Google ACE Practice Exam 4 — 20 Questions

Question 1

A security team wants to prevent every project in the organization from creating VM instances with external IP addresses — without requiring configuration in each individual project. What is the most scalable solution?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Set the organization policy constraint compute.vmExternalIpAccess to Deny All at the organization level. The organization policy constraint `compute.vmExternalIpAccess` can be applied at the organization level to deny all VM instances from having external IP addresses, enforcing this rule across all projects without per-project configuration. This is the most scalable approach as it uses Google Cloud's hierarchical policy engine to centrally control resource creation, overriding any project-level settings.

Answer

Create a firewall rule in every project blocking outbound traffic on port 80 and 443

Answer

Remove the Compute Engine Admin role from all project owners

Answer

Use Cloud Armor to block all traffic destined for public IPs in the organization

Question 2

A GCP project administrator needs to share read-only access to all resources in the project with an external auditor who has a Gmail account (auditor@gmail.com). What should the admin do?

Accepted Answer

Grant the Viewer role to auditor@gmail.com in the project's IAM policy. Granting the Viewer (roles/viewer) role to auditor@gmail.com in the project's IAM policy is correct because it provides read-only access to all resources in the project without requiring a Cloud Identity account. Gmail accounts are supported as Google Accounts and can be added directly to IAM policies, allowing them to authenticate and access resources via the GCP Console or APIs.

Answer

Create a service account for the auditor and share the JSON key file

Answer

Add auditor@gmail.com as a project billing admin to give them read-only access

Answer

Create a Cloud Identity account for the auditor — Gmail accounts cannot access GCP projects

Question 3

A company has 50+ Compute Engine instances running a stateful application in the us-central1 region. The instances are part of a managed instance group behind an internal load balancer. The application stores data on zonal persistent disks. The company wants to migrate the entire application stack to the europe-west1 region to reduce latency for European users. They have a Cloud VPN tunnel between their on-premises data center and us-central1. They want to extend connectivity to europe-west1 with minimal downtime. The current on-premises router uses BGP to advertise a specific CIDR block (10.0.0.0/8) to Google Cloud. The VPC is in custom mode with subnets in us-central1 and europe-west1 already created. The Cloud VPN gateway in us-central1 is attached to a Cloud Router with a BGP session to the on-premises router. Which course of action should the company take to achieve the migration with minimal downtime?

Accepted Answer

Create a new Cloud VPN gateway in europe-west1, attach it to a Cloud Router, and establish a BGP session with the on-premises router. Use route priority or metrics to gradually shift traffic to europe-west1.. Adding a second Cloud VPN gateway in europe-west1 and configuring a new BGP session to the on-premises router allows the on-premises router to learn routes for europe-west1 subnets and route traffic accordingly. This can be done without modifying existing sessions, and traffic can be shifted gradually by adjusting route priority (MED) or using BGP metrics. Option A is wrong because a second VPN tunnel on the same gateway would still be in us-central1 and might not provide optimal routing. Option B is wrong because VPC Network Peering does not extend on-premises connectivity; it only connects VPC networks, and the on-premises router would still only have a BGP session to the us-central1 Cloud Router. Option D is wrong because Dedicated Interconnect is a dedicated physical connection that requires significant provisioning time and may not be suitable for a quick migration, and it does not inherently allow gradual traffic shifting without additional BGP configuration.

Answer

Create a second Cloud VPN tunnel on the existing Cloud VPN gateway to Europe with a new BGP session, and update the on-premises router to accept the new route advertisement.

Answer

Set up VPC Network Peering between the us-central1 and europe-west1 VPCs to allow cross-region communication.

Answer

Provision a Dedicated Interconnect connection to europe-west1 and attach a new Cloud Router. Remove the existing Cloud VPN gateway.

Question 4

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?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is the only GCP database service that provides globally distributed, strongly consistent SQL transactions with horizontal scaling, supporting thousands of writes per second. It uses synchronous replication across regions and TrueTime-based clock synchronization to ensure external consistency, while also offering 99.999% availability with no planned downtime for maintenance.

