Flashcards · IT & Cloud

PCA Flashcards

expert 25 cards

Free flashcards for the Google Professional Cloud Architect: flip each card to reveal the definition. Built from the Google Cloud Architect glossary as a study aid, these are concept checks, not real exam questions.

By The Exam Atlas Editorial Team · Verified 2026-06-05

All 25 terms

Compute Engine
Google Cloud's virtual machine service (infrastructure as a service) for running workloads on VMs.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
A managed Kubernetes service for running containerised workloads with orchestration.
Cloud Run
A serverless service for running containers that scales automatically, including to zero.
Cloud Functions
An event-driven, serverless compute service for running small pieces of code in response to triggers.
App Engine
A managed platform-as-a-service for deploying applications without managing servers.
Cloud Storage
Object storage for unstructured data, organised into buckets with different storage classes.
Storage class
A Cloud Storage setting (standard, nearline, coldline, archive) trading storage cost against access frequency.
Cloud SQL
A managed relational database service supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server.
Spanner
A globally distributed, strongly consistent relational database that scales horizontally.
Bigtable
A wide-column NoSQL database for large-scale analytical and operational workloads.
BigQuery
A serverless, highly scalable data warehouse for analytics using SQL.
Firestore
A flexible, scalable document (NoSQL) database for application data.
VPC
Virtual Private Cloud: Google Cloud's software-defined network, which is global by design.
Cloud Load Balancing
A managed service that distributes traffic across instances, globally or regionally.
Cloud CDN
A content delivery network that caches content near users to reduce latency.
Cloud Interconnect
A service providing dedicated, private connectivity between on-premises networks and Google Cloud.
IAM
Identity and Access Management: controlling who can do what on which resources, designed for least privilege.
Service account
A special identity used by applications and VMs (rather than people) to authenticate to Google Cloud services.
Cloud KMS
Key Management Service for creating and managing cryptographic keys.
Resource hierarchy
The organisation, folders, projects and resources structure used to organise and govern Google Cloud.
Project
The basic Google Cloud organising unit that groups resources, billing and permissions.
Cloud Monitoring
A service for collecting metrics and building dashboards and alerts to observe systems.
Cloud Logging
A service for storing, searching and analysing log data across Google Cloud.
RTO
Recovery Time Objective: the maximum acceptable time to restore a system after an outage.
RPO
Recovery Point Objective: the maximum acceptable data loss, expressed as the age of the last recoverable data.