Google ACE Practice Test 48 — 15 Questions

Question 1

An organisation requires a managed relational database for an online transaction processing (OLTP) application with strong consistency, automated backups, and a 99.95% SLA. The database size is expected to be under 10 TB. Which service meets these requirements at the lowest cost?

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

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL. Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server, offering strong consistency (ACID), automated backups, and a 99.95% SLA on the Enterprise edition. For OLTP workloads under 10 TB, Cloud SQL provides the best price-to-performance among the listed options. Cloud Spanner and Bigtable are significantly more expensive and designed for different scales and access patterns.

Answer

Bare Metal Solution

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Question 2

A company is using Cloud NAT to allow private Compute Engine instances to access the internet. They notice that traffic from some instances is not being NATed. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The instances have external IP addresses assigned.. Cloud NAT only applies to instances that do not have external IP addresses. If an instance has an external IP, it will use that IP for outbound traffic and bypass Cloud NAT.

Answer

The Cloud Router is not configured correctly.

Answer

The firewall rules block egress traffic.

Answer

The instances are in a different region than the Cloud NAT gateway.

Question 3

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application requires persistent storage and must be highly available with automatic failover across zones. The workload has a moderate number of reads and writes. Which storage solution meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL with a regional (HA) configuration. Cloud SQL with a regional (HA) configuration provides a managed relational database with a primary instance in one zone and a standby in another, with automatic failover if the primary fails. It offers persistent storage, cross-zone high availability, and is well-suited to moderate read/write workloads typical of a migrated monolithic application. This matches the requirement for automatic failover across zones without the operational overhead of self-managed options.

Answer

Compute Engine persistent disk attached to a VM in a managed instance group

Answer

Cloud Storage with object versioning

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Question 4

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application has unpredictable traffic patterns and long-running connections. The team wants to minimize operational overhead and only pay for resources when the application is processing requests. Which compute option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless container platform that scales to zero when idle and bills only for actual request processing time (down to 100ms granularity). It handles unpredictable traffic and long-running HTTP/gRPC connections natively, with no cluster or node management. This matches the requirements of minimal operational overhead and pay-per-use.

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot cluster

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance groups and autoscaling

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard cluster with node autoscaling

Question 5

Refer to the exhibit. A user tries to delete the disk 'my-disk' but receives an error. Based on the exhibit, what is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The disk is still attached to an instance.. A disk cannot be deleted while it is attached to a running or stopped instance. In Google Cloud, you must first detach the disk from the instance before deletion. The error message indicates the disk is in use, and the exhibit confirms it is attached to an instance.

Answer

The disk is being used by a snapshot.

Answer

The disk size must be 0 to delete.

Answer

The disk is not in the correct project.

Question 6

A company wants to store event logs from multiple applications in a centralized location for future analysis. The logs are written frequently (thousands per second) and need to be retained for 90 days. The data is write-once, read-rarely. Which storage class and lifecycle rule combination is most cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Set default storage class to Coldline and use lifecycle rule to delete after 90 days. For write-once, read-rarely data, Coldline storage class is cost-effective for data accessed less than once per 90 days. Set a lifecycle rule to delete objects after 90 days. Alternatively, use Standard for the first 30 days then move to Coldline, but the question asks for a combination. The simplest is to set the default storage class to Coldline and a lifecycle rule to delete at 90 days.

Answer

Set default storage class to Archive and use lifecycle rule to delete after 90 days

Answer

Set default storage class to Standard and use lifecycle rule to delete after 90 days

Answer

Set default storage class to Nearline and use lifecycle rule to delete after 90 days

Question 7

An organization needs to deploy a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine. Each microservice has different resource requirements, and the team wants to optimize costs by using a mix of spot (preemptible) and regular nodes. They also need to ensure that critical services run on regular nodes. Which GKE feature allows this separation?

Accepted Answer

Use node pools with taints and tolerations on the pods. Node pools with taints and tolerations allow you to dedicate a pool of regular (non-preemptible) nodes to critical services by applying a taint to those nodes and a matching toleration only to the critical pods. Non-critical pods without the toleration will be scheduled onto spot node pools, achieving both cost optimization and workload separation.

Answer

Use resource quotas to limit namespace resource usage

Answer

Use separate clusters for critical and non-critical services

Answer

Use vertical pod autoscaling

Question 8

A company wants to use Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to estimate the monthly cost of running a Compute Engine instance for a web server. They plan to use a n2-standard-4 machine with a 100 GB SSD persistent disk and commit to a 1-year term. Which discount type should they include in the estimate?

Accepted Answer

Committed use discount (1 year). Google Cloud offers committed use discounts (CUDs) for Compute Engine when you commit to a 1-year or 3-year term in exchange for significant discounts (up to 57% for 3-year, ~37% for 1-year on n2). Since the company is committing to a 1-year term, the correct discount type to include in the Pricing Calculator estimate is the 1-year committed use discount. The calculator has a specific option to apply CUDs to the estimate.

Answer

No discount is needed; the price shown is final

Answer

Free tier discount

Answer

Sustained use discount only

Question 9

You manage a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster and need to update the deployment 'web-app' to use a new container image tag 'v2'. You also want to ensure the update proceeds and, if it fails, roll back to the previous revision. Which set of commands should you use?

