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

Question 1

A company wants to run a batch job that processes files from a Cloud Storage bucket and writes results to BigQuery. The job runs once daily and can take up to 30 minutes. Which compute option is the most cost-effective and requires the least operational overhead?

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

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run jobs. Cloud Run jobs is designed for containerized batch workloads that run to completion, scaling to zero when idle, so you pay only for the compute consumed during the 30-minute daily run. It requires no cluster management, no VM provisioning, and no function-level timeout concerns, giving the lowest operational overhead and cost for a once-daily batch.

Answer

GKE Autopilot cluster

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Cloud Functions (2nd gen)

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Compute Engine with a preemptible VM

Question 2

A user wants to estimate the monthly cost of running a Compute Engine VM with 8 vCPUs, 32 GB of memory, and a 100 GB persistent disk in us-central1 for one year. They plan to use the VM 24/7. Which tool should they use?

Accepted Answer

Google Cloud Pricing Calculator. The Google Cloud Pricing Calculator is the official tool for estimating future costs of GCP resources before deployment. It lets you configure VM machine type, region, disk size, and committed-use or sustained-use discounts to produce a monthly and yearly estimate. Cloud Billing reports, by contrast, show historical actual spend, not projections.

Answer

Cloud Asset Inventory

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Cloud Billing reports

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Cloud Monitoring

Question 3

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 Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless data warehouse designed for petabyte-scale analytics. It offers built-in machine learning through BigQuery ML and automatically scales compute and storage resources without manual intervention. This makes it the correct choice for analytics at scale with ML capabilities.

Answer

Cloud Storage

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Dataproc

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Cloud SQL

Question 4

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 (2nd gen) is a fully managed, event-driven serverless compute service that scales to zero when idle and is triggered natively by Pub/Sub. It is stateless by design, requires no cluster or instance management, and charges only for invocations and compute time, making it the most cost-effective and operationally simple choice for low, spiky workloads.

Answer

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

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

Answer

Cloud Run for Anthos on-premises

Question 5

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 for MySQL (option B) is correct because it is a fully managed relational database service that supports MySQL, letting the company lift and shift its existing MySQL database with minimal code changes while offloading patching, backups, and replication to Google. Cloud Run (option C) is correct because it is a fully managed serverless container platform that can host both the web frontend and the business logic layer as containerized services, scaling automatically and requiring no server or cluster management, which directly minimizes operational overhead. Cloud Functions (option A) is not suitable because it is an event-driven FaaS environment best for short, single-purpose functions rather than a full business logic layer of a monolithic application. Compute Engine (option D) is incorrect because managing VMs still requires significant operational effort (OS patching, scaling, capacity), contradicting the goal of minimizing overhead. Cloud Spanner (option E) is incorrect because it is a globally distributed, horizontally scalable database that is overkill and requires schema/application changes, whereas the existing MySQL workload maps directly to Cloud SQL.

Answer

Cloud Functions for the business logic

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Compute Engine to host the frontend and business logic

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Cloud Spanner for the database

Question 6

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 7

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 containerized HTTP applications that scales to zero when idle and bills only for request processing time (CPU/memory allocated during requests). It requires no infrastructure management and supports any containerized HTTP workload. This matches the requirement exactly.

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance group

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Cloud Functions

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard

Question 8

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

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Cloud Storage with object versioning

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Question 9

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) is the most cost-effective and easy-to-manage option for event-driven applications triggered by Cloud Storage object finalize events, with a maximum execution time of 10 minutes. It provides serverless execution, automatic scaling, and native integration with Cloud Storage events. Gen 2 offers longer execution times (up to 60 minutes) and improved performance compared to Gen 1.

Answer

Compute Engine with a startup script

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App Engine Standard

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Cloud Run jobs

Question 10

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

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Use separate clusters for critical and non-critical services

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Use vertical pod autoscaling

Question 11

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 is a fully managed database service that supports automated backups, point-in-time recovery (PITR), and offers a 99.95% availability SLA when configured with high availability (HA). It is specifically designed for PostgreSQL workloads, making it the ideal choice for migrating an on-premises PostgreSQL database to Google Cloud while meeting the stated requirements. The service handles routine tasks like patching, replication, and backups, allowing the company to focus on their application.

Answer

Compute Engine with self-managed PostgreSQL

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Cloud SQL for MySQL

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Question 12

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 and offline support for mobile and web applications. It is designed for mobile app backends with simple document-based data models, offering automatic scaling and strong consistency. Firestore's real-time listeners and offline persistence make it ideal for this use case.

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

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BigQuery

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Cloud SQL

Question 13

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

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Free tier discount

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Sustained use discount only

Question 14

A company has a VPC with custom mode and needs to connect to an on-premises network via HA VPN. They have two on-premises VPN devices, each with a static public IP address. What is the correct way to configure the HA VPN gateway on Google Cloud?

Accepted Answer

Create one HA VPN gateway with two interfaces in the same region, and create two tunnels, each connecting one cloud interface to one on-premises device. For HA VPN with two on-premises devices, you create one HA VPN gateway with two interfaces in the same region, and then create two tunnels, each connecting one cloud interface to one on-premises device. This provides redundancy and meets the HA requirements.

Answer

Create one classic VPN gateway with two tunnels to the two on-premises devices

Answer

Create two separate VPN gateways, each with one interface, and assign each to a different region

Answer

Create one HA VPN gateway in one region and one classic VPN gateway in another region

Question 15

A company has a Compute Engine instance that needs to access the internet for software updates, but the instance only has an internal IP address. Which TWO steps are required to enable outbound internet connectivity while keeping the instance private?

Accepted Answer

Create a firewall rule that allows egress traffic to the internet. Cloud NAT allows instances with only internal IP addresses to access the internet for outbound connections. You also need to configure firewall rules to allow egress traffic (e.g., allow HTTP/HTTPS). A NAT gateway without firewall rules will not work.

Answer

Create a VPC peering connection to a network with internet access

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Attach the instance to a load balancer

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Assign a public IP address to the instance