Google ACE Planning and configuring a cloud solution Practice Test 1 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A compliance archive stores legal documents accessed at most once per quarter. Which Cloud Storage class minimizes storage cost while meeting that access pattern?

Accepted Answer

Coldline. Coldline storage is designed for data accessed less than once per quarter, offering lower storage costs than Standard or Nearline while still providing millisecond access when needed. For a compliance archive accessed at most once per quarter, Coldline minimizes storage cost without incurring the higher retrieval fees or minimum storage durations of Archive storage.

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Standard

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Nearline

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Archive

Question 2

A team needs to run a containerized HTTP API that scales to zero when idle and requires zero cluster or server management. Which GCP compute platform is the best fit?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is the best fit because it is a fully managed serverless platform that automatically scales your containerized HTTP API to zero when idle, meaning you pay only for resources used during request processing. It requires no cluster or server management, as it abstracts away the underlying infrastructure entirely, unlike other options that still involve some level of node or instance management.

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Compute Engine with a managed instance group

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Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot

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App Engine Flexible

Question 3

A batch data processing job runs nightly for 4 hours and can tolerate interruption because it saves progress checkpoints every 15 minutes. Which VM option offers the greatest cost reduction?

Accepted Answer

Spot VM. Spot VMs offer significant cost reduction (up to 60-91% discount) compared to standard VMs, making them ideal for fault-tolerant, interruptible batch workloads. Since the job saves checkpoints every 15 minutes, it can resume from the last checkpoint if preempted, fully leveraging the cost benefit of Spot VMs.

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Custom machine type VM with reduced memory

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Sole-tenant node VM

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Shielded VM

Question 4

A mobile app needs a managed database to store user profiles with flexible nested structures that evolve frequently — new fields are added without schema migrations. Which GCP database service is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Firestore. Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database that supports flexible, nested data structures and automatically handles schema evolution. New fields can be added to documents at any time without requiring migrations, making it ideal for user profiles that change frequently. It also provides real-time synchronization and offline support, which are common requirements for mobile apps.

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Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL

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Cloud Bigtable

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Cloud Spanner

Question 5

A global web application needs HTTPS traffic routed to backend services in multiple regions, directing each user to the nearest healthy endpoint. Which load balancer type should be used?

Accepted Answer

Global external Application Load Balancer. The Global external Application Load Balancer (ALB) is the correct choice because it provides cross-regional load balancing for HTTPS traffic, routing each user to the nearest healthy backend based on anycast IP and client location. This is essential for a global web application requiring low latency and high availability across multiple regions.

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Regional external Network Load Balancer

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Regional internal Application Load Balancer

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Regional internal TCP/UDP load balancer

Question 6

A startup wants to minimize egress costs for a web service that exclusively serves customers within Europe. Which network service tier is most cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Standard Tier. Standard Tier uses Google's network with egress traffic routed over the internet, which is significantly cheaper than Premium Tier's SLA-backed, low-latency global network. Since the service exclusively serves customers within Europe, the higher cost of Premium Tier is unnecessary, making Standard Tier the most cost-effective choice for minimizing egress costs.

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Premium Tier

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Economy Tier

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Free Tier

Question 7

A data science team needs a VM with 96 vCPUs and 624 GB of RAM. No predefined GCP machine type matches these exact specifications. What is the recommended approach?

Accepted Answer

Create a custom machine type with exactly 96 vCPUs and 624 GB RAM. Option B is correct because Google Cloud allows you to create custom machine types when predefined machine types do not meet your exact requirements. Custom machine types let you specify the exact number of vCPUs (up to 96) and memory (up to 624 GB) for a VM, providing flexibility without over-provisioning resources.

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Select the closest larger predefined N2 machine type

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Split the workload across multiple smaller VMs and coordinate manually

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Contact Google Cloud support to request a new predefined machine type

Question 8

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

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Cloud Bigtable

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Cloud Firestore

Question 9

An enterprise requires a private connection between its on-premises data center and Google Cloud VPC that does NOT traverse the public internet and provides dedicated 10 Gbps bandwidth. Which connectivity option meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Dedicated Interconnect. Dedicated Interconnect provides a direct, private physical connection between your on-premises network and Google Cloud VPC, offering bandwidth up to 10 Gbps per circuit (or 100 Gbps with multiple circuits) without traversing the public internet. This meets the requirement for a private connection with dedicated 10 Gbps bandwidth, as it uses a colocation facility and a Google-supported router.

