Professional Cloud Architect
Designing resilient, secure and scalable cloud platforms.
Google Cloud certification journey
Architecture, security, networking — then AI.
Google Cloud certification gave me another way to examine the same enterprise problems: identity, network design, security controls, resilience and platform architecture — but through a different cloud provider's design philosophy.
Current credentials
Professional Cloud Security Engineer
IAM, data protection, platform security, governance and threat-aware design.
Professional Cloud Network Engineer
Hybrid connectivity, VPC design, routing, load balancing, DNS and network services.
Generative AI Leader
How generative AI changes products, operating models and decision making.
Cloud Digital Leader
Business value, transformation, operating models and cloud fundamentals.
Associate Google Workspace Administrator
Administration, collaboration, identity and service management in Google Workspace.
Why Google Cloud?
Multi-cloud knowledge is more useful when it is genuinely multi-cloud.
I have spent a large part of my career in Microsoft technologies, so deliberately studying Google Cloud was useful because it challenged some assumptions.
The services are different, the terminology is different and some architectural choices are approached differently. The underlying engineering problems are still familiar: identity, network boundaries, resilience, governance, data protection and operational control.
That comparison is one of the reasons I value certification across more than one cloud provider.
What stayed with me
Architecture
Google Cloud pushes you to think in terms of managed services, global infrastructure, failure domains, operational responsibility and service selection rather than simply recreating a datacentre in the cloud.
Networking
The networking track is valuable because it forces a detailed understanding of routing, hybrid connectivity, DNS, load balancing and service exposure — all of which map directly into Zero Trust and multi-cloud architecture.
Security
The security material strengthens the link between IAM, organisation policy, encryption, logging, cloud-native controls and shared responsibility.
AI
The newer AI learning provides another layer: how platform architecture changes when AI becomes part of the product and operating model rather than an isolated experiment.
The useful outcome
The point was not to become “a Google engineer”. It was to become a better multi-cloud architect.
Understanding different platform models makes it easier to distinguish enduring engineering principles from vendor-specific implementation details.