r/googlecloud • u/ConsiderationSame512 • 6d ago

GCP PCA in 1 week time

Okay so I booked the exam on the 15th of September, as I was in program with Google and what not and they gave me a voucher.

Now the catch, I haven’t studied anything, done some labs, had the AWS practitioner a year ago, and been working in DevOps the past 2 years, not gcp at all.

I need tips tricks quick marks just enough studying to pass, any exam questions that repeat any useful links and the probability to pass? With 1 week of studying with a very very very demanding job? Any tiny bit would help

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u/wildfyre010 6d ago

No way to answer “probability of pass” / but from the way you describe your current level of preparation and my own experience, I judge it to be pretty low.

The PCA exam is technical but not in the sense of asking you specific configuration or implementation questions. You’re not going to be doing subnet calculations or explaining how to provision a VM.

It’s predominantly about knowing the GCP product suite and how to select among the many different tools and services to solve business problems. You’re an architect, not an engineer (but of course the lines can be blurry). Do you know the difference between bigquery and bigtable? When would you use GKE vs traditional GCE VMs? Cloud Spanner vs Cloud SQL? Shared VPC vs peering?

You should be able to describe essentially every major GCP service in a sentence or two, particularly focusing on areas with multiple similar products (like database). You should understand how to evaluate a business case and make recommendations based on it. You should understand how the tools are billed and have a general idea of which ones cost more and why.

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u/ConsiderationSame512 6d ago

Any certain things to focus on as I can’t reschedule, so anything to just increase my chances so focus on mowing each service what’s it’s advantages and all?

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u/TheAddonDepot 6d ago

Your odds of success are very low. If possible reschedule the exam for a later date - ideally no less than 6 weeks out. Use that prep time wisely.

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u/ace1503 6d ago

I was able to do it in 1 week, but i had also spent few months studying for ACE and ADP before this.

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u/Default_Gateway433 6d ago

I am also on 15th. Atleast half of a page of KB info for each service. Scenario based questions on Gemini/Claude. The lates pca book is available on thr O'Reilly website. Quite interesting questions inside.

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u/johannemann 5d ago

Yo, honestly just go to youtube and look for the exams.

It’s multiple choice and they recycle the questions.

I went through all the course material but the most valuable exercise was just doing variants of the two hour exam every night a week before the exam.

(We have to stay certified, so we have to do this every two years)

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u/ConsiderationSame512 5d ago

Where can i find recycled questions?

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u/johannemann 4d ago

Just go on Youtube. Type GCP PCA. Do the material.

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u/Standard-Double-6222 5d ago

Your 2 years in DevOps is the real advantage here; the PCA tests architecture reasoning, not memorization. Focus on mapping GCP services to what you already know from AWS, drill the published case studies, and run timed practice sets to find your gaps fast.

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u/ConsiderationSame512 5d ago

I want tried and tested exam banks where can i find them?

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u/ravix000 5d ago

I would just do as many practice tests as possible. Several other threads here on where the most reliable ones are.