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Cloud VPN with high-availability configuration

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Partner Interconnect

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Direct Peering

Question 10

A web application uses a managed instance group. Traffic spikes sharply between 9 AM and 5 PM and drops to near zero overnight. Which autoscaling metric most directly triggers scale-out before user experience degrades?

Accepted Answer

HTTP load balancing serving capacity (requests per second per instance). HTTP load balancing serving capacity (requests per second per instance) is the most direct metric because it measures the actual user-facing load on each instance. When traffic spikes, this metric rises immediately, triggering scale-out before instances become saturated and response times degrade. CPU utilization can lag behind the spike due to queuing or async processing, making it less responsive for sharp traffic patterns.

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Average CPU utilization of instances in the group

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Pub/Sub subscription queue depth

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Disk I/O throughput

Question 11

A team is building a real-time multiplayer game backend requiring low-latency state synchronization between players worldwide. Session data must persist for the duration of a game (up to 2 hours) but doesn't need long-term storage. Which managed service best fits?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Memorystore for Redis. Cloud Memorystore for Redis is the best fit because it provides an in-memory data store with sub-millisecond latency, ideal for real-time state synchronization in a multiplayer game. Redis supports data structures like sets and sorted sets for leaderboards or session state, and its optional persistence (RDB/AOF) can cover the 2-hour game duration without needing long-term storage. This aligns with the requirement for low-latency, ephemeral session data that must survive only the game session.

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL with connection pooling

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Cloud Bigtable

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Cloud Firestore in Native mode

Question 12

A data analytics team runs Apache Spark jobs to process large datasets. They need a managed cluster that provisions quickly, scales dynamically, and integrates with Cloud Storage and BigQuery. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Dataproc. Cloud Dataproc is the correct choice because it is a managed Spark and Hadoop service that provisions clusters in under 90 seconds, supports autoscaling, and natively integrates with Cloud Storage (via the gs:// connector) and BigQuery (via the BigQuery Storage API and Spark BigQuery connector). This makes it ideal for teams needing fast, dynamic, and integrated Spark job execution.

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Cloud Dataflow

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Cloud Composer

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Cloud Run with a custom Spark container

Question 13

A media company ingests 500,000 events per second from IoT sensors and needs to store them for time-series analytics queries that scan billions of rows. Which storage service is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Bigtable. Cloud Bigtable is the most appropriate service because it is a fully managed, scalable NoSQL database designed for high-throughput, low-latency workloads like IoT sensor data ingestion at 500,000 events per second. It supports time-series analytics queries scanning billions of rows via its wide-column storage model and integration with BigQuery for complex analytics, while providing sub-10ms latency for point lookups and efficient range scans.

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Cloud Firestore

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Cloud SQL for MySQL

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BigQuery streaming inserts

Question 14

A startup needs to send transactional emails (order confirmations, password resets) from their GCP-hosted application. Which GCP service handles high-volume email delivery?

Accepted Answer

A third-party email delivery service such as SendGrid or Mailgun, integrated via API. B is correct because GCP does not provide a native high-volume transactional email service. Third-party email delivery services like SendGrid or Mailgun are designed specifically for this purpose, offering dedicated SMTP relays, APIs, and reputation management to ensure reliable delivery of transactional emails such as order confirmations and password resets.

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Cloud Tasks with an email delivery queue

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Cloud Pub/Sub with an email topic subscriber

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Cloud Functions triggered by Gmail API webhooks

Question 15

A financial application requires a relational database with automatic failover to a standby in a different zone, with minimal configuration overhead. Which Cloud SQL configuration provides this?

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL with High Availability (HA) configuration. Cloud SQL's High Availability (HA) configuration provides automatic failover to a standby instance in a different zone using synchronous replication and a regional persistent disk. This meets the requirement for minimal configuration overhead because it is a built-in feature that requires no application-level logic or manual intervention.

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Cloud SQL with a read replica in a different zone

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Cloud Spanner multi-region instance

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Two separate Cloud SQL instances with application-level failover logic