Google ACE Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution Practice Test 5 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and wants to reduce costs for a development environment that is only used for 8 hours a day (Monday-Friday). The database is under 100 GB and does not require high availability. Which action is the most cost-effective?

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

Accepted Answer

Change the activation policy to ON_DEMAND. Cloud SQL supports activation policies: ALWAYS (runs 24/7) and ON_DEMAND (starts when a connection is made, stops after a period of inactivity). For development environments used only during business hours, ON_DEMAND can significantly reduce costs by stopping the instance when not in use.

Answer

Use a smaller machine type and add a read replica

Answer

Migrate to Cloud Spanner for better cost efficiency

Answer

Enable deletion protection and manually stop the instance after hours, start it before hours

Question 2

Which Google Cloud service is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse for analytics at petabyte scale, with built-in machine learning capabilities and automatic scaling?

Accepted Answer

BigQuery. BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable data warehouse that supports SQL queries, automatic scaling, and integrated ML (BigQuery ML).

Answer

Cloud Storage

Answer

Dataproc

Answer

Cloud SQL

Question 3

A team needs to deploy a microservice that processes events from Pub/Sub and writes the results to Firestore. The service is stateless and should not incur cost when idle. The expected load is low but can spike unpredictably. Which compute service is the most cost-effective and operationally simple?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions (2nd gen) triggered by Pub/Sub. Cloud Functions is event-driven, scales automatically, and charges only while code is executing. It can be triggered by Pub/Sub messages, making it ideal for this use case. It scales to zero and handles spikes.

Answer

GKE Standard with a cluster autoscaler and a Pub/Sub sidecar

Answer

Compute Engine with a managed instance group and autoscaling based on Pub/Sub queue depth

Answer

Cloud Run for Anthos on-premises

Question 4

A company has a GKE Autopilot cluster and wants to run a stateful application that requires persistent volumes with high read/write throughput. The application is deployed in a single region and does not require multi-region redundancy. Which storage option is the best choice for the persistent volumes?

Accepted Answer

Compute Engine persistent disks (SSD) using StorageClass 'pd-ssd'. GKE Autopilot supports persistent volumes via Compute Engine persistent disks (PD) or Cloud Filestore. For high throughput, regional persistent disks (pd-balanced or pd-ssd) offer excellent performance. Cloud Storage is not a persistent volume. Filestore is file storage but is more expensive and adds network latency. Persistent disks are native and provide the best performance for stateful applications.

Answer

Cloud Filestore (NFS)

Answer

Bigtable

Answer

Cloud Storage FUSE

Question 5

An organization wants to set up a hybrid cloud connection between their on-premises data center and Google Cloud VPC. They need high availability (99.99% SLA) and support for dynamic routing. Which connection method should they use?

Accepted Answer

HA VPN with BGP. HA VPN provides a 99.99% SLA, supports dynamic routing via BGP, and offers two tunnels for redundancy. Dedicated Interconnect also offers high availability but is a physical connection with higher cost. Partner Interconnect is similar to HA VPN but also physical. Classic VPN has no SLA.

Answer

Cloud NAT

Answer

Dedicated Interconnect

Answer

Classic VPN with static routing

Question 6

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application consists of a web frontend, a business logic layer, and a MySQL database. They want to minimise operational overhead and use managed services where possible. Which two services should they choose? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL for MySQL to host the database. Cloud SQL provides a managed MySQL database, eliminating database administration. Cloud Run or GKE can host the frontend and logic, but Cloud Run is serverless and reduces overhead. Compute Engine would require more management.

