Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts Practice Test 4 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A developer needs to deploy a containerized microservice that scales to zero when not in use and automatically scales up on incoming traffic. The microservice uses a custom container image that listens on port 8080. Which Google Cloud compute service is BEST suited for this requirement?

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

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a managed compute platform that runs stateless containers, automatically scales (including to zero), and charges only for resources used during request processing. It fits the requirement perfectly. GKE requires managing a cluster and doesn't scale to zero by default; App Engine standard environment has a sandbox that may not support custom containers; Cloud Functions is limited to specific runtimes.

Answer

Cloud Functions

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

Answer

App Engine standard environment

Question 2

A financial services company is required to keep all data within a specific geographic region for regulatory compliance. They plan to deploy a globally distributed application using Cloud Spanner. How should they configure Cloud Spanner to meet this compliance requirement?

Accepted Answer

Use a single-region configuration in the required region. Cloud Spanner allows you to choose specific regions for your instance, and replicas are placed only within that region. Multi-region configurations span multiple geographic areas and would violate the data residency requirement. Therefore, a single-region configuration is required.

Answer

Use a multi-region configuration with a write region in the required region

Answer

Use a multi-region configuration but restrict access to only one region

Answer

Use a dual-region configuration

Question 3

An organization wants to use Google Cloud to analyze large-scale genomic data. The data is stored in Cloud Storage in a compressed format. They need to run a custom Python pipeline that preprocesses the data and then uses a GPU-intensive algorithm for alignment. The preprocessing is CPU-bound and takes 30 minutes per sample, while the alignment takes 1 hour per sample on a GPU. They have thousands of samples. Which compute approach is MOST cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Use preemptible VMs with CPU for preprocessing and preemptible VMs with GPU for alignment, with checkpointing. Using preemptible VMs for both steps can significantly reduce costs, especially for large batches. However, GPU preemptible pricing is also lower. The workload is batch and fault-tolerant if checkpointing is implemented. Committed use discounts require 1-year commitment; sole-tenant nodes are for isolation; independent scaling of CPU and GPU is not directly available without separate instance groups.

Answer

Use committed use discounts for 1 year on GPU instances

Answer

Use regular VMs with both CPU and GPU on the same instance

Answer

Use sole-tenant nodes for data isolation

Question 4

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application currently runs on a single physical server with a custom Linux distribution. The team wants to minimize changes to the application while gaining the benefits of cloud infrastructure. Which migration strategy should they use?

Accepted Answer

Rehost the application on Compute Engine using a custom image of the current OS. Lift and shift (rehosting) moves the application as-is to the cloud, often by creating a custom image to run on Compute Engine. This minimizes changes. Refactoring (rearchitecting) involves code changes; re-platforming modifies the OS/platform; rebuilding is a full rewrite.

Answer

Rebuild the application from scratch on Cloud Run

Answer

Re-platform the application to a supported OS version

Answer

Refactor the application into microservices and deploy on GKE

Question 5

A data engineer needs to run a one-time complex data transformation job on a large dataset (10 TB) stored in Cloud Storage. The job will take approximately 8 hours and is not fault-tolerant. The engineer wants the cheapest possible compute option that can reliably complete the job. What should they use?

Accepted Answer

Standard VMs (on-demand) and delete them after the job. Preemptible VMs can be terminated at any time, so they are not reliable for a non-fault-tolerant job. Standard VMs are reliable and can be stopped after the job to save costs. Committed use discounts require long-term commitment. Dataflow is a fully managed service but may have a minimum cost; however, the question asks for the cheapest compute option, and standard VMs (with proper sizing) can be cheaper than Dataflow for a one-time job.

Answer

Preemptible VMs

Answer

Committed use discount VMs for 1 year

Answer

Dataflow with preemptible workers

Question 6

A company wants to deploy a multi-tier web application on Google Cloud that requires high availability across zones. The application consists of a stateless web frontend and a stateful database backend. Which TWO actions should the company take to meet the high availability requirement? (Select two.)

Accepted Answer

Use a regional managed instance group for the web frontend. To achieve high availability across zones, the frontend should be deployed in multiple zones behind a load balancer, and the database should be configured with replication across zones. Using a single large instance for the database creates a single point of failure. Regional managed instance groups distribute instances across zones.