Answer

Cloud SQL with synchronous read replicas

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud Firestore

Question 5

Refer to the exhibit. An administrator wants to grant a service account read-only access to all Compute Engine instances in a project, but only those with label 'environment=production'. Which IAM policy configuration should be used?

Accepted Answer

roles/compute.viewer with condition 'resource.labels.environment == "production"'. Roles/compute.viewer provides read-only access to Compute Engine resources, and the condition 'resource.labels.environment == "production"' restricts that access to only instances with the specified label. This satisfies the requirement of granting read-only access to production-labeled instances without granting broader permissions.

Answer

roles/compute.instanceAdmin with condition 'resource.labels.environment == "production"'

Answer

roles/compute.imageUser with condition 'resource.labels.environment == "production"'

Answer

roles/compute.viewer with condition 'request.host == "production"'

Question 6

An e-commerce platform sees a 20x traffic spike every Black Friday. The rest of the year traffic is low and stable. The team wants to minimize costs during normal periods while handling the annual peak without manual intervention. Which architecture achieves this?

Accepted Answer

Managed instance group with autoscaling + scheduled scaling pre-warming before Black Friday. It combines managed instance group autoscaling for normal low-cost operation with scheduled scaling to pre-warm capacity before the Black Friday spike, ensuring seamless handling of the 20x traffic surge without manual intervention. This approach uses the 'autoscaler' and 'scheduled scaling' features in Google Cloud to dynamically adjust resources based on load, while pre-warming prevents cold-start latency during the peak.

Answer

Pre-provision 20x capacity year-round to guarantee Black Friday performance

Answer

Deploy on Cloud SQL — it scales compute automatically for traffic spikes

Answer

Add 20 manual VMs on Black Friday and delete them afterward each year

Question 7

A team's GKE application is running out of memory due to a memory leak. Pods are restarting with OOMKilled status. As an immediate measure before a code fix is available, what kubectl action provides the most insight into which container is leaking?

Accepted Answer

kubectl top pods --containers -n [NAMESPACE]. `kubectl top pods --containers` shows per-container CPU and memory usage for each pod in the namespace. This allows you to identify which specific container within a pod is consuming excessive memory and triggering the OOMKilled status, even before a code fix is deployed. It provides immediate, real-time insight into resource consumption at the container level, which is essential for diagnosing a memory leak in a multi-container pod.

Answer

kubectl get events --field-selector=reason=OOMKilling

Answer

kubectl delete pod [POD_NAME] -- force=true to clear the memory leak

Answer

gcloud container clusters describe [CLUSTER] --memory-usage

Question 8

A company is deploying a multi-region application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with clusters in us-central1 and europe-west1. They want to route user traffic to the closest healthy cluster using a global load balancer with SSL termination. Which load balancing service should they use?

Accepted Answer

External HTTPS Load Balancer with a global backend service (using NEGs). D is correct because the External HTTPS Load Balancer with a global backend service using Network Endpoint Groups (NEGs) provides global anycast IP, SSL termination, and traffic routing to the closest healthy GKE cluster via Google's global network. This meets the requirement for multi-region GKE clusters with automatic failover and low latency.

Answer

Internal Load Balancer

Answer

SSL Proxy Load Balancer

Answer

External TCP/UDP Network Load Balancer

Question 9

A company requires that all service account keys be automatically rotated every 90 days. Which two steps should the administrator take to enforce this? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use the Service Account API to create keys with a custom expiration time.. The Service Account API allows creating keys with a custom expiration time, which enforces automatic rotation by ensuring keys are invalid after 90 days. Option E is correct because a Cloud Function can monitor key age and delete keys older than 90 days, providing a programmatic enforcement mechanism. Both approaches ensure keys are rotated automatically without manual intervention.

Answer

Enable the Service Account Key Rotator in the Google Cloud Console.

Answer

Use IAM to set a condition that keys must have an expiration date.

Answer

Use an Organization Policy to disable service account key creation.

