Google Cloud PCA glossary of architecture, resilience, trade-off, and design terms.
Use this glossary when Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect (PCA) terms start to blur together. The goal is practical recognition, not encyclopedia coverage.
| Term | Exam meaning |
|---|---|
| Resource hierarchy | Organization, folders, projects, and resources used for structure and policy inheritance. |
| IAM | Identity and access management for principals, roles, and permissions. |
| SLO | Service-level objective: target reliability measure for a service. |
| VPC | Virtual private cloud network for Google Cloud resources. |
| Cloud Load Balancing | Managed load balancing across protocols, regions, and backends. |
| Organization policy | Governance constraint applied to resource hierarchy levels. |
| Pair | How to separate them |
|---|---|
| Solution design vs Security and compliance | Ask which layer the scenario is testing, then match the answer to that layer only. |
| Control vs evidence | A control changes behavior; evidence proves behavior or supports investigation. |
| Managed service vs custom build | Managed services win for lower operational effort unless the requirement needs unsupported customization. |
| Prevention vs detection | Prevention blocks or reduces a bad event; detection finds or reports that it happened. |
Do not memorize terms in isolation. For each term, write one scenario where it is the best answer, one scenario where it is a distractor, and one signal that proves it worked.