Objective 2.0

Planning and configuring a cloud solution

ACE Practice Questions

Use this page to practise Planning and configuring a cloud solution questions for this certification. Focus on how the exam tests planning and configuring a cloud solution in scenario format — understanding the why behind each answer builds more durable knowledge than memorising options.

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What this objective tests

ACE Planning and configuring a cloud solution — Key Topics

Planning and configuring a cloud solution questions on this certification test your ability to deploy and manage planning and configuring a cloud solution concepts in scenario-based situations.

Core Planning and configuring a cloud solution concepts and how they apply in real-world cloud scenarios.
How to deploy planning and configuring a cloud solution correctly and verify the outcome.
Troubleshooting planning and configuring a cloud solution issues by interpreting error output and system state.
Cloud best practices and Planning and configuring a cloud solution design trade-offs tested by this certification.

Common exam traps

Where candidates lose marks on Planning and configuring a cloud solution

⚠Selecting the most expensive service when a simpler managed option meets the requirement.
⚠Forgetting that cloud resources must be explicitly secured — defaults are rarely secure.
⚠Choosing a global service fix when the issue is region-specific.
⚠Overlooking cost implications of cross-region data transfer in architecture questions.

ACE Planning and configuring a cloud solution — Practice Questions

30 questions from this objective

Question 2easymultiple choice

Read the full NAT/PAT explanation →

A compliance archive stores legal documents accessed at most once per quarter. Which Cloud Storage class minimizes storage cost while meeting that access pattern?

Question 3mediummultiple choice

Planning and configuring a cloud solution

ACE Planning and configuring a cloud solution — Key Topics

Where candidates lose marks on Planning and configuring a cloud solution

ACE Planning and configuring a cloud solution — Practice Questions

A compliance archive stores legal documents accessed at most once per quarter. Which Cloud Storage class minimizes storage cost while meeting that access pattern?

A team needs to run a containerized HTTP API that scales to zero when idle and requires zero cluster or server management. Which GCP compute platform is the best fit?

A batch data processing job runs nightly for 4 hours and can tolerate interruption because it saves progress checkpoints every 15 minutes. Which VM option offers the greatest cost reduction?

A mobile app needs a managed database to store user profiles with flexible nested structures that evolve frequently — new fields are added without schema migrations. Which GCP database service is most appropriate?

A global web application needs HTTPS traffic routed to backend services in multiple regions, directing each user to the nearest healthy endpoint. Which load balancer type should be used?

A startup wants to minimize egress costs for a web service that exclusively serves customers within Europe. Which network service tier is most cost-effective?

A data science team needs a VM with 96 vCPUs and 624 GB of RAM. No predefined GCP machine type matches these exact specifications. What is the recommended approach?

A financial trading platform must support globally distributed, strongly consistent SQL transactions at thousands of writes per second, with no downtime for planned maintenance. Which GCP database service meets all these requirements?

An enterprise requires a private connection between its on-premises data center and Google Cloud VPC that does NOT traverse the public internet and provides dedicated 10 Gbps bandwidth. Which connectivity option meets these requirements?

A web application uses a managed instance group. Traffic spikes sharply between 9 AM and 5 PM and drops to near zero overnight. Which autoscaling metric most directly triggers scale-out before user experience degrades?

A team is building a real-time multiplayer game backend requiring low-latency state synchronization between players worldwide. Session data must persist for the duration of a game (up to 2 hours) but doesn't need long-term storage. Which managed service best fits?

A data analytics team runs Apache Spark jobs to process large datasets. They need a managed cluster that provisions quickly, scales dynamically, and integrates with Cloud Storage and BigQuery. Which service should they use?

A media company ingests 500,000 events per second from IoT sensors and needs to store them for time-series analytics queries that scan billions of rows. Which storage service is most appropriate?

A startup needs to send transactional emails (order confirmations, password resets) from their GCP-hosted application. Which GCP service handles high-volume email delivery?

A financial application requires a relational database with automatic failover to a standby in a different zone, with minimal configuration overhead. Which Cloud SQL configuration provides this?

