Case Study Workbook: Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect ([Candidate or study group])

Preparation workbook for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect exam. It maps the six sections of the official exam guide (with their published weights) to your own evidence, gives a reusable frame for analysing any case study (business requirements, technical requirements, constraints, current state, proposed architecture, service choices, Well-Architected pillar check, security and compliance, migration, cost, trade-offs) and works that frame through once on a fictional company written for this template. It follows the exam guide linked from the certification page as checked on 2026-10-23 (successor to guide v6.1, October 2025) and the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework (six pillars). It does not contain any text from the official case studies: read them at the source. Replace every [bracketed] value and every row marked Example.

Document control

Approvals

Revision history

Contents

1. Purpose and exam facts
2. Exam guide coverage map
3. Case study register
4. Analysis frame and worked company
5. Business and technical requirements
6. Current state and constraints
7. Proposed architecture and service choices
8. Well-Architected pillar check
9. Security, compliance and AI safeguards
10. Migration plan
11. Cost view
12. Trade-offs and decision log
13. Practice question log
14. Readiness tracker and exam-day plan
15. Glossary and references

1. Purpose and exam facts

This workbook turns the exam guide into a study plan and turns each case study into a structured architecture analysis. The exam rewards candidates who read a business situation, separate what the business needs from what the technology must do, and pick the Google Cloud service that satisfies the stated requirement with the least operational burden. The frame in this workbook trains exactly that habit.

1.1 Exam facts as published

1.2 How the workbook fits a study cycle

Repeat the loop until the readiness gate in section 14 is met; each pass should shrink the weighted gaps found in section 2.

1.3 Rules for this workbook

• Summarise the official case studies in your own words. Keep the official PDFs beside the workbook; do not paste their text here, and do not share copies of them.
• Write every practice question yourself. Do not record or share real exam questions; that breaches the exam agreement and invalidates the certification.
• When a product name in your notes differs from the current guide, use the current guide name and note the old one in brackets. Example: the guide linked in October 2026 uses Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform where guide v6.1 used Vertex AI.

2. Exam guide coverage map

The guide linked from the certification page on 2026-10-23 gives six sections with approximate weights. The earlier guide v6.1 (October 2025) used slightly different weights and is shown for comparison so that you can spot which version a course was built on.

2.1 Subsection self-assessment

Subsection topics are summarised in original short wording. Check the exact scope in the guide.

Example: subsection 1.1 rated 3 gives 25 x (5 - 3) = 50; subsection 6.3 rated 2 gives 12.5 x 3 = 37.5, so 1.1 is studied first.

3. Case study register

For each official case study, write a half-page summary in your own words under four headings: what the company sells and to whom, what is broken today, what leadership wants within which time frame, and which rules bind it (regulation, contracts, data location). Then copy only the requirement IDs into the tables in section 5.

4. Analysis frame and worked company

4.1 The eleven-step frame

4.2 Worked company brief (fictional)

Example: Halden Cold Chain is a fictional refrigerated freight company invented for this template. It runs 4,000 temperature-controlled trucks across the European Union and the United States, serving food and pharmaceutical shippers. It operates from two leased data centres; the lease on the larger one ends in 18 months and will not be renewed. Dispatch runs on a containerised Java application on a self-managed Kubernetes cluster; billing and contracts run on an Oracle database on VMware virtual machines; truck telemetry (position, reefer temperature, door events) arrives every 30 seconds through a message broker that drops data at peak. Shippers complain that the tracking portal is slow and that temperature excursion alerts arrive late. The board wants a shipper self-service portal with predicted arrival times and a natural-language assistant that answers "where is my load and is it within temperature". Pharmaceutical customers require audit evidence of temperature history for seven years, and EU shipper data must stay in the EU. The IT team of 25 knows VMware, Java and SQL well and has little cloud experience.

5. Business and technical requirements

5.1 Business requirements

5.2 Technical requirements

Example: 4,000 trucks x 2,880 messages per day (one every 30 seconds) = 11,520,000 messages per day. At about 1 KB per message that is about 11.5 GB per day and about 4.2 TB per year of raw telemetry, so seven years of pharmaceutical history is a storage-class and lifecycle decision, not a database sizing problem.

6. Current state and constraints

6.1 Current state

6.2 Constraints

7. Proposed architecture and service choices

7.1 Target architecture

Example: the target for Halden Cold Chain separates the telemetry path from the portal path so that a burst of truck messages cannot slow shipper pages, and keeps one deployment per geography to satisfy CN-002.

7.2 Service choices with rationale

8. Well-Architected pillar check

The framework also offers cross-pillar perspectives (AI and ML, Financial services). Apply the AI and ML perspective to any case study that includes generative AI, as the worked assistant does.

9. Security, compliance and AI safeguards

Compliance note: record which laws and certifications the case study names (health records, children's privacy, card data, sovereignty, SOC 2) and which Google Cloud compliance offerings support them. Shared responsibility still applies: the provider's certification does not certify your workload.

10. Migration plan

Plan cutovers with the Cutover Plan (project/cutover-plan) and the Migration Wave Plan (project/migration-wave-plan), and reconcile data with Data Migration Reconciliation (project/data-migration-reconciliation).

11. Cost view

Business case framing: compare data centre exit costs (lease, hardware refresh avoided, staff time) with the cloud run rate in CapEx and OpEx terms, and state the success measures from section 5 that justify the spend.

12. Trade-offs and decision log

13. Practice question log

14. Readiness tracker and exam-day plan

14.1 Readiness gate

14.2 Exam-day plan

• Re-read your own case study summaries the day before, not the product documentation.
• With 120 minutes for 50 to 60 questions, budget about 2 minutes per question; mark long ones for review and return.
• For a case study question, find the requirement ID or constraint that the question touches before you read the options.
• Eliminate options that break a stated constraint, then options that add self-managed components without need, then choose between the remaining ones on the qualifier in the stem (cheapest, fastest, least operations, most secure).
• For multiple-select items, check the stem for the exact number of answers.

15. Glossary and references

15.1 Glossary

15.2 References

Standard and licence note

Structure aligned with the section outline and weights of the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect exam guide (as linked from the certification page on 2026-10-23, successor to guide v6.1 of October 2025) and with the six pillars of the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework. Only section names, weights, pillar names and the names of the official case studies are used; no case study text, exam guide text or exam questions are reproduced. The analysis frame, the fictional company Halden Cold Chain and all practice questions are original text written for this collection. Check the current exam guide, case studies and product names on the official certification page before use. Google, Google Cloud and the product names used here are trademarks of their owners; this template is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Template licence: MIT.