Cloud Digital Leader Why Cloud Technology Can Transform Business Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a batch processing workload every night that takes 60 minutes on a single n1-standard-32 VM. They want to reduce costs by using preemptible VMs but need the job to complete within 90 minutes. The job can be parallelized if necessary. Which approach is most cost-effective?

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

Accepted Answer

Split the workload across 4 preemptible n1-standard-8 VMs with checkpointing.. Preemptible VMs can be terminated at any time, so running multiple smaller instances with checkpointing and retries reduces cost and meets the deadline.

Answer

Use a single non-preemptible VM to ensure completion.

Answer

Use the same VM but as preemptible; if preempted, restart the job from scratch.

Answer

Use a single preemptible VM with persistent disk snapshots every 10 minutes.

Question 2

A data analytics firm wants to query data across Cloud Storage and BigQuery without moving the data. They need a single SQL interface. Which Google Cloud service enables this?

Accepted Answer

BigQuery external tables (federated queries). BigQuery allows querying external data sources like Cloud Storage via external tables (federated queries) without loading data.

Answer

Dataproc with Spark SQL

Answer

Cloud SQL federated queries

Answer

BigQuery Omni

Question 3

A company wants to reduce its carbon footprint by using cloud infrastructure powered by renewable energy. Which Google Cloud sustainability commitment is most relevant?

Accepted Answer

100% renewable energy match. Google Cloud matches 100% of its global electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases.

Answer

Net zero emissions by 2025

Answer

Carbon offset program

Answer

Carbon-free energy by 2025

Question 4

A company is evaluating total cost of ownership (TCO) for migrating a legacy application to Google Cloud. Which cost should they include in the cloud TCO calculation that is often overlooked?

Accepted Answer

Data egress fees. Egress charges for data leaving Google Cloud are an often-overlooked cost that can significantly impact TCO.

Answer

Software licensing for operating systems

Answer

Cost of physical security for data centers

Answer

Cost of electricity for servers

Question 5

A financial company wants to run sensitive workloads on Google Cloud while ensuring data never leaves a specific geographic boundary and meets strict compliance requirements. Which THREE Google Cloud services should they combine?

Accepted Answer

Assured Workloads for Government. VPC Service Controls create security perimeters to prevent data exfiltration. Assured Workloads provides compliance controls for regulated industries (e.g., FedRAMP). Cloud HSM with CMEK ensures customer-managed keys in hardware for encryption compliance.

Answer

Cloud VPN

Answer

Cloud NAT

Question 6

A retail company runs a web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They want to automatically scale the application based on custom metrics (e.g., number of items in a shopping cart). Which TWO resources should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Custom Metrics Stackdriver Adapter. Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) can scale pods based on custom metrics. Custom Metrics adapter (e.g., Stackdriver adapter) exposes application metrics to HPA.

Answer

Cluster Autoscaler

Answer

Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)

Answer

Cloud Load Balancing

Question 7

A startup wants to launch a new application quickly and only pay for the compute resources they use, avoiding upfront hardware purchases. Which cloud benefit best supports this goal?

Accepted Answer

Cost optimisation (pay-as-you-go). Pay-as-you-go pricing allows customers to pay only for what they use, avoiding large capital expenditures (CAPEX) on hardware. Agility is about speed, scalability is about handling load, and global reach is about geographic coverage.

Answer

Scalability

Answer

Agility

Answer

Global reach

Question 8

A company runs a batch job that processes data every night. The job can tolerate interruptions and currently runs on a dedicated on-premises server that is underutilized. They want to migrate to Google Cloud and minimise compute cost. Which compute option is most cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Preemptible VMs. Preemptible VMs offer significantly lower cost (up to 80% discount) but can be terminated at any time, making them ideal for fault-tolerant batch workloads. Standard VMs are more expensive, sole-tenant nodes are for isolation, and GPUs add cost.

Answer

Sole-tenant nodes

Answer

Standard (on-demand) VMs

Answer

VMs with GPUs

Question 9

A retail company experiences sudden traffic spikes during flash sales. Their on-premises infrastructure often runs out of capacity, causing downtime. They are migrating to Google Cloud and need to automatically handle traffic spikes without manual intervention. Which approach should they take?

Accepted Answer

Create a managed instance group with autoscaling. Managed instance groups with autoscaling automatically add and remove VM instances based on load, handling spikes without manual intervention. GPUs are not needed; manual scaling is wasteful; Cloud Load Balancing alone does not auto-scale compute.

Answer

Manually add VMs when traffic increases

Answer

Use a GPU-accelerated VM for compute

Answer

Use a single large VM and rely on Cloud Load Balancing

Question 10

A company wants to reduce its carbon footprint and has committed to using 100% renewable energy for its cloud infrastructure. Which Google Cloud value proposition directly supports this goal?

Accepted Answer

Sustainability (renewable energy match). Google Cloud matches 100% of its global energy consumption with renewable energy and aims for carbon-free energy by 2030. Security, open source, and compliance are unrelated to renewable energy.

Answer

Open cloud (Kubernetes/TensorFlow)

Answer

Security (BeyondCorp/encryption)

Answer

Trust and compliance (certifications)

Question 11

A financial services firm must keep sensitive data on-premises due to regulatory requirements but wants to use Google Cloud's AI/ML services for analytics on that data. Which deployment model should they adopt?

Accepted Answer

Hybrid cloud (on-premises + Google Cloud). Hybrid cloud connects on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud, allowing data to remain on-prem while leveraging cloud AI/ML services via secure connections. Public cloud would move data off-prem, private cloud is on-prem only, multi-cloud is about multiple public clouds.

Answer

Private cloud (on-premises only)

Answer

Multi-cloud (AWS + Azure + Google Cloud)

Answer

Public cloud (Google Cloud only)

Question 12

A company currently runs its applications in a co-location data centre with a 5-year contract for hardware. They are considering migrating to Google Cloud to avoid the upcoming hardware refresh cycle. Which business driver is most directly addressed by this migration?

Accepted Answer

Cost optimisation (avoiding CAPEX). Hardware refresh avoidance is a key migration motivation, shifting from CAPEX to OPEX. Agility, scalability, and innovation are also benefits but not the primary driver for this specific scenario.

Answer

Scalability

Answer

Agility

Answer

Innovation (AI/ML access)

Question 13

A company uses a legacy on-premises database and wants to migrate to Google Cloud with minimal changes to application code. They need a fully managed relational database that supports MySQL compatibility and automatic failover. Which service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL for MySQL. Cloud SQL for MySQL is a fully managed relational database with MySQL compatibility, automatic failover, and minimal code changes. Cloud Spanner is globally distributed and requires schema changes, Bigtable is NoSQL, and Firestore is document-based.

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Question 14

A multinational corporation wants to serve content to users worldwide with low latency. They plan to use Google Cloud's content delivery network and points of presence. Which cloud benefit enables this?

Accepted Answer

Global reach. Global reach, enabled by Google's extensive network and CDN, provides low-latency content delivery worldwide. Scalability is about capacity, cost optimisation is about pricing, and agility is about speed of deployment.

Answer

Cost optimisation

Answer

Scalability

Answer

Agility

Question 15

A company wants to use machine learning models but has no in-house data science team. They need a service that allows them to train custom models using their own data without managing infrastructure. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Vertex AI (including AutoML). Vertex AI provides a unified platform for ML, including AutoML for custom model training without managing infrastructure. BigQuery ML is for SQL-based ML, AI Platform Notebooks require manual setup, and Cloud TPUs are hardware accelerators, not a managed service.

Answer

AI Platform Notebooks

Answer

BigQuery ML

Answer

Cloud TPUs