Answer

Place all resources in the same zone to simplify management

Answer

Configure the database as a single large instance with automatic backups

Answer

Deploy the web frontend in a single zone to reduce network latency

Question 7

A company runs a critical application on Compute Engine that must always be available, even if an entire zone fails. The application stores state in a Cloud Spanner instance. The operations team wants to test disaster recovery procedures without affecting production. Which TWO actions should they take? (Select two.)

Accepted Answer

Create a Cloud Spanner clone from the production instance for testing. To test DR without impacting production, you can create a clone of the production Spanner instance (which creates a point-in-time copy) and perform testing on the clone. Alternatively, you can set up a separate test environment with its own Spanner instance. Restoring a backup to a new instance is also valid. However, the question asks for TWO actions. Modifying production IAM roles could affect access; failing over a regional Spanner instance would cause downtime.

Answer

Use the same Spanner instance but with a different database

Answer

Perform a manual failover of the production Spanner instance to another region

Answer

Modify IAM roles to grant testers read-only access to production

Question 8

A startup wants to run a containerized web application on Google Cloud without managing the underlying servers or Kubernetes clusters. They expect traffic to vary significantly, and they want to only pay for the resources consumed during request processing. Which Google Cloud compute option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless platform that runs containers in response to events or HTTP requests, scales to zero, and charges only for resources used during request processing. It abstracts away all infrastructure management.

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

App Engine Standard

Question 9

A company wants to ensure that their customer data stored in BigQuery is encrypted at rest using customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK). Which Google Cloud service should they use to manage these keys?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS). Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS) allows customers to create, manage, and use encryption keys, including CMEK for BigQuery and other GCP services.

Answer

Cloud HSM

Answer

Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)

Answer

Secret Manager

Question 10

A financial institution is deploying a sensitive workload on Compute Engine and needs to meet PCI DSS compliance. The security team wants to ensure that the virtual machines run on dedicated, single-tenant hardware and that no other customer's VMs share the same host. Which Compute Engine feature should they enable?

Accepted Answer

Sole-tenant nodes. Sole-tenant nodes ensure that VMs from that project are the only ones running on the underlying hardware, providing physical isolation and meeting compliance requirements for dedicated infrastructure.

Answer

Confidential VMs

Answer

Preemptible VMs

Answer

Shielded VMs

Question 11

A data analytics team needs to process streaming data from thousands of IoT devices in real time. They want to ingest the data, process it (e.g., windowed aggregations), and then load it into BigQuery for analysis. Which Google Cloud service should they use for the stream processing step?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Dataflow. Dataflow is a fully managed, serverless service for stream and batch data processing, based on Apache Beam. It can handle real-time streaming data, perform windowed aggregations, and write to BigQuery.

Answer

BigQuery

Answer

Cloud Pub/Sub

Answer

Cloud Dataproc

Question 12

A development team is building a microservices-based application and wants to use a service mesh to secure and observe inter-service communication. They are using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Which Google Cloud service should they integrate with GKE to provide service mesh capabilities?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Service Mesh (Anthos Service Mesh). Anthos Service Mesh (ASM) is a fully managed service mesh that provides traffic management, security (mTLS), and observability for microservices running on GKE and other environments.

Answer

Apigee

Answer

Cloud Traffic Director

Answer

Cloud Endpoints

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. Cloud SQL read replicas are read-only copies of the primary instance that can serve read traffic, reducing load on the primary and improving query performance.

Answer

Automatic failover replicas

Answer

Connection pooling

Answer

Point-in-time recovery

Question 14

A multinational corporation needs to deploy a global web application that serves users from multiple continents. They want to minimize latency for end users by serving content from the nearest location. Which combination of Google Cloud services should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Load Balancing (global) with Cloud CDN. Cloud CDN uses Google's globally distributed edge caches to deliver content close to users, reducing latency. A load balancer with global routing distributes traffic across regional backends and directs users to the nearest healthy backend.

Answer

Compute Engine with regional load balancers

Answer

Cloud Run with Cloud NAT

Answer

Cloud DNS with Traffic Director

Question 15

A data scientist wants to train a machine learning model using a managed service that supports custom TensorFlow code and provides GPU/TPU hardware acceleration. They prefer not to manage the underlying infrastructure. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

AI Platform Training (Vertex AI Training). AI Platform Training (now Vertex AI Training) is a managed service that allows you to run custom TensorFlow/PyTorch training jobs on pre-configured VM instances with GPUs/TPUs, without managing the cluster.

Answer

Compute Engine with pre-installed TensorFlow

Answer

Cloud Functions

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine with GPU nodes