Description
GCP Architect Overview and Skill Progression
Google Cloud Architect designs and governs cloud solutions that meet business goals for scalability, reliability, and cost‑efficiency.
Core platform knowledge: compute (Compute Engine, GKE), storage (Cloud Storage, Filestore), and networking (VPC, Cloud Load Balancing).
Identity and security: IAM design, organization policies, KMS, and secure service‑to‑service authentication patterns.
Data and analytics: designing pipelines with BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, and choosing storage/processing patterns for latency and cost.
Application modernization: containerization, Kubernetes orchestration, serverless options (Cloud Run, Cloud Functions) and migration strategies.
Resilience and availability: multi‑region architecture, disaster recovery planning, SLO/SLA definition, and automated failover.
Cost management: budgeting, committed use discounts, right‑sizing, and designing for predictable spend.
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Deployment Manager, and CI/CD pipelines for repeatable, auditable deployments.
Observability and operations: Stackdriver/Cloud Monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting integrated into runbooks.
Networking advanced topics: hybrid connectivity (VPN, Interconnect), private services access, and traffic engineering.
Compliance and governance: policy frameworks, audit logging, and designing architectures that meet regulatory requirements.
Migration expertise: lift‑and‑shift vs refactor decisions, migration tools, and phased cutover strategies.
Security operations: threat modeling, incident response playbooks, and automated remediation patterns.
Advanced integrations: ML/AI services, BigQuery ML, and event‑driven architectures for real‑time business use cases.
Leadership and cross‑team skills: translating business requirements into technical roadmaps, stakeholder communication, and cost/benefit tradeoffs.
Certification and continuous learning: preparing for Professional Cloud Architect and staying current with Google’s evolving services.
Experience focus areas differ: juniors master core services and IaC; mid‑level own end‑to‑end solutions; seniors and architects lead strategy, governance, and large‑scale migrations.
