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Google Cloud Platform Syllabus
Roadmap to Google Cloud Platform Expert. The full Google Cloud Platform syllabus: 6 chapters, 18 topics and 70 sub-topics, with 51 flashcards written against it.
Google Cloud Platform syllabus — full chapter and topic list
Expand any chapter to see its topics and sub-topics. This is the whole examinable outline for Google Cloud Platform, not a summary of it.
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Introduction to Google Cloud
3 topics- Overview of Cloud Computing
- What is Cloud Computing?
- Benefits of Cloud Computing
- Types of Cloud Services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
- Introduction to Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- What is Google Cloud Platform?
- Key Features of GCP
- GCP Global Infrastructure
- Getting Started with GCP
- Creating a GCP Account
- Navigating the GCP Console
- Setting Up Billing and Budgets
- Overview of Cloud Computing
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Core GCP Services
5 topics- Compute Services
- Google Compute Engine
- Google Kubernetes Engine
- Google App Engine
- Google Cloud Functions
- Storage Services
- Google Cloud Storage
- Google Cloud SQL
- Google Cloud Spanner
- Google Bigtable
- Google Firestore
- Networking Services
- Google Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- Cloud Load Balancing
- Cloud CDN
- Cloud DNS
- Cloud Interconnect
- Big Data Services
- Google BigQuery
- Google Dataflow
- Google Dataproc
- Google Pub/Sub
- Google Data Studio
- Machine Learning and AI Services
- Google AI Platform
- Google AutoML
- Google Cloud Vision
- Google Cloud Speech-to-Text
- Google Cloud Text-to-Speech
- Google Cloud Translation
- Compute Services
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GCP Management Tools
3 topics- Google Cloud IAM
- Understanding IAM
- Creating and Managing IAM Policies
- Service Accounts and Roles
- Google Cloud Monitoring
- Setting Up Monitoring
- Creating Dashboards and Alerts
- Using Logs and Traces
- Google Cloud Deployment Manager
- Introduction to Deployment Manager
- Creating Deployment Templates
- Managing Deployments
- Google Cloud IAM
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Security and Compliance
2 topics- Google Cloud Security
- Understanding GCP Security Model
- Data Encryption
- Network Security
- Identity and Access Management
- Compliance and Governance
- Regulatory Compliance
- Governance Policies
- Audit and Reporting
- Google Cloud Security
-
Advanced Topics
3 topics- Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Strategies
- Understanding Hybrid Cloud
- Implementing Multi-Cloud Solutions
- Google Anthos
- Serverless Architectures
- Introduction to Serverless
- Building Serverless Applications
- Use Cases for Serverless
- DevOps on GCP
- CI/CD Pipelines
- Infrastructure as Code
- Monitoring and Logging
- Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Strategies
-
Certifications and Learning Resources
2 topics- GCP Certifications
- Associate Cloud Engineer
- Professional Cloud Architect
- Professional Data Engineer
- Professional Cloud Developer
- Professional Cloud Network Engineer
- Professional Cloud Security Engineer
- Professional Collaboration Engineer
- Learning Resources
- Official GCP Documentation
- Google Cloud Training
- Online Courses and Tutorials
- Community and Forums
- GCP Certifications
Google Cloud Platform flashcards
The complete Google Cloud Platform deck: 51 questions with worked answers.
What is cloud computing?
The on-demand delivery of computing resources (servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics) over the internet, with pay-as-you-go pricing instead of owning and maintaining physical infrastructure.
Name the three main cloud service models and what each provides.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) — virtualized compute, storage, networking (e.g., Compute Engine); PaaS (Platform as a Service) — managed runtime/platform for apps (e.g., App Engine); SaaS (Software as a Service) — ready-to-use applications (e.g., Google Workspace).
What are the four main cloud deployment models?
Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud (mix of public and private), and multi-cloud (using more than one cloud provider).
List five essential characteristics of cloud computing (NIST).
On-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service (metered usage).
What is the difference between vertical and horizontal scaling?
Vertical scaling (scale up) adds more power (CPU/RAM) to a single machine; horizontal scaling (scale out) adds more machines/instances to distribute load.
What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?
Google's suite of public cloud computing services running on the same infrastructure Google uses internally, offering compute, storage, networking, big data, machine learning, and management tools.
How is the GCP resource hierarchy organized from top to bottom?
Organization → Folders → Projects → Resources. Projects are the base-level organizing entity to which resources belong.
