Interview, certification, and glossary
Use CLUSTER to answer design questions:
- Context: outcome, users, data, scale, existing systems.
- Levels of reliability: SLO, RTO, RPO, failure scope.
- Users and identities: IAM, RBAC, workload identity, tenants.
- Services and state: workloads, traffic, storage, dependencies.
- Trust and threats: supply chain, network, policy, secrets.
- Elasticity and economics: requests, scaling, quota, unit cost.
- Rollout and recovery: delivery, observability, upgrades, DR.
Professional Cloud Architect checkpoint
Google's standard Professional Cloud Architect exam is two hours with 50–60 multiple-choice and multiple-select questions. It includes two case studies; case-study questions make up 20–30%. This site uses one 60-question original GKE-heavy mock and two fictional case studies. It is practice, not copied exam content.
Official source: Professional Cloud Architect certification.
Compact glossary
| Term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Autopilot | GKE mode where Google manages node infrastructure and many defaults |
| Standard | GKE mode with customer-managed node pools and more control |
| Cluster | Kubernetes control plane plus registered compute |
| Node | Worker machine that runs Pods |
| Pod | Smallest Kubernetes scheduled unit |
| Deployment | Reconciles and rolls out stateless Pods |
| StatefulSet | Workload with stable identity and ordered behavior |
| Service | Stable discovery and virtual endpoint for Pods |
| Gateway API | Kubernetes traffic-routing API with role separation |
| HPA | Changes Pod replica count from metrics |
| VPA | Recommends or changes Pod resource requests |
| PDB | Limits voluntary concurrent Pod disruption |
| RBAC | Kubernetes role-based authorization |
| IAM | Google Cloud authorization |
| WIF | Workload Identity Federation; keyless workload access |
| CSI | Container Storage Interface |
| CNI | Container Network Interface |
| SLO | Measurable reliability target |
| RTO | Maximum acceptable recovery time |
| RPO | Maximum acceptable data loss measured in time |
Official references
- GKE documentation
- GKE best practices
- Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework
- GKE security best practices
- Autopilot and Standard comparison
- GKE fleets
Features, versions, limits, and certification formats change. Verify production details in current official documentation.