Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Quick Facts (2025)

Exam Domain Breakdown

Domain 1: Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture (24% of the exam)

Designing a solution infrastructure that meets business requirements.

• Business use cases and product strategy
• Cost optimization
• Supporting the application design
• Integration with external systems
• Movement of data
• Design decision trade-os
• Build, buy, modify, or deprecate
• Success measurements (e.g., key performance indicators [KPI], return on investment [ROI], metrics)
• Compliance and observability

Summary: In this section, you will develop the ability to align business goals with cloud architecture decisions. It emphasizes turning product strategy into tangible infrastructure choices, ensuring cost optimization, and considering integration with external systems. By understanding trade-offs and decision-making, you learn how to evaluate when to build in-house, modify existing solutions, or adopt managed services. Success measures like ROI and KPIs guide how you validate the effectiveness of your architecture.

Additionally, compliance, observability, and data movement are central, helping ensure that solutions are transparent, secure, and measurable. Through this lens, you learn to balance technical requirements with business outcomes. This creates architectures that not only meet but also exceed business expectations, translating investments into measurable value for stakeholders.

Designing a solution infrastructure that meets technical requirements.

• High availability and failover design
• Elasticity of cloud resources with respect to quotas and limits
• Scalability to meet growth requirements
• Performance and latency

Summary: This section centers on technical decision-making. It introduces methods of designing infrastructures that support reliability under stress, drawing on principles of high availability and failover planning. Elasticity and quotas act as important levers in maintaining service levels even as workloads fluctuate.

Scaling for business growth and planning to maintain low latency are key outcomes of this study area. By mastering this section, you gain the expertise to ensure that your architectures not only meet current requirements but are also set up for consistent, efficient future performance.

Designing network, storage, and compute resources.

• Integration with on-premises/multicloud environments
• Cloud-native networking (VPC, peering, firewalls, container networking)
• Choosing data processing technologies
• Choosing appropriate storage types (e.g., object, file, databases)
• Choosing compute resources (e.g., spot, custom machine type, specialized workload)
• Mapping compute needs to platform products

Summary: This section highlights the architecture of core cloud infrastructure elements. You will practice selecting types of storage, compute, and networking services based on workload needs, moving seamlessly between on-premises, multicloud, and cloud-native models. The coverage of VPC, peering, and container networks ensures that your networking solutions remain scalable, secure, and integrated.

From choosing storage types to mapping compute needs to the right Google Cloud products, this content builds your confidence in translating technical requirements into reproducible infrastructure blueprints. It empowers you to consistently deliver performance within budgetary and business goals.

Creating a migration plan (i.e., documents and architectural diagrams).

• Integrating solutions with existing systems
• Migrating systems and data to support the solution
• Software license mapping
• Network planning
• Testing and proofs of concept
• Dependency management planning

Summary: Migration planning is a key element of any architect role. This section guides you in integrating new cloud environments with existing systems, planning seamless data and workload migration, and ensuring licensing is managed correctly.

Testing strategies and dependency planning round out the process, equipping you to produce thorough proofs of concept that validate solutions. These skills ensure that migration is not only technically successful but smoothly coordinated with ongoing business operations.

Envisioning future solution improvements.

• Cloud and technology improvements
• Evolution of business needs
• Evangelism and advocacy

Summary: This section highlights the forward-looking responsibilities of the architect role. You learn how to anticipate both technical evolution and shifting business requirements, ensuring that solutions remain adaptable over time.

It also emphasizes the architect’s role in evangelism and advocacy, inspiring teams to adopt beneficial new practices and technologies. Combined, these skills position cloud architects as leaders who champion continual improvement and innovation.

Domain 2: Managing and provisioning a solution infrastructure (15% of the exam)

Configuring network topologies.

• Extending to on-premises environments (hybrid networking)
• Extending to a multicloud environment that may include Google Cloud to Google Cloud communication
• Security protection (e.g. intrusion protection, access control, firewalls)

Summary: Networking is fundamental to cloud deployments, and this section focuses on extending connectivity across diverse environments. Hybrid networking skills let you establish connectivity between on-premises systems and Google Cloud, while multicloud strategies expand that scope even further.

You will also gain insight into implementing security protections like access control and firewalls. This combination ensures you can design end-to-end connectivity that is highly secure, adaptable, and enterprise-ready.

Configuring individual storage systems.

• Data storage allocation
• Data processing/compute provisioning
• Security and access management
• Network configuration for data transfer and latency
• Data retention and data lifecyle management
• Data growth planning

Summary: This section covers all aspects of configuring cloud storage and associated data strategies. You discover how to allocate storage, manage access, optimize performance during transfers, and plan retention policies.

Growth planning and lifecycle management help sustain long-term operations. This ensures the systems you design remain cost-effective and consistently available throughout their entire lifecycle.

Configuring compute systems.

• Compute resource provisioning
• Compute volatility configuration (spot vs. standard)
• Network configuration for compute resources (Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, serverless networking)
• Infrastructure orchestration, resource configuration, and patch management
• Container orchestration

Summary: Configuring compute systems extends your skills into provisioning essential services. It involves distinguishing between options like spot versus standard compute, while aligning network configurations to workloads.

