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PCCP - Professional Cloud Certified Professional: Managing and provisioning a cloud solution infrastructure

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Managing and provisioning a cloud solution infrastructure

Managing and provisioning a cloud solution infrastructure

This domain tests how you automate and manage GCP infrastructure: Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, provisioning networks and compute, managing quotas, and using GCP-native admin tooling. Questions often ask for repeatable, auditable, and policy-compliant deployments.

Core rules

  • IaC: Terraform is the recommended declarative tool (state in GCS backend with locking); Config Connector manages GCP resources via Kubernetes manifests; Deployment Manager is GCP-native but less preferred for new work.
  • CI/CD: Cloud Build triggers on source commits; Artifact Registry stores images and packages; Cloud Deploy orchestrates progressive delivery to GKE (canary/blue-green); Binary Authorization enforces only signed images.
  • Provisioning: use projects as isolation boundaries; create with Terraform modules; enforce Org Policy (e.g., location restrictions, disable external IPs); enable APIs before resource creation; use labels for cost/owner.
  • Networking: Shared VPC host/service projects; Cloud NAT for outbound without external IPs; firewall rules with service accounts/tags; Private Service Connect for private access to Google APIs and third-party services.
  • Managing changes: Cloud Asset Inventory for resource history; Config Controller for policy as code; quotas via console/API; budget alerts.

Worked example

A team must deploy a containerized app to GKE across dev and prod with promotion. Reason: Terraform creates projects, VPC, and GKE clusters; Cloud Build builds the image on commit, pushes to Artifact Registry, and runs tests; Cloud Deploy promotes from dev to prod with an approval gate; Binary Authorization ensures only signed images run. This yields repeatable, auditable provisioning.

Traps

Local Terraform state (use GCS backend); using Deployment Manager for new work; forgetting to enable APIs; hardcoding project IDs; sharing projects across environments; ignoring quota limits during autoscaling; not enforcing image signing.