Question 10

An organization with multiple teams needs to provision separate, isolated environments (e.g., development, test, production) while sharing common services like Cloud NAT and VPC firewall rules. Which VPC networking pattern is most suitable?

Accepted Answer

Shared VPC (XPN). Shared VPC (XPN) allows an organization to create a single, centrally managed VPC network that hosts common services like Cloud NAT and firewall rules, while enabling multiple project teams to provision their own isolated environments (dev, test, prod) within that same VPC. This pattern meets the requirement for separate, isolated environments with shared services without needing individual VPCs for each team.

Answer

Network Service Tiers (Premium vs Standard)

Answer

VPC Network Peering between team VPCs

Answer

Single VPC with per-team firewall rules

Question 11

A GKE Deployment must be updated to a new container image version with zero downtime — old Pods should be replaced gradually, not all at once. Which update strategy should be configured?

Accepted Answer

RollingUpdate strategy. The RollingUpdate strategy is correct because it gradually replaces old Pods with new ones while keeping the Deployment available, ensuring zero downtime. By default, it uses a `maxSurge` of 25% and `maxUnavailable` of 25%, allowing a controlled, incremental rollout that matches the requirement of replacing Pods gradually rather than all at once.

Answer

Recreate strategy

Answer

Blue-green deployment using a separate Deployment and Service selector swap

Answer

Canary deployment with a traffic-splitting ingress

Question 12

A public API receives global traffic but has been targeted by both volumetric DDoS attacks and SQL injection attempts in HTTP request parameters. Which single GCP service provides protection against both threats?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Armor security policies on the load balancer. Cloud Armor security policies, when attached to a Google Cloud HTTPS Load Balancer, provide both Layer 7 DDoS protection (via pre-configured WAF rules like 'modsecurity-crs' to block SQL injection) and volumetric DDoS defense (via rate limiting and adaptive protection). This makes it the single GCP service that directly addresses both threats mentioned in the question.

Answer

VPC firewall rules with deny rules for known attacker IPs

Answer

Cloud NAT to hide backend IP addresses

Answer

Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) to require authentication before accessing the API

Question 13

A team needs to export all Cloud Logging entries from a production GCP project to a BigQuery dataset for long-term analysis and compliance. The export must be near-real-time and include future log entries automatically. Which approach achieves this?

Accepted Answer

Create a log sink (Log Router) that routes all logs from the project to the BigQuery dataset. A log sink (Log Router) in Cloud Logging can be configured to route log entries in near-real-time to a BigQuery dataset. This approach automatically includes all future log entries without requiring any scheduled jobs or manual intervention, making it ideal for long-term analysis and compliance.

Answer

Schedule a daily Cloud Function to query the Logging API and write results to BigQuery

Answer

Use BigQuery Data Transfer Service to pull logs from Cloud Logging on a schedule

Answer

Enable VPC Flow Logs and stream them directly to BigQuery

Question 14

A platform engineer is deploying a Kubernetes Job that processes a batch of records. The Job should run 10 parallel workers, each processing a subset of records, and complete when all workers finish successfully. Which Job spec configuration achieves this?

Accepted Answer

Set parallelism: 10 and completions: 10 in the Job spec. In Kubernetes, a Job's `parallelism` field specifies the number of Pods that can run concurrently, and `completions` specifies the total number of successful Pod completions required for the Job to be considered finished. Setting both to 10 ensures exactly 10 Pods run in parallel, each processing a subset of records, and the Job completes only when all 10 have succeeded.

Answer

Set replicas: 10 in the Job spec

Answer

Create 10 separate Job objects — one per worker

Answer

Set concurrency: 10 in the Job spec

Question 15

A Cloud Function must execute automatically every time a new object is written to a specific Cloud Storage bucket. Which trigger type should be configured for the function?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Storage trigger (object finalized event). The Cloud Storage trigger (object finalized event) is the correct choice because Cloud Functions natively supports Cloud Storage events via the `google.storage.object.finalize` event type, which fires when a new object is created or an existing object is overwritten in a bucket. This trigger automatically invokes the function without requiring any intermediary service, directly binding the function to the bucket's notification system.

