Cloud Digital Leader Practice Test 42 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Match each Google Cloud networking concept to its description.

Accepted Answer

VPC: Virtual network environment in Google Cloud.. The correct matches are: VPC - virtual network, Cloud Load Balancing - traffic distribution, Cloud CDN - content caching, Cloud Interconnect - dedicated physical connection. Common confusions include mixing Cloud CDN with Load Balancing and Cloud Interconnect with Cloud VPN.

Answer

Cloud CDN: Distributes incoming traffic across instances.

Answer

Cloud Interconnect: Virtual private network over the internet.

Question 2

A company wants to reduce its cloud spending by optimizing storage costs for infrequently accessed data. Which THREE Google Cloud storage classes should they consider? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Archive. Nearline, Coldline, and Archive are cost-effective storage classes for infrequently accessed data with lower retrieval costs.

Answer

Standard

Answer

Regional

Question 3

A company is building a data pipeline that ingests events from multiple sources, processes them in real-time, and stores the results in a data warehouse for analysis. They need a fully managed, serverless solution for stream processing. Which THREE Google Cloud services should they use?

Accepted Answer

Pub/Sub. Pub/Sub ingests events. Dataflow processes streams. BigQuery stores and analyzes results. Cloud Functions is for lightweight event-driven functions, not stream processing. Dataproc is for batch processing.

Answer

Dataproc

Answer

Cloud Functions

Question 4

Match each Google Cloud security concept to its description.

Accepted Answer

Cloud IAM: Unified access control for Google Cloud resources. The correct matches are Cloud IAM (access control), Cloud KMS (key management), Cloud Security Command Center (threat detection), and Cloud DLP (data loss prevention). Common confusions include mixing up IAM with Security Command Center or KMS with Cloud Armor.

Answer

Cloud IAM: Security monitoring and threat detection

Answer

Cloud KMS: Web application firewall and DDoS protection

Question 5

An organization needs to ensure that data stored in Cloud Storage is encrypted at rest using keys that are rotated every 30 days. They also need to audit who accesses the keys and when. Which THREE services should they use? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Cloud Audit Logs. Cloud KMS manages key rotation. Cloud Audit Logs record key access. Cloud Storage stores the data. Cloud HSM can be used but is not required for the scenario.

Answer

Cloud HSM

Answer

Secret Manager

Question 6

A company runs a web application on Compute Engine. They want to improve availability by distributing traffic across multiple regions and automatically failing over if one region becomes unhealthy. Which TWO services should they combine? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Cloud DNS with geo-routing. External HTTPS Load Balancer with global backend services can route traffic across regions and support failover. Cloud DNS with health checks can route traffic to healthy backends.

Answer

Internal Load Balancer

Answer

External HTTPS Load Balancer with backend buckets

Answer

Network Load Balancer

Question 7

A company is migrating a legacy application to Google Cloud. The application has variable traffic and requires reliable, low-latency database access. The team wants to minimize operational overhead. Which TWO services should they consider for the database tier? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL. Cloud SQL provides managed relational databases with automatic failover and replication. Cloud Spanner provides globally distributed, strongly consistent database with automatic sharding. Both reduce operational overhead.

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Self-managed MySQL on Compute Engine

Question 8

Match each Google Cloud DevOps tool to its purpose.

Accepted Answer

Cloud Build: Continuous integration/continuous delivery platform that executes builds in the cloud.. Key Google Cloud DevOps tools include Cloud Build for CI/CD, Container Registry for container image storage, Cloud Deployment Manager for infrastructure as code, and Cloud Source Repositories for version control. Common confusions often arise between Container Registry and Cloud Build, or between Cloud Source Repositories and Deployment Manager.

Answer

Cloud Build: Private container image registry for storing and managing Docker images.

Answer

Cloud Deployment Manager: Private Git repositories hosted on Google Cloud.

Question 9

Match each Google Cloud pricing concept to its definition.

Accepted Answer

Sustained Use Discounts: Automatic discounts applied for sustained usage of resources over a month. Sustained Use Discounts are automatic monthly discounts for sustained usage; Committed Use Discounts require a contractual commitment for 1-3 years; Preemptible VMs are short-lived and can be terminated. Common confusions include swapping the definitions of sustained and committed use, or confusing preemptible VMs with standard VMs.

Answer

Sustained Use Discounts: Discounts for committing to a specific amount of usage over 1-3 years

Answer

Committed Use Discounts: Automatic discounts applied for sustained usage

Answer

Preemptible VMs: Compute instances that run continuously with high availability

Question 10

A company runs a web application on Compute Engine. During seasonal sales, traffic spikes unpredictably. The operations team wants to ensure the application scales automatically without manual intervention while minimizing cost. Which solution should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Use a managed instance group with autoscaling based on CPU utilization.. A managed instance group (MIG) with autoscaling based on CPU utilization is the correct solution because it automatically adjusts the number of VM instances in response to real-time traffic spikes, ensuring the application scales out during high demand and scales in during low demand. This eliminates manual intervention and optimizes cost by only running the necessary number of instances based on a target CPU utilization threshold (e.g., 60-80%).

