Professional Cloud Developer: applications and production

Objectives and progression

Seven lessons with guided application, 35 questions, and five original cases. Internal assessment of 26 decisions in 50 minutes. Examples use fictional banking incidents and integrations. Initial coverage without executable labs or exhaustive treatment of every service and objective. Current Google-linked guide inspected 2026-09-30; edition date not stated. Four approximate weights: 32/23/24/21. Exam of 50–60 items in 120 minutes, in English and Japanese. A public numerical passing threshold is unconfirmed.

Audience: Cloud developers, platform engineers, and APS professionals investigating applications and releases.

Prerequisites: Programming experience and HTTP, container, IAM, and data fundamentals. The certification defines no formal prerequisite; Google Cloud practice is recommended.

290 estimated study minutes

• Choose execution and state mechanisms according to the required outcome.
• Identify the effective principal and limit access capabilities.
• Connect code, build identity, digest, and evidence to promotion.
• Build tests validating requirements and making environment limits explicit.
• Validate execution contracts, invocation identity, and retry effects.
• Separate startup, health, and readiness and coordinate scaling with dependencies.
• Handle uncertain outcomes, pagination, resources, and end-to-end evidence.

Modules

1. State, caching, and asynchronous flows
2. Credentials, secrets, and access
3. Build, artifacts, and provenance
4. Tests, emulators, and AI assistance
5. Cloud Run: contracts and events
6. GKE: probes and scaling
7. Clients, data, and troubleshooting

Continue learning

Google Cloud

• Associate Cloud Engineer
• Professional Cloud Architect
• CI/CD
• REST APIs
• Production Support L3

References and version

Current linked guide; edition date unconfirmed (2026-09-30 inspection)

• Google Cloud certification FAQs · 2026-09-30
• Well-Architected Framework · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Run overview · 2026-09-30
• GKE overview · 2026-09-30
• Apigee overview · 2026-09-30
• IAM overview · 2026-09-30
• Workload Identity Federation · 2026-09-30
• Binary Authorization overview · 2026-09-30
• Pub/Sub exactly-once delivery · 2026-09-30
• Bigtable schema design · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Run service autoscaling · 2026-09-30
• Professional Cloud Developer certification · 2026-09-30
• Professional Cloud Developer exam guide · 2026-09-30
• Application Default Credentials · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Run container contract · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Tasks overview · 2026-09-30
• Signed URLs · 2026-09-30
• Cloud SQL Auth Proxy · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Build provenance · 2026-09-30
• Artifact Registry image names · 2026-09-30
• Secret Manager best practices · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Run service authentication · 2026-09-30
• GKE Horizontal Pod Autoscaler · 2026-09-30
• Kubernetes probes · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Run session affinity · 2026-09-30
• Workflows overview · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Storage retry strategy · 2026-09-30
• Pub/Sub emulator · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Run logging · 2026-09-30
• Cloud SQL connection management · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Run rollouts and traffic · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Storage objects list · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Storage JSON API · 2026-09-30
• Gemini Code Assist Standard and Enterprise · 2026-09-30
• Memorystore for Redis overview · 2026-09-30
• Cloud Build default service account changes · 2026-09-30