Google Cloud

GCP PCA Mind Map

Professional Cloud Architect · active recall

GCP PCA Curriculum→ 6 pillars + decision guides · 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

Persistent Disks

Network block storage for VMs

3

Spot (Preemptible) VMs

Deep-discount interruptible compute

3

Sole-tenant Nodes

Dedicated physical hosts for VMs

2

Anthos

Managed hybrid & multi-cloud platform

3

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

Filestore

Managed NFS file storage

3

Datastore

Legacy document DB (now Firestore)

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 VPN

Encrypted IPsec tunnels to on-prem

3

Cloud Router

Dynamic BGP routing for hybrid

3

Shared VPC

One network shared across projects

3

VPC Peering

Private VPC-to-VPC connectivity

3

Private Google Access

Reach Google APIs without external IPs

3

Private Service Connect

Private endpoints to services & APIs

3

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 Identity

Users, groups & SSO for Google Cloud

3

Resource Manager

Org → Folders → Projects hierarchy

3

Service Accounts

Machine identities for workloads

3

Organization Policy Service

Central guardrails on resource config

3

Security Command Center

Central security & risk dashboard

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 Operations Suite

Monitoring, logging, tracing, SRE

3

Cloud Audit Logs

Who did what, where and when

3

Artifact Registry

Managed container & package repo

3

Cloud Shell & SDK

Browser CLI and gcloud tooling

2

Cloud Billing

Accounts, budgets & cost export

3

Storage Transfer Service

Managed online data transfer to GCS

3

Transfer Appliance

Offline bulk data shipping

3

Migrate to Virtual Machines

Lift-and-shift servers to Compute Engine

3

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 + generative-AI platform

3

Pre-trained AI APIs

Ready-made ML via API

1

Cloud Composer

Managed Airflow orchestration

Cloud Data Fusion

Visual ETL / ELT pipelines

Eventarc

Route CloudEvents to serverless targets

3

On-prem ↔ VPC Connectivity

guide

VPN vs Interconnect vs Peering — which link?

2

VPC ↔ VPC Connectivity

guide

Peering vs Shared VPC vs NCC vs PSC

2

Migration Path Selector

guide

DMS vs M2VM vs Transfer vs Appliance

3

DR Strategy (RTO / RPO)

guide

Backup → pilot light → warm → hot multi-region

3

Cost Optimization Levers

guide

CUD vs SUD vs Spot vs autoscaling vs tiers

3

HA / Deployment Scope

guide

Zonal vs regional vs multi-region

3

Compute Platform Chooser

guide

GCE vs GKE vs Cloud Run vs Functions vs App Engine

5

Load Balancer Chooser

guide

Global vs regional · L7 vs L4 · external vs internal

3

Data Processing Chooser

guide

Dataflow vs Dataproc vs Data Fusion vs Composer vs BigQuery

5

Storage & Database Chooser

guide

Object · relational · global · document · wide-column · analytics · cache

7

Compliance & Regulation Mapping

guide

Requirement → the GCP control that satisfies it

4