What is a GCP Project and what identifiers does it have?
A project is the fundamental container for GCP resources. It has a unique Project ID (user-chosen, immutable), a Project Name (mutable), and a Project Number (auto-generated).
What is a GCP region versus a zone?
A region is a specific geographic location (e.g., us-central1); a zone is an isolated deployment area within a region (e.g., us-central1-a). Regions contain multiple zones for high availability.
What are the main ways to interact with GCP?
The Google Cloud Console (web UI), the gcloud CLI (Cloud SDK), Cloud Shell (browser-based terminal), client libraries/SDKs, and the REST APIs.
What is Google Compute Engine (GCE)?
GCP's IaaS offering that provides scalable virtual machines (VMs) running in Google's data centers, with configurable machine types, disks, and networking.
What are preemptible/Spot VMs in Compute Engine?
Short-lived, low-cost VM instances that Google can reclaim (preempt) at any time when capacity is needed. They offer large discounts and suit fault-tolerant, batch workloads.
What is Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)?
A managed Kubernetes service for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications, handling the control plane and node management for you.
What is Google App Engine?
A fully managed PaaS for building and deploying applications without managing the underlying infrastructure, offering Standard (sandboxed runtimes) and Flexible (Docker containers) environments.
What is a sustained use discount in Compute Engine?
An automatic discount applied when you run a VM for a significant portion of the billing month; the longer the instance runs, the greater the discount (up to ~30% for general-purpose machines).
What is a Managed Instance Group (MIG)?
A group of identical VM instances created from an instance template that supports autoscaling, autohealing, rolling updates, and load balancing for stateless or stateful workloads.
What are the four storage classes in Google Cloud Storage?
Standard (hot, frequent access), Nearline (access < once/month), Coldline (access < once/quarter), and Archive (long-term, access < once/year).
What is a bucket in Google Cloud Storage?
The basic container that holds objects (files) in Cloud Storage. Each bucket has a globally unique name, a location, and a default storage class.
Compare Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner.
Cloud SQL is a managed relational database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) for regional workloads; Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, horizontally scalable relational database with strong consistency and high availability.
What is Cloud Bigtable used for?
A fully managed, NoSQL wide-column database designed for large analytical and operational workloads with high throughput and low latency (e.g., time-series, IoT, financial data).
Show the other 31 Google Cloud Platform flashcards
What is the difference between Firestore and Cloud Storage?
Firestore is a NoSQL document database for structured application data with querying and real-time sync; Cloud Storage is object storage for unstructured blobs like images, videos, and backups.
What are the persistent disk types available in Compute Engine?
Standard persistent disks (HDD), Balanced persistent disks (SSD, cost-balanced), SSD persistent disks (high performance), and Extreme persistent disks (highest IOPS).
What is a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) in GCP?
A global, private, software-defined network that provides connectivity for your resources, with subnets defined per region, firewall rules, and routing.
What is the difference between an internal and external IP address in GCP?
An internal IP is used for private communication within a VPC; an external (public) IP allows resources to be reached from the internet.
What are the types of Cloud Load Balancing in GCP?
Global external HTTP(S) LB, external/internal TCP/UDP (network) LB, internal HTTP(S) LB, and SSL Proxy/TCP Proxy load balancers — split into global and regional, external and internal.
What is Cloud CDN?
Google Cloud's Content Delivery Network that caches content at globally distributed edge points of presence to reduce latency and offload origin servers.
What is Cloud Interconnect versus Cloud VPN?
Cloud Interconnect provides a dedicated or partner physical connection between on-premises and GCP with high bandwidth; Cloud VPN provides an encrypted IPsec tunnel over the public internet.
What is BigQuery?
A fully managed, serverless, petabyte-scale data warehouse for fast SQL analytics, with separated storage and compute and a pay-per-query or flat-rate pricing model.
What is Cloud Dataflow?
A fully managed service for stream and batch data processing based on the Apache Beam programming model, using a unified pipeline for both.
What is Cloud Pub/Sub?
A globally scalable, asynchronous messaging service that decouples senders and receivers using a publish/subscribe model for event ingestion and delivery.
Compare Cloud Dataproc and Cloud Dataflow.
Dataproc is a managed Hadoop/Spark cluster service (good for lift-and-shift of existing Spark/Hadoop jobs); Dataflow is serverless, autoscaling, and built on Apache Beam for new unified batch/stream pipelines.
What is Cloud Composer?
