Exam Domain Map
Every sub-objective of the official exam guide, mapped to the pages that cover it. Gap flags mark guide bullets with no notes yet - skim those from the official docs before the exam.
Section 1: Setting up a cloud solution environment (~20%)
1.1 Setting up cloud projects and accounts
- Resource hierarchy - hierarchy, org policies, quotas
- Projects - creating projects, enabling APIs
- Cloud Identity - users and groups, manual and automated
- Members & policies - granting IAM roles within a project
- Interfaces & gcloud - CLI setup, default project
- Regions & zones - verifying product availability by location
- Observability architecture - provisioning observability products
Gaps: Cloud Asset Inventory, Gemini Cloud Assist for resource analysis, setting up standalone organizations.
1.2 Managing billing configuration
- Billing - billing accounts, linking projects, budgets, alerts, exports
- Cost & utilization - cost visibility and optimization
Section 2: Planning and implementing a cloud solution (~30%)
2.1 Planning and implementing compute resources
- Compute overview - choosing between Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, functions
- Machine families and Special VM types - Spot VMs, custom machine types
- VM lifecycle - launching instances, SSH keys, OS Login, availability policy
- Disks & images - Persistent Disk, Hyperdisk
- Instance groups - autoscaled MIGs from instance templates
- GKE - Autopilot, regional and private clusters, kubectl, deploying containerized apps
- Cloud Run and Cloud Run functions - serverless deployment, event triggers
- GPUs & TPUs - identifying whether to use GPUs or TPUs (depth in AI Infrastructure)
Gaps: VM Manager, Agent Runtime on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
2.2 Planning and implementing storage and data solutions
- Choosing a database + per-product pages (Cloud SQL, Spanner, AlloyDB, Firestore, Bigtable, BigQuery)
- Cloud Storage - classes, loading data, Storage Transfer Service
- Filestore and Memorystore
- Messaging & streaming - Pub/Sub
- Data processing - Dataflow, managed Kafka
- Backups & redundancy - multi-region redundancy
Gaps: Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Managed Lustre (name-recognition level).
2.3 Planning and implementing networking resources
- VPC - custom mode, Shared VPC, VPC Network Peering
- Firewall rules - VPC rules and Cloud NGFW policies, tags, service accounts
- Load balancing - choosing and deploying load balancers
- Hybrid connectivity and Cloud VPN - VPN, Interconnect, peering
- Network Service Tiers
- Common network designs
2.4 Planning and implementing resources using tooling
- Terraform section - IaC workflow, state, modules; Infrastructure as code covers Config Connector and Helm
Gaps: Fabric FAST, AI-assisted planning tools (Gemini CLI, Google Antigravity, Gemini Cloud Assist, Application Design Center).
Section 3: Ensuring the successful operation of a cloud solution (~30%)
3.1 Managing compute resources
- VM lifecycle - connecting remotely, viewing running instances
- Disks & images - snapshots and images, snapshot schedules
- Working with clusters and Introspection - cluster inventory, node pools, Pods/Services/StatefulSets
- Container images - Artifact Registry access
- Revisions & traffic - new versions, traffic splitting
- Autoscaling - Cloud Run scaling parameters; GKE HPA/VPA in GKE
Gaps: Cloud Workstations, Agent Runtime deployment, notebooks in Workbench/BigQuery.
3.2 Managing storage and data solutions
- Cloud Storage - securing objects, lifecycle policies, cost estimation
- Backups & redundancy - backing up and restoring database instances
- Encryption & CMEK
- Data processing - reviewing Dataflow/BigQuery job status
- Per-database pages - executing queries against Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Spanner, Firestore, AlloyDB
Gaps: Database Center (fleet management).
3.3 Managing networking resources
- VPC - adding/expanding subnets, custom static routes
- IP addresses - reserving static internal/external IPs
- DNS, NAT & IPs - Cloud DNS, Cloud NAT
- Firewall rules - managing VPC rules and NGFW policies
3.4 Monitoring and logging
- Observability architecture - the product family, Ops Agent, Managed Prometheus
- Cloud Monitoring - metrics, custom metrics, dashboards
- Alerting & SLOs - alerts on resource metrics
- Cloud Logging - viewing/filtering logs, log buckets, analytics, routers, exports
- Audit logs - configuring audit, VPC Flow, firewall logs
- Diagnostics - Trace, Profiler, Personalized Service Health, Cloud Hub
- Cost & utilization - Active Assist recommendations
Gaps: Gemini Cloud Assist for Cloud Monitoring.
Section 4: Configuring access and security (~20%)
4.1 Managing IAM
- Roles - basic/predefined/custom role types
- Members & policies - viewing/creating policies, inheritance in the hierarchy
- IAM best practices
4.2 Managing service accounts
- Service accounts - creating, minimum permissions, attaching to resources, impersonation, short-lived credentials
- Workload Identity Federation - keyless auth, GKE Workload Identity
- Cloud Run service identity - service accounts on serverless