GCP PCA Mind Map

Professional Cloud Architect · active recall

GCP PCA Curriculum→ 6 pillars · click a node to deep-dive

Compute Engine

IaaS virtual machines

3

Google Kubernetes Engine

Managed Kubernetes

3

Cloud Run

Serverless containers

3

Cloud Run Functions

Event-driven functions

2

App Engine

Managed PaaS platform

Cloud SQL

Managed OLTP relational (MySQL / PostgreSQL / SQL Server)

3

Cloud Spanner

Globally-distributed, horizontally-scaling relational (ACID)

3

Cloud Bigtable

Petabyte-scale wide-column NoSQL, sub-10 ms latency

3

BigQuery

Serverless petabyte-scale OLAP data warehouse

4

Firestore

Serverless document NoSQL with realtime sync & offline

2

Cloud Storage

Unified object storage with lifecycle tiers

3

Memorystore

Managed Redis / Memcached in-memory cache

2

Virtual Private Cloud

Global software-defined network

Cloud Load Balancing

Global / regional load balancers

3

Cloud CDN

Edge content caching

2

Cloud DNS

Managed authoritative DNS

Cloud Interconnect

Dedicated hybrid connectivity

Cloud NAT

Managed outbound NAT

Cloud IAM

Roles, policies & service accounts

VPC Service Controls

Data exfiltration perimeter

2

Cloud KMS

Managed encryption keys (CMEK)

Secret Manager

Secrets & credential storage

Cloud Armor

WAF & DDoS protection

1

Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)

Context-aware app access

3

Cloud Monitoring

Metrics, dashboards & alerting

Cloud Logging

Centralized log management

Cloud Build

Managed CI/CD builds

Cloud Deploy

Managed continuous delivery

Infrastructure Manager

Terraform-based IaC

Database Migration Service

Near-zero-downtime DB migration

1

Cloud Pub/Sub

Global async messaging

3

Cloud Dataflow

Serverless stream & batch (Beam)

4

Cloud Dataproc

Managed Spark & Hadoop

Looker

Enterprise BI & modeling

1

Vertex AI

Unified ML platform

Cloud Composer

Managed Airflow orchestration

Cloud Data Fusion

Visual ETL / ELT pipelines