A managed workflow orchestration service built on Apache Airflow, used to author, schedule, and monitor data pipelines across GCP and other services.
What is Vertex AI?
Google Cloud's unified machine learning platform for building, training, tuning, and deploying ML models, combining AutoML and custom training with MLOps tools.
What is AutoML in GCP?
A suite of products that lets users train high-quality custom ML models with minimal ML expertise, using Google's neural architecture search and transfer learning.
Name three pre-trained ML APIs offered by GCP.
Cloud Vision API (image analysis), Cloud Natural Language API (text/sentiment), and Speech-to-Text / Text-to-Speech APIs (plus Translation API and Video Intelligence API).
What are the three core components of Google Cloud IAM?
Members/principals (who), Roles (a collection of permissions — what actions), and the Policy that binds roles to members on a resource.
What are the three types of IAM roles in GCP?
Basic (primitive) roles — Owner, Editor, Viewer; Predefined roles — granular, service-specific; and Custom roles — user-defined sets of permissions.
What is a service account in GCP?
A special account used by an application or VM (not a person) to authenticate and make authorized API calls to GCP services, identified by an email and using keys or attached identity.
What is the principle of least privilege in IAM?
Granting each user or service account only the minimum permissions needed to perform its tasks, reducing security risk from over-provisioned access.
What is Google Cloud Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver)?
A set of integrated monitoring, logging, and diagnostics tools including Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, Cloud Profiler, and Error Reporting.
What is the difference between Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging?
Cloud Monitoring collects metrics, dashboards, uptime checks, and alerts on performance/health; Cloud Logging collects, stores, and searches log entries from applications and infrastructure.
What is an SLI, SLO, and SLA in the context of monitoring?
SLI (Service Level Indicator) is a measured metric (e.g., latency); SLO (Service Level Objective) is a target value/range for an SLI; SLA (Service Level Agreement) is the contractual commitment with consequences if the SLO is not met.
What is Google Cloud Deployment Manager?
An infrastructure-as-code service that lets you define, deploy, and manage GCP resources declaratively using YAML configuration files with Jinja2 or Python templates.
How does Deployment Manager differ from Terraform?
Deployment Manager is Google's native, GCP-only IaC tool using YAML/Python/Jinja2; Terraform is a third-party (HashiCorp) multi-cloud IaC tool using HCL that works across many providers.
What is Cloud KMS (Key Management Service)?
A managed service for creating, rotating, and managing cryptographic keys used to encrypt data, supporting software and hardware (HSM) protection levels.
What is the difference between Google-managed encryption keys and CMEK?
Google-managed keys are handled automatically by Google with no user action; CMEK (Customer-Managed Encryption Keys) let customers control key rotation and lifecycle via Cloud KMS.
What is the shared responsibility model in cloud security?
A framework where the cloud provider secures the underlying infrastructure ('security of the cloud') and the customer secures their data, access, and configurations ('security in the cloud').
What are compliance certifications GCP supports for governance? Name three.
Examples include ISO 27001, SOC 1/2/3, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and FedRAMP — helping organizations meet regulatory and audit requirements.
What is Anthos in GCP?
Google's hybrid and multi-cloud application platform built on GKE and Kubernetes, enabling you to build, deploy, and manage applications consistently across on-premises, GCP, and other clouds.
What are the main serverless compute options on GCP?
Cloud Functions (event-driven functions), Cloud Run (containerized stateless services), and App Engine Standard (managed apps) — you pay only for actual usage with no server management.
Which GCP certification is the entry-level fundamentals exam, and name two associate/professional certs?
Cloud Digital Leader is the foundational cert; the Associate Cloud Engineer is associate-level; Professional certs include Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Data Engineer.
Google Cloud Platform syllabus FAQ
What is in the Google Cloud Platform syllabus?
The Google Cloud Platform syllabus is split into 6 chapters: Introduction to Google Cloud, Core GCP Services, GCP Management Tools, Security and Compliance, Advanced Topics and Certifications and Learning Resources. Together they contain 18 topics and 70 sub-topics.
How many chapters and topics are in the Google Cloud Platform syllabus?
6 chapters and 18 topics, broken down further into 70 sub-topics. The largest chapter is Core GCP Services, with 5 topics.
Are there Google Cloud Platform flashcards?
Yes — 51 question-and-answer flashcards, printed in full on this page and available in the Examius app with spaced repetition. The free plan covers one exam of your choice, including its flashcards; Examius Pro, a one-time purchase, unlocks every other exam and deck.
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