Accepted Answer

kubectl set image deployment/web-app web-app=gcr.io/myproject/web-app:v2; kubectl rollout status; kubectl rollout undo. The correct command to update a deployment's container image is 'kubectl set image deployment/web-app web-app=gcr.io/myproject/web-app:v2', which directly updates the image tag for the specified container in the deployment. Following that, 'kubectl rollout status' monitors the update progress, and 'kubectl rollout undo' reverts to the previous revision if the update fails. This sequence ensures a controlled update with rollback capability.

Answer

gcloud container clusters upgrade; kubectl rollout status; kubectl rollout undo

Answer

kubectl edit deployment web-app; kubectl rollout status; kubectl delete deployment web-app

Answer

kubectl apply -f web-app.yaml; kubectl rollout status; kubectl rollout undo

Question 10

A company wants to create a Cloud Storage bucket to store archival data that is accessed infrequently (less than once a year). The data must be stored at the lowest possible cost. Which storage class should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Archive. Archive storage is designed for data accessed less than once a year and offers the lowest storage cost among the classes listed, at the expense of higher retrieval cost and longer access latency (typically hours). Since the requirement explicitly states infrequent access (less than once a year) and lowest possible cost, Archive is the correct match. Coldline, Nearline, and Standard all cost more per gigabyte because they offer faster retrieval.

Answer

Coldline

Answer

Nearline

Answer

Standard

Question 11

A team stores application log archives in a Cloud Storage bucket. Logs older than 90 days should automatically move to Coldline storage, and logs older than 365 days should be deleted. Which feature automates this?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Storage Object Lifecycle Management rules on the bucket. Cloud Storage Object Lifecycle Management rules allow you to automatically transition objects to Coldline storage after 90 days and delete them after 365 days based on object age conditions. This is a native, serverless feature that requires no external compute or scheduling, making it the most efficient and reliable approach for automating tiering and deletion of log archives.

Answer

Cloud Scheduler jobs that run gsutil rewrite and gsutil rm commands nightly

Answer

Cloud Pub/Sub notifications triggering a Cloud Function on each object creation

Answer

Retention policies that lock objects in Coldline after 90 days

Question 12

A DevOps engineer needs to grant a service account the ability to pull images from a specific Container Registry repository in project 'my-project'. The service account is in project 'other-project'. Which command should the engineer use?

Accepted Answer

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding my-project --member serviceAccount:sa@other-project.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/storage.objectViewer. To grant a service account from 'other-project' permission to pull images from a repository in 'my-project', the IAM policy binding must be applied to the resource-owning project ('my-project') with the service account as the member. Option D does exactly this: it binds roles/storage.objectViewer on my-project to the service account from other-project.

Answer

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding my-project --member user:admin@other-project.com --role roles/storage.objectViewer

Answer

gcloud iam service-accounts add-iam-policy-binding sa@other-project.iam.gserviceaccount.com --member serviceAccount:sa@other-project.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/storage.objectViewer

Answer

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding other-project --member serviceAccount:sa@other-project.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/storage.objectViewer

Question 13

You are troubleshooting a Pub/Sub subscription that is not receiving messages as fast as they are published. You want to check if there is a backlog of unacknowledged messages for the subscription. What should you use?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Monitoring to view the 'oldest_unacked_message_age' metric. The 'oldest_unacked_message_age' metric in Cloud Monitoring directly measures the age of the oldest unacknowledged message in a subscription, which is the definitive indicator of a backlog. A growing value means messages are accumulating faster than they are being acknowledged. This metric is part of the standard Pub/Sub monitoring metrics and is the recommended way to detect and quantify subscription backlog.

Answer

Check the Cloud Logging logs for the subscription

Answer

Use gcloud pubsub subscriptions describe and check the ackDeadlineSeconds

Answer

Check the Cloud Console Pub/Sub dashboard for the topic publish rate

Question 14

A company wants to deploy a containerized application on Google Cloud that automatically scales to zero when not in use, and they want to minimize operational overhead. They also need to avoid managing any underlying infrastructure such as Kubernetes clusters or VMs. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless platform that runs containerized applications and automatically scales to zero when there is no traffic, eliminating costs during idle periods. It abstracts away all infrastructure management, including Kubernetes clusters and VMs, so the company can focus solely on their container image. This directly satisfies the requirements of containerized deployment, scale-to-zero, and minimal operational overhead.

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

App Engine Standard Environment

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance groups

Question 15

A developer created a service account with the roles/storage.admin role and wants to use it from a Compute Engine instance without downloading a key file. What is the best practice?

Accepted Answer

Attach the service account to the instance using the --service-account flag when creating the instance.. The best practice is to attach the service account to the Compute Engine instance at creation time using the --service-account flag. This allows the instance to automatically obtain credentials via the metadata server, avoiding the need to download and manage a service account key file. Downloading keys should be avoided due to security risks.

Answer

Download the service account key and store it on the instance's persistent disk.

Answer

Use gcloud auth activate-service-account on the instance with the service account email.

Answer

Store the service account email in an instance metadata and use gcloud commands.