A startup builds a serverless REST API using Cloud Functions (2nd gen). Each function invocation runs for 200ms on average, processes 5 million requests per day, and uses 256 MB memory. Approximately how should they estimate monthly Cloud Functions costs?

A startup runs its application entirely on Cloud Run. They want to use a custom domain (api.mycompany.com) instead of the default Cloud Run URL. Which GCP feature maps a custom domain to a Cloud Run service?

A SaaS company serves 200 enterprise customers, each requiring complete data isolation in separate databases. The company needs to provision a new customer database within minutes and manage 200 databases with minimal overhead. Which GCP approach scales most efficiently?

A team builds a document processing pipeline: files are uploaded to Cloud Storage, then analyzed by Cloud Vision AI, results stored in Firestore, and a confirmation email sent. Each step depends on the previous. Which GCP service orchestrates these sequential, dependent steps reliably?

An application architect is comparing Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL) and Cloud Spanner for a new global e-commerce platform. The platform must serve customers on three continents with <50ms latency for reads and strong consistency for inventory updates. Which service best fits?

A payment service publishes an event to a message queue every time a transaction completes. Multiple downstream services (inventory, analytics, email) must each process every event independently. Which messaging pattern and GCP service best supports this?

A team must choose between Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Tasks for a use case where jobs must be delivered to a single HTTP endpoint, each job executed at most once, with rate limiting to 10 requests per second, and with retry on failure. Which service is the better fit and why?

An engineering team is deciding between App Engine Standard and App Engine Flexible for a Python API. The API has unpredictable traffic, must scale to zero when idle, runs standard Python code with no custom system packages, and requires < 1 second startup time. Which environment is most suitable?

A team is designing a system where two GCP projects — a shared services project and an application project — need their VMs to communicate using private IPs. Both projects are in the same organization. Which networking option best enables this with centralized network management?

A global web application serves static assets (images, JavaScript, CSS) from a Cloud Storage bucket via an HTTPS load balancer. Users in Asia report slow load times compared to users in the US where the bucket resides. What is the most effective solution?

A team deploys an application on GKE and needs it to be accessible at https://api.company.com with automatic TLS certificate provisioning. They use a Global external Application Load Balancer. What handles the TLS certificate?

Microservices in a GKE cluster need to discover each other by name without using public DNS. Service A calls Service B at `http://service-b.production.svc.cluster.local`. Which GCP/Kubernetes feature provides this internal DNS resolution?

A startup's application uses both GCP services and an existing on-premises Kubernetes cluster. They want a single control plane to manage Kubernetes clusters across both environments with consistent policy enforcement. Which Google service provides this?

A team is selecting the right Compute Engine machine family for a machine learning training workload that is GPU-bound. The workload runs for 6 hours at a time and tolerates interruption. Which combination maximizes GPU access at lowest cost?

All ACE Objectives

Planning and configuring a cloud solution

ACE Planning and configuring a cloud solution — Key Topics

Where candidates lose marks on Planning and configuring a cloud solution

ACE Planning and configuring a cloud solution — Practice Questions

A compliance archive stores legal documents accessed at most once per quarter. Which Cloud Storage class minimizes storage cost while meeting that access pattern?

A team needs to run a containerized HTTP API that scales to zero when idle and requires zero cluster or server management. Which GCP compute platform is the best fit?

A batch data processing job runs nightly for 4 hours and can tolerate interruption because it saves progress checkpoints every 15 minutes. Which VM option offers the greatest cost reduction?

A mobile app needs a managed database to store user profiles with flexible nested structures that evolve frequently — new fields are added without schema migrations. Which GCP database service is most appropriate?

A global web application needs HTTPS traffic routed to backend services in multiple regions, directing each user to the nearest healthy endpoint. Which load balancer type should be used?

A startup wants to minimize egress costs for a web service that exclusively serves customers within Europe. Which network service tier is most cost-effective?

A data science team needs a VM with 96 vCPUs and 624 GB of RAM. No predefined GCP machine type matches these exact specifications. What is the recommended approach?

A financial trading platform must support globally distributed, strongly consistent SQL transactions at thousands of writes per second, with no downtime for planned maintenance. Which GCP database service meets all these requirements?

