Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Test 10 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A security team needs to protect a web application behind an HTTP(S) Load Balancer from SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Which Google Cloud service provides these protections?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Armor. Cloud Armor is Google Cloud's edge security service that attaches to HTTP(S) Load Balancers and provides WAF capabilities, including preconfigured rules for SQL injection and XSS (the OWASP ModSecurity core rule set). It inspects requests at the load balancer before they reach the backend, blocking malicious payloads.

Answer

Cloud CDN

Answer

VPC firewall rules

Answer

Cloud DNS

Question 2

A startup wants to run a Node.js web application with zero server management and automatic scaling. They expect unpredictable traffic and want to minimise costs. Which Google Cloud service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

App Engine Standard Environment. App Engine Standard Environment is a fully managed, serverless platform that automatically scales instances up and down (including to zero) based on traffic, requires no server management, and bills only for resources consumed — ideal for unpredictable traffic and cost minimisation. It supports Node.js runtimes and is purpose-built for exactly this use case.

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Question 3

A company runs batch analytics jobs every night using Apache Spark on a cluster. The jobs require 100 vCPUs and run for 3 hours. The cluster must be created, run, and then shut down automatically to minimise cost. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Dataproc. Cloud Dataproc is a fully managed service for running Apache Spark and Hadoop clusters on Google Cloud. It supports creating clusters with specified vCPU counts, running jobs, and then automatically deleting the cluster after job completion, which minimizes cost for batch workloads. The service is purpose-built for ephemeral Spark jobs, offering fast cluster startup and per-second billing.

Answer

Cloud Dataflow

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance groups

Question 4

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. A lifecycle rule in Cloud Storage allows automatic deletion of objects after a specified age, such as 30 days from creation. This is the standard method to manage object lifecycle and reduce storage costs. The rule can be applied to a bucket and will delete objects matching the criteria.

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 5

A company wants to migrate its on-premises MySQL database to Google Cloud with minimal changes to the application. Which managed database service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL for MySQL. Cloud SQL provides managed MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server databases. It is compatible with existing MySQL applications. Cloud Spanner is globally distributed but not drop-in MySQL. Firestore and Bigtable are NoSQL.

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Firestore

Question 6

A company runs a video processing application that triggers a function each time a new video is uploaded to Cloud Storage. The function transcodes the video and stores the result. Which compute service is BEST suited for this event-driven workload?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. Cloud Functions is Google Cloud's event-driven FaaS product, natively integrated with Cloud Storage object-finalize events via Eventarc, making it the canonical choice for 'run code when a file lands in a bucket.' It handles the trigger wiring, retries, and scaling automatically, so the developer only writes the transcoding logic. Cloud Run can also be event-driven via Eventarc, but Cloud Functions is the purpose-built, lowest-friction option for this pattern.

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

Cloud Run

Question 7

A data analyst needs to create interactive dashboards and reports from data stored in BigQuery. They want a fully managed business intelligence platform without building custom applications. Which Google Cloud product should they use?

Accepted Answer

Looker (Google Cloud's BI platform). Looker is a BI platform that connects to BigQuery and provides interactive dashboards, reports, and embedded analytics. Looker Studio is a free tool for simple visualizations. Data Studio is the old name. Vertex AI is for ML.

Answer

Looker Studio

Answer

Vertex AI

Answer

Data Studio

Question 8

A company wants to run a critical stateful application on Compute Engine with the highest availability. The application requires block storage that can survive a zone failure. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose TWO)

Accepted Answer

Use regional Persistent Disk. Regional Persistent Disk replicates data across zones synchronously, surviving a zone failure. The instances should be in a regional managed instance group to distribute across zones. Zonal PD and single-zone MIG would not survive zone failure.

