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

Question 1

A company needs to store petabytes of time-series IoT sensor data and query it with single-digit millisecond latency at millions of reads per second. The data has a simple key-value structure with timestamps. Which Google Cloud database is MOST appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Bigtable. Cloud Bigtable is designed for exactly this use case — petabyte-scale, low-latency (single-digit ms), high-throughput NoSQL storage for time-series, IoT, and financial data. It scales horizontally by adding nodes. BigQuery is optimised for analytics (seconds-to-minutes latency), Cloud SQL is for OLTP (limited to tens of thousands of QPS), and Firestore is for document data with hierarchical structure.

Answer

Firestore

Answer

BigQuery

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Question 2

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 serverless compute platform that executes containers in a fully managed environment, automatically scaling from zero to thousands of requests per second. It is ideal for containerized stateless applications that need to scale down to zero. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) does not scale to zero, Compute Engine requires VM management, and App Engine Flexible does not support custom containers that scale to zero as seamlessly.

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Question 3

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 4

A company wants to build a global application that requires strong consistency across regions and an SLA of 99.999% for its transactional database. The workload involves moderate write throughput (10K writes/sec) and high read throughput (100K reads/sec). Which database should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed relational database that provides ACID transactions across regions, strong consistency, and a 99.999% availability SLA. It can handle millions of reads per second with automatic horizontal scaling. Bigtable does not offer SQL or ACID transactions; Cloud SQL is not globally distributed; Firestore is eventually consistent by default.

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Question 5

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 6

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 7

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

Question 8

A security engineer wants to block malicious traffic patterns at the edge of Google's network before it reaches their application. Which service should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Armor. Cloud Armor is a web application firewall (WAF) and DDoS protection service that works with Cloud Load Balancing to filter traffic based on IP addresses, geo-location, and Layer 7 attributes. Cloud CDN caches content, Cloud DNS resolves domain names, and VPC firewall rules protect at the instance level, not at the edge.

Answer

VPC firewall rules

Answer

Cloud DNS

Answer

Cloud CDN

Question 9

A startup is building a mobile app and needs a real-time database that synchronises data across user devices automatically. The data model is document-based, and the app needs offline support. Which database should they use?

Accepted Answer

Firestore. Firestore is a NoSQL document database designed for mobile and web apps with real-time synchronization, offline support, and automatic multi-device sync. Cloud SQL is relational and not designed for mobile offline sync. Bigtable is for time-series. Memorystore is a cache.

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Memorystore

Question 10

A company wants to migrate an on-premises PostgreSQL database to Google Cloud with minimal changes to the application code. They also require high availability with automatic failover. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL provides a managed PostgreSQL service with automatic failover, read replicas, and high availability (HA) configuration. AlloyDB is PostgreSQL-compatible but is designed for high-performance analytical workloads and may require some application changes. Compute Engine would require manual setup.

Answer

AlloyDB

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

Compute Engine with PostgreSQL

Question 11

A data scientist wants to train a custom machine learning model using their own data and deploy it for online predictions. They want a unified platform that manages the entire ML lifecycle from data preparation to model serving. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Vertex AI. Vertex AI is Google Cloud's unified ML platform that covers data labeling, training, tuning, evaluation, and deployment (online prediction endpoints). AutoML is part of Vertex AI but focuses on automated model building. Cloud Functions is for serverless code, not ML. AI Platform (unified) is the old name for Vertex AI.

Answer

Cloud Functions

Answer

AutoML

Answer

AI Platform (Unified)

Question 12

A company needs to store files that are accessed infrequently (once a quarter) and wants the lowest storage cost. Data retrieval can take a few hours. Which Cloud Storage class should they use?

Accepted Answer

Archive. Archive storage is the lowest-cost storage class for data accessed less than once a year, with retrieval times up to hours. Coldline is for data accessed less than once a month. Nearline is for data accessed less than once a quarter, but Archive is cheaper. Standard is for frequently accessed data.

Answer

Nearline

Answer

Coldline

Answer

Standard

Question 13

A company is running a stateful workload on Compute Engine and needs persistent block storage that can be attached to multiple VMs in read-only mode. Which two Google Cloud storage solutions meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Persistent Disk. Persistent Disk (PD) supports read-only mounting to multiple VMs in the same zone. Filestore is a file-based NFS storage that can be mounted to multiple VMs with read-write access, but not specifically block storage. Cloud Storage is object storage, not block storage. Local SSD is ephemeral and cannot be shared. Persistent Disk is the correct block storage option.

Answer

Filestore

Answer

Local SSD

Answer

Cloud Storage

Answer

Persistent Disk (with read-only replica)

Question 14

A company runs a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and wants to reduce costs by using preemptible nodes for stateless workloads. However, they need to ensure that critical stateful workloads are not disrupted. Which two actions should they take?

Accepted Answer

Taint the regular node pool and use tolerations for stateful pods. To protect stateful workloads, use node pools with regular VMs and taint them to prevent preemptible pods from scheduling. For stateless workloads, use a separate node pool with preemptible VMs and add tolerations to the pods. Affinity rules or priority classes can also help but are not the primary method.

Answer

Use a single node pool with a mix of regular and preemptible VMs

Answer

Set pod priority class to 'high' for stateful workloads

Answer

Use node affinity rules to schedule stateful pods on regular nodes

Question 15

A company wants to implement a serverless event-driven architecture where object uploads to Cloud Storage trigger a function that processes the file and stores results in Firestore. The function needs to be written in Python. Which three Google Cloud services are required?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. The architecture uses Cloud Storage (trigger), Cloud Functions (compute), and Firestore (database). Cloud Build is for CI/CD, not runtime. Pub/Sub could be used but is not required if the function is triggered directly from Cloud Storage.

Answer

Pub/Sub

Answer

Cloud Build