Google ACE Practice Test 4 — 10 Questions

Question 1

Your application is deployed on GKE and experiencing increased latency. You suspect a memory leak causing the JVM to run frequent garbage collection cycles. Cloud Monitoring shows high memory usage but you need to understand the garbage collection behavior over time. Which GCP tool provides JVM-level profiling including memory allocation data?

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

Accepted Answer

Cloud Profiler with heap profiling enabled for the JVM application.. Cloud Profiler with heap profiling enabled captures JVM-level memory allocation data and garbage collection behavior over time, allowing you to identify memory leaks and GC frequency. Unlike generic memory monitoring, it provides per-method allocation snapshots and GC pause analysis specific to the JVM.

Answer

Cloud Trace

Answer

Cloud Monitoring with JVM MBeans metrics exported via the Ops Agent.

Answer

Error Reporting filtered for OutOfMemoryError exceptions.

Question 2

You want to allow a vendor to upload files to a specific Cloud Storage bucket in your project without creating a GCP account for them. The upload URL should expire after 24 hours. Which mechanism should you use?

Accepted Answer

Generate a Signed URL with a 24-hour expiration for the specific bucket path.. A signed URL allows time-limited, permissionless access to a specific Cloud Storage object or bucket path without requiring a GCP identity. The URL is cryptographically signed using a service account key, and the 24-hour expiration is set via the `expires` parameter. This meets the requirement of allowing the vendor to upload files without creating a GCP account.

Answer

Create a GCP service account for the vendor and share the key JSON file.

Answer

Make the Cloud Storage bucket publicly writable and share the bucket URL.

Answer

Add the vendor's email to the bucket's IAM policy with Storage Object Creator role.

Question 3

A DevOps team deploys a MIG (Managed Instance Group) with autohealing configured. The health check probes `/health` on port 8080 with a 30-second initial delay. After deployment, new VMs are failing the health check and being immediately recreated — causing a restart loop. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The initial delay is too short — the application hasn't finished starting before the health check probes begin. The 30-second initial delay is too short for the application to complete its startup sequence. When the health check begins probing before the application is ready, it immediately fails, causing the MIG autohealing mechanism to treat the VM as unhealthy and recreate it, leading to a restart loop. The initial delay must be set to a value that exceeds the application's typical startup time.

Answer

The health check HTTP path `/health` doesn't exist — the application uses `/healthz`

Answer

Autohealing is incompatible with autoscaling — they cannot be used together

Answer

The MIG does not support HTTP health checks — TCP checks must be used instead

Question 4

A Cloud SQL production instance experiences a spike in connections during business hours, causing 'too many connections' errors. The application uses 50 microservices each maintaining 10 connections. What is the recommended solution to reduce connection count without rewriting the application?

Accepted Answer

Deploy a connection pooler (e.g., PgBouncer) between the microservices and Cloud SQL. Deploying a connection pooler like PgBouncer between the microservices and Cloud SQL allows many application connections to be multiplexed over a smaller number of actual database connections. This directly reduces the total connection count on the Cloud SQL instance without requiring any application code changes, as the pooler transparently manages the connection lifecycle and reuses idle connections.

Answer

Increase the Cloud SQL instance's max_connections database flag to 10,000

Answer

Enable Cloud SQL HA — the standby will handle the connection overflow

Answer

Add a read replica — microservices can connect to the replica instead of the primary

Question 5

A team's Cloud Storage bucket has fine-grained access control (ACLs) enabled. They want to switch to a simpler model where IAM policies alone control access, and object-level ACLs are ignored. What should they enable?

Accepted Answer

Enable Uniform Bucket-Level Access (UBLA) on the bucket. Enabling Uniform Bucket-Level Access (UBLA) on the bucket disables object-level ACLs and enforces IAM policies as the sole access control mechanism. This simplifies management by ignoring any existing ACLs on objects, ensuring that only bucket-level IAM permissions are evaluated for access decisions.

Answer

Delete all ACLs on each object and set them to 'authenticated-read'

Answer

Enable VPC Service Controls on the bucket

Answer

Set the bucket's default object ACL to `projectPrivate` and apply it to all objects

Question 6

A microservices application has intermittent high latency. The team wants to identify which specific service-to-service call in the request chain is causing the slowdown. Which Cloud Operations tool is designed for this?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Trace. Cloud Trace is designed to capture latency data for individual service-to-service calls in a distributed request chain. It provides end-to-end tracing by collecting trace spans from each microservice, allowing you to pinpoint which specific call is causing the slowdown. This makes it the correct tool for identifying the exact service-to-service latency bottleneck.

Answer

Cloud Monitoring Metrics Explorer

Answer

Cloud Logging log viewer

Answer

Cloud Profiler

Question 7

A junior developer needs read-only access to all GCP resources in a project. Which IAM role grants the minimum permissions required?

Accepted Answer

Viewer. The Viewer role (roles/viewer) grants read-only access to all GCP resources in a project, including existing and future resources, without allowing any modifications. This is the minimum permissions required for read-only access, as it provides exactly the necessary permissions (e.g., resourcemanager.projects.get, storage.objects.list) without any write or administrative capabilities.

Answer

Editor

Answer

Owner

Answer

Browser

Question 8

A project is being decommissioned. You need to delete it but want to ensure there is a 30-day window during which the deletion can be cancelled if needed. What happens when you delete a GCP project?

Accepted Answer

The project enters a 30-day pending deletion period; resources are inaccessible but the project can be restored within this window.. When you delete a GCP project, it enters a 30-day pending deletion period. During this time, all resources are inaccessible, but the project and its data can be fully restored if needed. This ensures a safety window before permanent deletion, aligning with the requirement for a 30-day cancellation window.

Answer

The project is immediately and permanently deleted along with all resources.

Answer

The project is archived but billing continues for 30 days before final deletion.

Answer

All resources are deleted immediately but the project ID is reserved for 90 days.

Question 9

A developer attempts to create a Cloud SQL instance but receives the error: 'API [sqladmin.googleapis.com] not enabled.' What is the correct resolution?

Accepted Answer

Enable the Cloud SQL Admin API via APIs & Services > Library in the Console. The error 'API [sqladmin.googleapis.com] not enabled' indicates that the Cloud SQL Admin API has not been activated for the project. The correct resolution is to enable the API via APIs & Services > Library in the Google Cloud Console, as this is a prerequisite for creating any Cloud SQL instance. Assigning IAM roles or requesting quota increases does not enable the underlying API service.

Answer

Assign the developer the Cloud SQL Admin IAM role

Answer

Request a quota increase for Cloud SQL in the project

Answer

Create a new project — Cloud SQL is enabled by default in new projects

Question 10

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?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner multi-region configuration. Cloud Spanner multi-region configuration is the correct choice because it provides strong global consistency with <50ms read latency across continents, which is essential for an e-commerce platform requiring real-time inventory updates. Spanner uses TrueTime and Paxos-based replication to ensure ACID transactions globally, meeting both the latency and consistency requirements simultaneously.

Answer

Cloud SQL with one primary instance and cross-region read replicas

Answer

Cloud Firestore in multi-region mode

Answer

Cloud SQL with Cloud Memorystore caching layer for reads