Answer

Create a managed instance group with a fixed number of instances.

Answer

Use an unmanaged instance group and manually add instances.

Answer

Use a single large VM with vertical scaling.

Question 11

A company is adopting cloud to improve operational efficiency. Which TWO benefits are directly associated with cloud's resource pooling characteristic?

Accepted Answer

Cost optimization. Resource pooling allows the cloud provider to dynamically allocate and reallocate physical and virtual resources among multiple customers based on demand, which drives cost optimization through economies of scale and higher utilization rates. Option D is correct because multi-tenancy is a direct outcome of resource pooling, where a single physical infrastructure serves multiple tenants securely, maximizing resource usage and reducing per-tenant costs.

Answer

Dedicated hardware

Answer

Custom hardware

Answer

Increased downtime

Question 12

A DevOps engineer notices that a Cloud Function is timing out after 9 minutes. The function performs a long-running data transformation. They need to increase the timeout. What is the maximum timeout they can set for a Cloud Function (1st gen)?

Accepted Answer

9 minutes. Cloud Functions (1st gen) have a maximum timeout of 9 minutes (540 seconds). For longer timeouts, they would need to use Cloud Functions (2nd gen) which supports up to 60 minutes, or use Cloud Run.

Answer

15 minutes

Answer

30 minutes

Answer

60 minutes

Question 13

A DevOps engineer wants to automatically delete a Cloud Storage object after 30 days from creation. The object is stored in a bucket with the 'Standard' storage class. Which approach should the engineer use?

Accepted Answer

Add a lifecycle rule to delete objects after 30 days. Object Lifecycle Management rules can be configured on a bucket to delete objects based on age (days since creation). The rule sets a condition (e.g., age: 30) and action (Delete). Changing the storage class or using bucket lock does not delete objects. Object versioning is for keeping multiple versions.

Answer

Set a retention policy on the bucket with a 30-day retention period

Answer

Change the storage class to 'Archive' which automatically deletes after 30 days

Answer

Enable object versioning and set a noncurrent time deletion of 30 days

Question 14

A company stores customer data in Google Cloud and wants to ensure data confidentiality in the event that hardware is decommissioned and returned by Google. How does Google protect customer data when storage hardware reaches end of life?

Accepted Answer

Google uses approved data erasure and physical destruction processes (shredding, degaussing) for decommissioned storage media before hardware leaves its facilities.. Google Cloud follows strict data destruction policies for decommissioned storage media. Before any hardware leaves Google's facilities, it undergoes approved data erasure (e.g., NIST SP 800-88 compliant wiping) followed by physical destruction (e.g., shredding, degaussing) to ensure customer data cannot be recovered. This process guarantees data confidentiality even if the hardware is returned or recycled.

Answer

Google transfers customer data to new hardware first, then ships the old hardware to the customer for self-destruction.

Answer

Customer data on decommissioned hardware is automatically encrypted, making it safe to discard without wiping.

Answer

Customers must pay a data destruction fee to ensure their data is wiped from decommissioned hardware.

Question 15

A large online retailer operates a microservices-based e-commerce platform on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) across multiple zones. The application consists of several stateless services that handle customer traffic, inventory, and order processing. Recently, the company migrated its relational database to Cloud Spanner to achieve global scalability and strong consistency. After the migration, during peak shopping periods (e.g., Black Friday), the application experiences significant performance degradation. The operations team monitors CPU utilization of the pods and finds it consistently below 60% even under heavy load. However, Cloud Spanner metrics show high query latency and increased number of transactions waiting for lock conflicts. The team suspects that the bottleneck is now the database, not the compute. The application is designed to scale horizontally by adding more pod replicas. The team wants to ensure that scaling decisions are based on the actual performance bottleneck. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Modify the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) to scale based on a custom metric that reflects Cloud Spanner query latency.. The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) can be configured to scale based on custom metrics, such as Cloud Spanner query latency. Since the bottleneck is the database, scaling pods based on CPU utilization (which remains low) would not resolve the issue; instead, scaling based on Spanner latency ensures that the application adds replicas only when the database can handle more connections, reducing lock contention and improving overall performance.

Answer

Scale the GKE cluster to use larger node instances.

Answer

Increase the CPU request limit for the pods to allow higher CPU usage.

Answer

Reduce the number of pods to decrease Spanner load.