Google Cloud Engineering & Architecture Bootcamp Certificate

Checkpoint 1: Create a budgeted GCP sandbox with organization/project conventions, IAM groups/service accounts, MFA expectations, labels and billing alerts; document trust boundaries and least privilege.
Checkpoint 2: Design a VPC with subnets, firewall rules, Cloud NAT or controlled egress, private service access where needed and an explicit ingress path; prove connectivity and denied paths.
Checkpoint 3: Deploy one containerized workload on Cloud Run or GKE and one VM-based workload on Compute Engine; compare scaling, operational burden, latency and cost tradeoffs.
Checkpoint 4: Add Cloud Storage plus one managed database appropriate to the workload; configure lifecycle/backup behavior, encryption/IAM and a recovery test.
Checkpoint 5: Codify the core environment with Terraform or another IaC path; make a controlled change, detect drift and show repeatable create/update/destroy behavior in a non-production environment.
Checkpoint 6: Instrument Cloud Monitoring/Logging, define user-centered SLOs and alerts, inject a zonal/service failure or dependency outage, recover safely and complete a Well-Architected-style review.

Day 1: Set workload SLOs, data sensitivity and cost ceiling; create project hierarchy, IAM/service accounts, budgets and audit baseline.
Day 2: Build VPC, subnets, routes/firewalls and ingress/egress; validate connectivity and publish architecture/trust-boundary diagram.
Day 3: Deploy on Cloud Run/GKE/Compute Engine; add load balancing/autoscaling and capture health, scale and latency evidence.
Day 4: Add Cloud Storage plus managed data; configure backup/lifecycle, IAM/encryption and perform a restore with RPO/RTO notes.
Day 5: Move core environment to IaC; use reviewed version control and demonstrate idempotent deployment, drift and reversible change.
Day 6: Add logs, metrics, traces/SLOs and alerts; inject a dependency failure and show detection, diagnosis, mitigation and recovery.
Day 7: Publish repo, ADR, IaC, dashboards, recovery proof, cost estimate, security notes, demo and operations runbook.