Answer

Place instances in a zonal managed instance group

Answer

Enable object versioning on a Cloud Storage bucket

Answer

Use zonal Persistent Disk

Question 9

A company is building a microservices architecture on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They need to expose services externally with HTTPS, distribute traffic across the cluster, and protect against DDoS attacks. Which THREE Google Cloud services should they combine? (Choose THREE)

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN. Cloud Load Balancing (E) is correct because it provides the external HTTPS load balancer that fronts the GKE services, terminates TLS, and distributes incoming traffic across the cluster's nodes and pods. Cloud Armor (D) is correct because it attaches to the external load balancer's backend service to provide WAF rules and Layer 3/4/7 DDoS protection, including Google Cloud's edge-based network DDoS mitigation. Cloud CDN (C) is correct because it caches content at Google's global edge locations, reducing origin load and absorbing traffic spikes, which complements the load balancer and helps mitigate volumetric attacks. Cloud DNS (A) is not required for this scenario since it only resolves domain names and does not distribute traffic or provide DDoS protection, and VPC firewall rules (B) operate at the network level within the VPC but do not expose services externally over HTTPS or defend against DDoS at the edge.

Answer

Cloud DNS

Answer

VPC firewall rules

Question 10

A developer wants to deploy a serverless application that runs code in response to HTTP requests and events from other Google Cloud services. They also need to store configuration and session data in a fast, in-memory data store. Which TWO services should they use? (Choose TWO)

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. Cloud Functions handles HTTP and event-driven triggers serverlessly. Memorystore provides managed Redis/Memcached for caching and session storage. Cloud SQL is relational and not in-memory. Cloud Storage is object storage. Bigtable is NoSQL but not in-memory.

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud Storage

Question 11

A developer wants to deploy a containerized web application that automatically scales to zero when not in use, and they want to minimize operational overhead. Which compute service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless container platform that runs containers on demand, scales automatically including to zero when there is no traffic, and requires no cluster or infrastructure management. This directly satisfies the requirements of automatic scale-to-zero and minimal operational overhead. It is the only option purpose-built for serverless container execution.

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Question 12

A data engineer needs to process a continuous stream of clickstream events from multiple sources, aggregate them into 1-minute windows, and write the results to BigQuery for real-time dashboarding. The solution must handle exactly-once processing semantics. Which combination of services should they use?

Accepted Answer

Pub/Sub -> Dataflow -> BigQuery. Dataflow (Apache Beam) provides exactly-once processing semantics and can read from Pub/Sub, apply windowed aggregations, and write to BigQuery. Pub/Sub is the ingestion layer for streaming events. Cloud Functions and Cloud Run are not designed for stateful windowed aggregations at scale, and Cloud Dataproc (Hadoop/Spark) would require more overhead.

Answer

Pub/Sub -> Cloud Functions -> BigQuery

Answer

Cloud Storage -> Dataflow -> BigQuery

Answer

Pub/Sub -> Cloud Dataproc -> BigQuery

Question 13

A company needs to perform interactive SQL analytics on petabytes of data without managing any infrastructure. They need to query data stored in Cloud Storage and want the fastest query performance. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

BigQuery. BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable data warehouse that supports SQL queries on data stored in Cloud Storage (external tables) or natively. It provides fast performance on petabyte-scale data without infrastructure management. Dataflow is for ETL, not ad-hoc analytics; Cloud SQL is for OLTP; Looker is a BI layer on top of a data warehouse.

Answer

Looker

Answer

Dataflow

Answer

Cloud SQL

Question 14

A developer is deploying a web application on Compute Engine and needs to distribute traffic across multiple VM instances in different regions. They also need SSL termination and health checks. Which Google Cloud networking service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Load Balancing. Cloud Load Balancing (HTTP(S) Load Balancer) is a global, scalable load balancing service that distributes traffic across instance groups in multiple regions, provides SSL termination, and performs health checks. Cloud CDN is for caching content; Cloud Armor is for security policies; VPC peering connects networks.

Answer

VPC peering

Answer

Cloud Armor

Answer

Cloud CDN

Question 15

A company has a batch processing job that runs once per day and can be interrupted without significant impact. They want to reduce costs by using Google Cloud infrastructure. Which compute option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Preemptible VMs. Preemptible VMs offer significant cost savings (up to 60-91% discount) but can be terminated at any time by Google. They are ideal for fault-tolerant batch jobs. Spot VMs are similar but with a newer pricing model (no maximum runtime). Both are good, but Preemptible is the classic answer. Custom machine types are not cost-saving by themselves; standard VMs are more expensive.

Answer

Standard persistent disk

Answer

Sustained use discounts

Answer

Custom machine types