About This Study Plan
This 7-day study plan breaks the PCD (Cloud Developer) exam preparation into 7 focused study sessions with 28 actionable tasks. The plan covers all 5 exam domains — Designing Cloud-Native Applications, Building and Testing, Deploying Applications, Integrating Services, Managing Performance — ensuring complete coverage. Intensive 7-day review for the Google Professional Cloud Developer exam covering application development, deployment, and GCP-native services.
Prerequisites
- Cloud development experience
- Familiarity with one GCP SDK
- 5–7 hours per day
Study Schedule
- Microservices vs monolith architecture decisions
- 12-factor app principles on GCP
- API design: REST, gRPC, and Cloud Endpoints
- Choosing compute: Cloud Run, App Engine, GKE, Cloud Functions
- Cloud Build: build configs, triggers, and pipelines
- Container development: Dockerfiles, Cloud Build, and Artifact Registry
- Testing strategies: unit, integration, and end-to-end on GCP
- Local development with emulators (Firestore, Pub/Sub, Spanner)
- Choosing databases: Cloud SQL, Spanner, Firestore, Bigtable
- Cloud Storage: object lifecycle, signed URLs, and access control
- Caching strategies: Memorystore (Redis/Memcached)
- Data modeling for NoSQL (Firestore) and relational (Spanner)
- Pub/Sub: topics, subscriptions, ordering, and dead-letter topics
- Cloud Tasks and Cloud Scheduler for async processing
- Eventarc for event-driven architectures
- Workflows for service orchestration
- IAM for applications: service accounts, workload identity
- Secret Manager for credentials and configuration
- Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring: custom metrics and alerts
- Error Reporting, Cloud Trace, and Cloud Profiler
- Take a full practice exam
- Review all incorrect answers
- Focus on service selection for development scenarios
- Review CI/CD and deployment patterns
- Service selection for developers cheat sheet
- CI/CD pipeline reference
- Pub/Sub patterns
- Rest before exam
Study Tips
Think like a developer, not an architect — the exam focuses on building and deploying.
Know Pub/Sub deeply — message ordering, exactly-once, and dead-letter patterns.
Cloud Run is featured heavily — understand its deployment model and configuration.
Recommended Google Cloud Study Resources
Supplement this study plan with Google Cloud Skills Boost, which provides structured learning paths aligned to each certification. The Google Cloud documentation is exceptionally detailed and frequently referenced in exam questions. Take advantage of the free $300 credit for new GCP accounts to build real projects during your study period.
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with Cloud Developer practice questions.