Answer

HTTP trigger

Answer

Pub/Sub trigger

Answer

Cloud Scheduler trigger

Question 16

A DevOps team uses Terraform to manage GCP infrastructure and wants to store Terraform state in a shared location that all team members can access securely, with state locking to prevent concurrent modifications. Which backend configuration achieves this?

Accepted Answer

gcs backend storing state in a Cloud Storage bucket. The `gcs` backend is the correct choice because it stores Terraform state in a Google Cloud Storage bucket, which provides secure, shared access via IAM policies and supports state locking natively through object versioning and write-preconditions. This ensures that only one team member can modify the state at a time, preventing conflicts and corruption.

Answer

gcp backend storing state in a BigQuery table

Answer

remote backend connected to a Cloud SQL database

Answer

local backend with a path shared over Cloud Filestore

Question 17

You want to use Kustomize to manage environment-specific Kubernetes configurations (dev, staging, prod) from a single base set of manifests. How does Kustomize achieve environment customization without duplicating YAML files?

Accepted Answer

Kustomize uses overlays that patch a shared base: environment-specific differences are expressed as patches without duplicating base manifests.. Kustomize uses a base set of Kubernetes manifests and applies environment-specific overlays that contain patches. These patches modify only the differences (e.g., replicas, image tags, namespaces) without copying or altering the original base YAML files. This approach avoids duplication and keeps the base clean, with each overlay representing a distinct environment.

Answer

Kustomize duplicates all YAML files per environment, then applies find-and-replace on values.

Answer

Kustomize uses Helm charts with values files per environment for templating.

Answer

Kustomize requires a separate Git branch per environment where manifests are committed.

Question 18

You need to deploy a new version of an App Engine standard environment application. The new version should receive 10% of traffic while the current version continues to receive 90%. Which command achieves this?

Accepted Answer

`gcloud app services set-traffic default --splits v1=0.9,v2=0.1`. The `gcloud app services set-traffic` command explicitly splits traffic between versions of an App Engine service. By specifying `--splits v1=0.9,v2=0.1`, you direct 90% of requests to version v1 and 10% to version v2, without deploying a new version or promoting it. This is the standard method for gradual traffic migration in App Engine standard environment.

Answer

`gcloud app deploy --version=v2 --no-promote`

Answer

`gcloud app versions migrate v2`

Answer

`gcloud app deploy --version=v2 --promote --stop-previous-version`

Question 19

You have an Artifact Registry repository for Python packages (`format: python`). A developer needs to publish a new Python package to this repository. Which tool and configuration allows them to publish?

Accepted Answer

Use `twine upload` with the Artifact Registry Python repository URL as the repository target.. B is correct because `twine` is the standard tool for uploading Python packages to package indices, and Artifact Registry's Python repositories are compatible with the PyPI API. By specifying the Artifact Registry repository URL as the `--repository-url` target in `twine upload`, the developer can authenticate via a service account or OAuth token and publish the package directly.

Answer

Use `pip install` pointing to the Artifact Registry URL to upload the package.

Answer

Use `docker push` to push the Python package as a container layer.

Answer

Use `gsutil cp` to copy the wheel file to the Artifact Registry bucket.

Question 20

A developer needs to forward traffic from their local port 5432 to a PostgreSQL service running in GKE on port 5432, to test database queries locally without exposing the database externally. Which kubectl command achieves this?

Accepted Answer

kubectl port-forward svc/postgres-service 5432:5432. `kubectl port-forward` creates a local tunnel from port 5432 on the developer's machine to the specified service's port 5432 inside the GKE cluster. This allows the developer to connect to the PostgreSQL service as if it were running locally, without exposing it to the internet via a LoadBalancer or Ingress.

Answer

kubectl expose pod postgres-pod --type=LoadBalancer --port=5432

Answer

kubectl tunnel --local=5432 --remote=postgres-service:5432

Answer

gcloud container ssh postgres-pod --port-forward=5432:5432