Cloud Digital Leader Practice Test 38 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Match each Google Cloud AI/ML term to its definition.

Accepted Answer

Vertex AI: A unified platform for AI/ML model development and deployment.. Vertex AI is the unified platform; AutoML automates model training; Cloud TPUs accelerate computation. Common confusions include swapping these definitions.

Answer

Vertex AI: A suite of tools to train high-quality models with minimal ML expertise.

Answer

Cloud TPU: A unified platform for AI/ML model development and deployment.

Question 2

A company wants to replace its VPN-based remote access with a zero-trust solution that verifies user identity and device health before granting access to internal applications. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

BeyondCorp Enterprise. BeyondCorp Enterprise is Google Cloud's zero-trust solution that provides identity and context-aware access to internal applications. It verifies user identity and device health before granting access, aligning with zero-trust principles. It includes IAP but offers broader capabilities like device trust and continuous validation.

Answer

Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)

Answer

Cloud VPN

Answer

Cloud Identity

Question 3

A financial services company needs a relational database with global strong consistency, horizontal scaling, and 99.999% availability SLA. Which database should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is Google's globally distributed, horizontally scalable relational database that offers external consistency (strong consistency) and a 99.999% availability SLA for multi-region configurations. It is the only GCP database that combines relational semantics, horizontal scale, and global strong consistency at that SLA level.

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Firestore

Question 4

A company wants to analyze their GCP spending trends by service and project over the past year. They need to export detailed billing data to a BigQuery dataset for custom queries. Which feature should they use?

Accepted Answer

Billing export to BigQuery. Billing export to BigQuery automatically streams detailed Cloud Billing data — including cost by service, project, SKU, and labels — into a BigQuery dataset where you can run arbitrary SQL for trend analysis. It is the only option that provides granular, queryable historical billing data. The other options are for estimation, recommendations, or alerting, not detailed export and custom querying.

Answer

Cloud Pricing Calculator

Answer

Active Assist rightsizing recommendations

Answer

Cloud Billing budget alerts

Question 5

An organization needs to ensure that data stored in Cloud Storage is encrypted using keys that they manage and rotate themselves. Which encryption option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK). Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) allow the organization to create, manage, and rotate encryption keys themselves using Cloud KMS, while still leveraging Google Cloud's encryption infrastructure. This meets the requirement for self-managed keys with rotation control. CMEK provides the necessary control without the operational burden of handling raw key material.

Answer

Default encryption at rest

Answer

Customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK)

Answer

Google-managed encryption keys

Question 6

A security analyst needs to analyze large volumes of security logs from multiple GCP projects, detect anomalies, and investigate incidents. The solution should support advanced analytics and threat hunting. Which service is best suited?

Accepted Answer

Chronicle. Chronicle is Google's security analytics platform designed for ingesting and analyzing massive volumes of security telemetry across multiple projects, with built-in threat detection, anomaly detection, and threat hunting capabilities. It retains years of data and provides a petabyte-scale search and correlation engine, making it the best fit for advanced security analytics and incident investigation.

Answer

Cloud Logging

Answer

BigQuery

Answer

Security Command Center

Question 7

A data scientist wants to train a custom machine learning model using a large dataset stored in BigQuery. They need a managed service that supports distributed training with GPU accelerators. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Vertex AI Training. Vertex AI Training is Google Cloud's managed service for training custom machine learning models, supporting distributed training across multiple machines and GPU/TPU accelerators. It integrates with BigQuery for data access and allows custom training code in containers, making it the right choice for training a custom model on a large BigQuery dataset with GPUs.

Answer

Dataflow

Answer

Cloud Functions

Answer

AutoML (within Vertex AI)

Question 8

Which cloud benefit allows a company to automatically add or remove computing resources based on demand, avoiding both over-provisioning and under-provisioning?

Accepted Answer

Elasticity. Elasticity is the cloud property that automatically scales computing resources up or down to match demand, adding capacity during peaks and removing it during lulls. This dynamic adjustment avoids both over-provisioning (wasted cost) and under-provisioning (poor performance), which is exactly what the question describes.