Answer

Cloud Functions for the business logic

Answer

Compute Engine to host the frontend and business logic

Answer

Cloud Spanner for the database

Question 7

A company needs to store and analyze large amounts of log data (hundreds of terabytes) with occasional SQL queries. The data is rarely accessed after 30 days and must be kept for compliance for 7 years. They want to minimize storage costs. Which three actions should they take? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Storage Object Lifecycle Management to move objects to Nearline after 30 days, then to Coldline after 90 days, then to Archive after 1 year. BigQuery is ideal for log analysis. For historical data, moving older data to lower-cost storage classes like NEARLINE or COLDLINE reduces cost. Partitioning and clustering improve query performance and reduce costs. Cloud Storage is an alternative, but BigQuery is better for SQL queries.

Answer

Store the data in BigQuery and set an expiration on the table to delete data after 30 days

Answer

Use BigQuery partitions based on ingestion time and set partition expiration to 30 days

Question 8

An organization wants to run a stateless HTTP-based containerized application that scales to zero when not in use and charges only for request processing time. They do not want to manage any underlying infrastructure. Which compute option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless platform for containers. It scales to zero automatically when no requests are coming in, and you pay only for the resources used during request processing. It is ideal for stateless HTTP-triggered workloads.

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance group

Answer

Cloud Functions

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard

Question 9

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 regional (high availability) configuration replicates data synchronously to a standby instance in a different zone within the same region, providing automatic failover. It is ideal for legacy applications requiring relational database support (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server).

Answer

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

Answer

Cloud Storage with object versioning

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Question 10

A startup wants to run a small, event-driven application that processes files uploaded to Cloud Storage. The function should be triggered by object finalize events and should have a maximum execution time of 10 minutes. Which compute option is most cost-effective and easy to manage?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions (Gen 2). Cloud Functions (Gen 2) can be triggered by Cloud Storage events and supports longer timeouts (up to 60 minutes). It is serverless and cost-effective for event-driven workloads. Cloud Run also works but requires running a container; Cloud Functions is simpler for single-purpose functions.

Answer

Compute Engine with a startup script

Answer

App Engine Standard

Answer

Cloud Run jobs

Question 11

A company needs to run a batch job every hour on a Compute Engine VM. The VM should be terminated after the job completes to save costs. The job is run from a script inside a custom container image stored in Container Registry. Which approach is the most cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Create a VM with a preemptible instance setting and a startup script that runs the container, then shuts down the VM. Compute Engine preemptible VMs are up to 60-91% cheaper than regular VMs. For batch jobs that can be interrupted, they are highly cost-effective. Combining with a startup script that pulls and runs the container, and having the script shut down the VM after the job, minimizes costs.

Answer

Use a managed instance group with autoscaling and a target CPU load of 0%

Answer

Use a regular VM and stop it manually when the job finishes

Answer

Use Cloud Run with a scheduled job

Question 12

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 in GKE allow you to have groups of nodes with different configurations (e.g., machine type, preemptible vs on-demand). You can then use node affinity or taints/tolerations to schedule pods onto the appropriate node pool.

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 13

A company wants to migrate an on-premises PostgreSQL database to Google Cloud. They require automated backups, point-in-time recovery, and a 99.95% availability SLA. Which service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL provides automated backups, point-in-time recovery (PITR), and a 99.95% SLA for single-zone instances. It is fully managed, reducing operational overhead.

Answer

Compute Engine with self-managed PostgreSQL

Answer

Cloud SQL for MySQL

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Question 14

A team is building a mobile app backend that requires real-time data synchronization across devices and offline support. The data model is simple and document-based. Which database service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Firestore. Firestore is a NoSQL document database that provides real-time synchronization, offline support, and is designed for mobile and web apps. It integrates with Firebase SDKs.

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

BigQuery

Answer

Cloud SQL

Question 15

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). Committed use discounts (CUDs) offer significant savings (up to 57% for machine types) in exchange for committing to 1 or 3 years. Sustained use discounts apply automatically for running instances >25% of the month, but CUDs are additional and can be combined. For a 1-year commitment, they should include CUD for the machine type.

Answer

No discount is needed; the price shown is final

Answer

Free tier discount

Answer

Sustained use discount only