STUDY: MediSecure Overview: Telehealth provider, 1500 employees, $300M revenue. Core app on AWS, 3 acquired clin...Easy Q21A global financial institution is designing a new ledger system. The system requires strong relational consistency (A...Medium Q22Your enterprise is adopting a multi-cloud strategy. You need to manage Kubernetes clusters running in Google Cloud, A...Hard Q23You are designing a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan for a critical application. The business requires a 'Warm Standby' ap...Medium Q24Your organization has 10 different departments, each with their own GCP project. The central IT security team wants t...Easy Q25You are deploying a web application to Cloud Run. The application occasionally experiences sudden, massive spikes in ...Medium Q26A development team wants to deploy a simple Node.js web application. They want zero infrastructure management, automa...Medium Q27Your company stores highly sensitive intellectual property in a Cloud Storage bucket. You need to ensure that even if...Hard Q28An application running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) needs to read data from a Cloud Storage bucket. What is the ...Medium Q29Your SRE team is defining Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for a user-facing web application. Which metric is the most...Medium Q30You are designing a secure CI/CD pipeline for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). You must ensure that only container ima...Medium Q31Your company is planning a massive marketing campaign that will require spinning up 5,000 new Compute Engine instance...Easy Q32The CFO wants to implement a chargeback model where each department is billed exactly for the cloud resources they co...Hard Q33You are running a batch processing job on Compute Engine that takes 4 hours to complete. The job is fault-tolerant; i...Medium Q34Your global e-commerce site serves heavy image and video content. Users in Asia are experiencing slow load times beca...Medium Q35You are planning a massive data center migration to GCP involving 500 applications. You need to determine which appli...Hard Q36You are designing a highly available web application on Compute Engine. The application must survive a single zone fa...Medium Q37Your company generates daily log files that must be kept for 5 years for compliance reasons. The logs are accessed fr...Medium Q38The CISO wants to implement a centralized security dashboard to detect misconfigurations and active threats across th...Hard Q39You are setting up a CI/CD pipeline using Cloud Build. You want the pipeline to automatically trigger whenever a deve...Medium Q40Your company's GCP bill has increased significantly. You suspect that developers are provisioning VMs that are much l...Easy Q41You are designing a serverless data pipeline to ingest streaming clickstream data, transform it by enriching it with ...Hard Q42You are configuring a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance for a production application. The application is read-heavy. ...Medium Q43You are designing the IAM hierarchy for a new GCP organization. Following Google's best practices for security and ma...Hard Q44Your SRE team wants to implement Chaos Engineering to test the resilience of a microservices application running on G...Hard Q45Your company is analyzing its GCP bill and notices that 'Network Egress' is the highest cost. The traffic is primaril...Medium Q46Your data analytics team runs queries against a 100 TB BigQuery table containing 5 years of sales data. Most queries ...Medium Q47You are designing the hybrid connectivity between your on-premises data center and GCP. The connection must support 2...Hard Q48Your organization is migrating sensitive data to Cloud Storage. The security team dictates that Google must not manag...Medium Q49You need to design a logging architecture. Security audit logs must be retained for 3 years for compliance. Applicati...Easy Q50Your team manages a large Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard cluster. The CFO has asked you to optimize the comp...Hard