Someone replied here, but by the time I drafted a reply, the comment was deleted, but I felt the information was important so I'll post it below. > To me, that

Someone replied here, but by the time I drafted a reply, the comment was deleted, but I felt the information was important so I'll post it below. > To me, that's the definition of an unhelpful exam. I am curious that these new knowledge-based certifications aren't the new "Java certified associate" exams (which could not be more useless). This is a case where the devil is in the details though. For example, GCP has five major database offerings: Bigtable, Data/Firestore, Spanner, Cloud SQL, and BigQuery. Knowing which one best applies to which situation is a pretty important aspect of being an architect. You can't just use "high level" knowledge here, because Bigtable and Firestore are both NoSQL databases, while Cloud SQL, BQ, and Spanner are relational. They are each optimized for specific workloads and picking the right solution involves knowing how each is optimized. Using these services is relatively easy. The documentation is fairly comprehensive and Google offers sample applications for use as a jumping off point. This applies across the GCP landscape. Lots of services have 70-80% functionality overlap with another, so choosing the right one for a particular situation involves understanding the appropriate use cases for each, and this information is what is covered in the exam materials.