Answer

High availability

Answer

Pay-as-you-go

Answer

Global reach

Question 9

An engineer needs to organize resources for multiple departments and enforce organization-wide policies such as restricting VM external IP addresses. Which GCP resource hierarchy level should the policy be applied at to ensure all projects inherit it?

Accepted Answer

Organization node. In Google Cloud's resource hierarchy, the organization node is the root and sits above folders and projects. IAM policies and organization policies applied at the organization node are inherited by all folders, projects, and resources beneath it. To enforce a policy such as restricting external IP addresses across all projects in the company, the organization node is the correct level because it guarantees universal inheritance.

Answer

Resource

Answer

Folder

Answer

Project

Question 10

A developer needs to estimate the monthly cost of running a set of Compute Engine instances with specific machine types, persistent disks, and network egress before deploying. Which tool should they use?

Accepted Answer

Google Cloud Pricing Calculator. The Google Cloud Pricing Calculator is the tool designed to estimate costs for specific resources like Compute Engine instances, persistent disks, and network egress before deployment. It lets you configure machine types, disk sizes, and egress volumes to produce a monthly cost estimate. This is exactly the pre-deployment estimation use case described.

Answer

Billing export to BigQuery

Answer

Active Assist Recommendations

Answer

Cost Management dashboard

Question 11

A company wants to monitor the CPU and memory utilisation of their Compute Engine instances and set up alerts when utilisation exceeds 80%. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Monitoring. Cloud Monitoring collects metrics from Compute Engine instances via the Ops Agent (or legacy monitoring agent) and provides alerting policies based on metric thresholds. CPU utilization and memory utilization are standard metrics (compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization and memory/utilization) that can be charted and alerted on when exceeding 80%. This is the native GCP service for metric-based monitoring and alerting.

Answer

Cloud Logging

Answer

Cloud Error Reporting

Answer

Cloud Trace

Question 12

A company wants to use machine learning to analyze customer reviews without building and training models from scratch. They need a pre-trained model that can classify sentiment. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Natural Language API. The Cloud Natural Language API is a pre-trained, fully managed service that exposes sentiment analysis (among other NLP features like entity and syntax analysis) through a simple REST/RPC call, so no model training or ML expertise is required. It directly satisfies the requirement for a pre-trained sentiment classification model. Vertex AI and AutoML require you to build/train or at least manage a model, and Dialogflow is for conversational agents, not sentiment classification.

Answer

Vertex AI

Answer

AutoML Natural Language

Answer

Dialogflow

Question 13

A company is using Cloud SQL for MySQL and notices that read queries are becoming slow as the application scales. They want to offload read traffic from the primary instance to improve performance. Which Cloud SQL feature should they enable?

Accepted Answer

Read replicas. Read replicas in Cloud SQL for MySQL are designed specifically to offload read traffic from the primary instance by maintaining an asynchronous copy of the data that applications can query directly. By directing SELECT queries to one or more read replicas, the primary instance is freed up to handle write operations, improving overall throughput and reducing latency on the primary. This is the standard horizontal scaling pattern for read-heavy Cloud SQL workloads.

Answer

Automatic failover replicas

Answer

Connection pooling

Answer

Point-in-time recovery

Question 14

Which defense-in-depth layer includes measures like access controls, vulnerability management, and intrusion detection systems?

Accepted Answer

Operational security. Operational security (OpSec) is the defense-in-depth layer focused on day-to-day processes, people, and procedures that protect systems — it explicitly encompasses access controls, vulnerability management, and intrusion detection systems. These are ongoing operational activities rather than physical barriers or data-at-rest protections, which is why OpSec is the correct classification.

Answer

Data security

Answer

Physical security

Answer

Infrastructure security

Question 15

A media company needs to stream live video to global viewers with low latency. They also want to protect against DDoS attacks. Which combination of Google Cloud networking services should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN and Cloud Armor. Cloud CDN and Cloud Armor together provide low-latency global content delivery and DDoS protection. Cloud CDN caches content at edge locations to reduce latency for global viewers, while Cloud Armor provides WAF and DDoS protection at the edge. This combination directly addresses the requirements.

Answer

Cloud Interconnect and Cloud VPN

Answer

Cloud DNS and Cloud Armor

Answer

Cloud Load Balancing and Cloud NAT