Google ACE Planning and configuring a cloud solution — Timed 50 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

Question 16

A startup builds a serverless REST API using Cloud Functions (2nd gen). Each function invocation runs for 200ms on average, processes 5 million requests per day, and uses 256 MB memory. Approximately how should they estimate monthly Cloud Functions costs?

Accepted Answer

Estimate based on invocation count, compute time (memory × duration), and networking costs beyond the free tier. Option B is correct because Cloud Functions (2nd gen) pricing is based on three components: invocation count, compute time (measured in GB-seconds, which is memory multiplied by duration), and networking egress beyond the free tier. With 5 million requests per day at 200ms each and 256 MB memory, the monthly compute time is approximately 5,000,000 × 0.2 seconds × (256/1024) GB = 250,000 GB-seconds per day, or 7.5 million GB-seconds per month, which far exceeds the free tier of 400,000 GB-seconds per month, so costs will accrue. Additionally, the 150 million invocations per month exceed the free tier of 2 million invocations, and egress traffic will also incur charges beyond the 1 GB free tier.

Answer

Approximately $0 — all invocations fall within the free tier

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Approximately the same as a continuously-running e2-medium VM — Cloud Functions and VMs are priced equivalently

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Fixed monthly rate based on the number of deployed functions, not invocation count

Question 17

A startup runs its application entirely on Cloud Run. They want to use a custom domain (api.mycompany.com) instead of the default Cloud Run URL. Which GCP feature maps a custom domain to a Cloud Run service?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run Domain Mappings or a Global Load Balancer with a Serverless NEG. Option B is correct because Cloud Run Domain Mappings provide a native, managed way to map a custom domain to a Cloud Run service without additional infrastructure. Alternatively, a Global Load Balancer with a Serverless NEG (Network Endpoint Group) can also route traffic from a custom domain to Cloud Run, offering advanced features like SSL termination and traffic splitting. Both approaches are officially supported by Google Cloud for custom domain mapping.

Answer

Cloud DNS — create a CNAME record pointing to the Cloud Run URL

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Cloud Endpoints with an API gateway configuration

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Firebase Hosting rewrites to Cloud Run

Question 18

A SaaS company serves 200 enterprise customers, each requiring complete data isolation in separate databases. The company needs to provision a new customer database within minutes and manage 200 databases with minimal overhead. Which GCP approach scales most efficiently?

Accepted Answer

A single Cloud SQL instance with a separate schema (database) per customer, provisioned via API automation. Option B is correct because it uses a single Cloud SQL instance with separate schemas (databases) per customer, which allows you to achieve complete data isolation while minimizing overhead. Provisioning a new schema via API automation takes seconds, and managing 200 schemas on one instance is far more efficient than managing 200 separate instances. This approach scales efficiently because Cloud SQL supports up to 10,000 databases per instance, and you can leverage connection pooling and shared resources without sacrificing isolation.

Answer

200 separate Cloud SQL instances, one per customer

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Storing all customer data in a single shared database with customer_id as a discriminator column

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Using BigQuery with a separate dataset per customer

Question 19

A team builds a document processing pipeline: files are uploaded to Cloud Storage, then analyzed by Cloud Vision AI, results stored in Firestore, and a confirmation email sent. Each step depends on the previous. Which GCP service orchestrates these sequential, dependent steps reliably?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Workflows. Cloud Workflows is designed to orchestrate sequential, dependent steps with built-in retry, error handling, and state management. It directly models the pipeline as a series of steps where each step's output feeds the next, without requiring manual chaining or intermediate messaging infrastructure.

Answer

Cloud Pub/Sub with a subscription per step

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Cloud Tasks with per-step queues

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Cloud Functions chained via HTTP calls

Question 20

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

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Cloud Firestore in multi-region mode

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Cloud SQL with Cloud Memorystore caching layer for reads