Overview
The PCA exam tests your ability to design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, and cost-effective solutions on Google Cloud. Unlike associate-level certifications that test service knowledge in isolation, PCA presents complex business scenarios with two case studies that make up 20-30% of the exam.
The case studies are where most candidates lose or gain their passing score. Each case study describes a realistic business situation with multiple requirements. You must apply architectural judgment across compute, data, networking, and security services while balancing cost, compliance, and operational constraints. The case studies are available on a split screen during the exam, so practice reading them efficiently.
| Domain |
Description |
| Design and plan a cloud solution architecture |
Business requirements, technical requirements, network, storage, compute |
| Manage and provision the cloud solution infrastructure |
IaC, CI/CD, resource provisioning, configuration management |
| Design for security and compliance |
IAM, data protection, network security, regulatory compliance |
| Analyze and optimize technical and business processes |
Business process analysis, cost optimization, capacity planning |
| Manage implementations of cloud architecture |
Stakeholder management, project planning, deployment strategy |
| Ensure solution and operations excellence |
Monitoring, incident response, SLOs, disaster recovery |
Google does not publish domain weights for this exam. The six domains above cover the full scope. Questions frequently span multiple domains within a single scenario.
Recommended experience: 3+ years of industry experience including 1+ years designing and managing solutions using Google Cloud. Familiarity with the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework and its six pillars (operational excellence, security, reliability, performance optimization, cost optimization, sustainability).