About This Study Plan
This 90-day study plan breaks the PCD (Cloud Developer) exam preparation into 3 focused study sessions with 12 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. Comprehensive 90-day plan for the Google Professional Cloud Developer exam.
Prerequisites
- Programming fundamentals
- 1–2 hours per day
Study Schedule
- Weeks 1–2: GCP basics and setting up your development environment
- Week 3: Compute services — deploy apps on Cloud Run and App Engine
- Week 4: Data services — Cloud SQL, Firestore, and Cloud Storage
- End of month: Working application deployed on GCP
- Week 5: Microservices, containers, and GKE basics
- Week 6: Messaging — Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, and event-driven design
- Week 7: CI/CD with Cloud Build and deployment strategies
- Week 8: Security — IAM, Secret Manager, and workload identity
- Week 9: Observability — logging, monitoring, and debugging
- Week 10: Build a complete multi-service project
- Week 11: Practice exam #1 + review
- Week 12: Practice exam #2, coding scenarios, and final prep
Study Tips
Hands-on coding is the best preparation for this exam.
Use Qwiklabs/Cloud Skills Boost developer learning paths.
Focus on GCP-native services rather than third-party alternatives.
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.