An enterprise requires a private connection between its on-premises data center and Google Cloud VPC that does NOT traverse the public internet and provides dedicated 10 Gbps bandwidth. Which connectivity option meets these requirements?

A web application uses a managed instance group. Traffic spikes sharply between 9 AM and 5 PM and drops to near zero overnight. Which autoscaling metric most directly triggers scale-out before user experience degrades?

A team is building a real-time multiplayer game backend requiring low-latency state synchronization between players worldwide. Session data must persist for the duration of a game (up to 2 hours) but doesn't need long-term storage. Which managed service best fits?

A data analytics team runs Apache Spark jobs to process large datasets. They need a managed cluster that provisions quickly, scales dynamically, and integrates with Cloud Storage and BigQuery. Which service should they use?

A media company ingests 500,000 events per second from IoT sensors and needs to store them for time-series analytics queries that scan billions of rows. Which storage service is most appropriate?

A startup needs to send transactional emails (order confirmations, password resets) from their GCP-hosted application. Which GCP service handles high-volume email delivery?

A financial application requires a relational database with automatic failover to a standby in a different zone, with minimal configuration overhead. Which Cloud SQL configuration provides this?

A startup builds a serverless REST API using Cloud Functions (2nd gen). Each function invocation runs for 200ms on average, processes 5 million requests per day, and uses 256 MB memory. Approximately how should they estimate monthly Cloud Functions costs?

A startup runs its application entirely on Cloud Run. They want to use a custom domain (api.mycompany.com) instead of the default Cloud Run URL. Which GCP feature maps a custom domain to a Cloud Run service?

A SaaS company serves 200 enterprise customers, each requiring complete data isolation in separate databases. The company needs to provision a new customer database within minutes and manage 200 databases with minimal overhead. Which GCP approach scales most efficiently?

A team builds a document processing pipeline: files are uploaded to Cloud Storage, then analyzed by Cloud Vision AI, results stored in Firestore, and a confirmation email sent. Each step depends on the previous. Which GCP service orchestrates these sequential, dependent steps reliably?

An application architect is comparing Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL) and Cloud Spanner for a new global e-commerce platform. The platform must serve customers on three continents with <50ms latency for reads and strong consistency for inventory updates. Which service best fits?

A payment service publishes an event to a message queue every time a transaction completes. Multiple downstream services (inventory, analytics, email) must each process every event independently. Which messaging pattern and GCP service best supports this?

A team must choose between Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Tasks for a use case where jobs must be delivered to a single HTTP endpoint, each job executed at most once, with rate limiting to 10 requests per second, and with retry on failure. Which service is the better fit and why?

An engineering team is deciding between App Engine Standard and App Engine Flexible for a Python API. The API has unpredictable traffic, must scale to zero when idle, runs standard Python code with no custom system packages, and requires < 1 second startup time. Which environment is most suitable?

A team is designing a system where two GCP projects — a shared services project and an application project — need their VMs to communicate using private IPs. Both projects are in the same organization. Which networking option best enables this with centralized network management?

A global web application serves static assets (images, JavaScript, CSS) from a Cloud Storage bucket via an HTTPS load balancer. Users in Asia report slow load times compared to users in the US where the bucket resides. What is the most effective solution?

A team deploys an application on GKE and needs it to be accessible at https://api.company.com with automatic TLS certificate provisioning. They use a Global external Application Load Balancer. What handles the TLS certificate?

Microservices in a GKE cluster need to discover each other by name without using public DNS. Service A calls Service B at `http://service-b.production.svc.cluster.local`. Which GCP/Kubernetes feature provides this internal DNS resolution?

A startup's application uses both GCP services and an existing on-premises Kubernetes cluster. They want a single control plane to manage Kubernetes clusters across both environments with consistent policy enforcement. Which Google service provides this?

A team is selecting the right Compute Engine machine family for a machine learning training workload that is GPU-bound. The workload runs for 6 hours at a time and tolerates interruption. Which combination maximizes GPU access at lowest cost?

All ACE Objectives