Familiarity with orchestration, patching, and Kubernetes adds depth, ensuring you can build scalable and manageable environments. This allows teams to operate confidently and efficiently, knowing that compute systems are optimized for reliability and scale.

Domain 3: Designing for security and compliance (18% of the exam)

Designing for security.

• Identity and access management (IAM)
• Resource hierarchy (organizations, folders, projects)
• Data security (key management, encryption, secret management)
• Separation of duties (SoD)
• Security controls (e.g., auditing, VPC Service Controls, context aware access, organization policy)
• Managing customer-managed encryption keys with Cloud Key Management Service
• Remote access

Summary: This section emphasizes building strong security into every layer of your cloud designs. It covers identity and access management, resource organization, encryption, and separation of duties, giving you a versatile toolkit for security design.

The integration of controls like auditing and VPC service controls ensures compliance and operational visibility. By practicing security-by-design principles, you strengthen trust and resilience across the enterprise.

Designing for compliance.

• Legislation (e.g., health record privacy, children’s privacy, data privacy, and ownership)
• Commercial (e.g., sensitive data such as credit card information handling, personally identifiable information [PII])
• Industry certifications (e.g., SOC 2)
• Audits (including logs)

Summary: Compliance design goes hand in hand with regulations, and this area teaches you to align architectures with governmental and industry standards. You learn how to enforce protections over sensitive data like PII and credit card transactions while respecting privacy laws.

Audit readiness and certifications ensure customers can demonstrate adherence to required standards. With these skills, you help organizations meet obligations while maintaining operational agility.

Domain 4: Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes (18% of the exam)

Analyzing and defining technical processes.

• Software development life cycle (SDLC)
• Continuous integration / continuous deployment
• Troubleshooting / root cause analysis best practices
• Testing and validation of software and infrastructure
• Service catalog and provisioning
• Business continuity and disaster recovery

Summary: This section focuses on the frameworks and tools to maintain high-performing technical operations. From CI/CD pipelines to troubleshooting strategies, you learn methods to sustain software and infrastructure quality.

Business continuity adds a critical layer of resilience, preparing teams to respond confidently during disruptions and maintain operational integrity. Collectively, these practices deliver trusted, high-value systems.

Analyzing and defining business processes.

• Stakeholder management (e.g. influencing and facilitation)
• Change management
• Team assessment / skills readiness
• Decision-making processes
• Customer success management
• Cost optimization / resource optimization (CapEx / OpEx)

Summary: This section extends into the business side of cloud operations. Stakeholder and change management skills enable teams to build consensus and progress smoothly through transitions.

You will also learn to analyze cost structures and resource optimization processes to improve business value. This enhances your ability to bridge technical outcomes with organizational strategy.

Developing procedures to ensure reliability of solutions in production (e.g., chaos engineering, penetration testing).

• General

Summary: Reliability in production is a cornerstone of successful solutions. In this section, you gain exposure to approaches such as chaos engineering and penetration testing. Each technique is designed to test resilience under stress.

These methods help you cultivate proactive strategies for preventing outages and strengthening security. The result is a production environment team members can trust for both stability and performance.

Domain 5: Managing implementation (11% of the exam)

Advising development/operation teams to ensure successful deployment of the solution.

• Application development
• API management best practices
• Testing frameworks (load/unit/integration)
• Data and system migration and management tooling

Summary: Implementation guidance is critical, and this section emphasizes your role in advising development and operations teams. You will focus on practices such as application development and API management to promote consistent success.

Testing frameworks ensure reliability, while migration tooling supports smooth transitions to cloud systems. This combines to build confidence in implementation steps across delivery cycles.

Interacting with Google Cloud programmatically.

• Cloud Shell
• Google Cloud SDK (gcloud, gsutil and bq)
• Cloud Emulators (e.g. Bigtable, Spanner, Pub/Sub, Firestore)

Summary: Programmatic interaction empowers scalability and automation in operations. This section introduces Cloud Shell, SDKs, and emulators, helping you understand how to interact beyond the console.

By mastering these tools, you reduce manual overhead and introduce development efficiencies. This prepares you to boost productivity and manage cloud environments at scale.

Domain 6: Ensuring solution and operations reliability (14% of the exam)

Monitoring/logging/profiling/alerting solution

• General

Summary: Monitoring and alerting are key for staying ahead of potential issues. This section ensures you can design solutions that detect anomalies and provide early notification.

Profiling and logging enrich context, offering insights to guide root cause analysis and continuous improvement. The result is an environment structured for preventive reliability.

Deployment and release management

• General

Summary: Release management is emphasized here as a structured discipline. You will examine how careful deployments reduce risk while delivering new features at speed.

Sound release practices sustain system performance and customer trust, ensuring feature innovation is balanced with stability.

Assisting with the support of deployed solutions

• General

Summary: Supporting live systems is a responsibility every architect must embrace. This section outlines how to integrate support strategies into post-deployment phases.

You reinforce practices that keep uptime strong and customer experiences smooth. These efforts demonstrate ongoing value of your architecture decisions.

Evaluating quality control measures

• General

Summary: Quality control is essential for long-term system viability. You'll engage with methodologies to evaluate performance, efficiency, and compliance.

Testing these measures allows your teams to validate architectures continuously and maintain alignment with business and customer expectations.