Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Test 4 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A data engineering team wants to process continuous streams of real-time events from millions of devices, perform transformations, and load the results into BigQuery for analysis. They need a fully managed, serverless solution. Which service should they use?

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

Accepted Answer

Cloud Dataflow. Dataflow is a fully managed, serverless service for stream and batch data processing, with built-in connectors to Pub/Sub and BigQuery. Pub/Sub is for ingestion only, not processing. Cloud Functions is not designed for high-throughput streaming. Dataproc is a managed Hadoop/Spark service, not serverless.

Answer

Dataproc

Answer

Cloud Pub/Sub

Answer

Cloud Functions

Question 2

A startup is building a mobile app and needs to store user profiles and preferences. The data is hierarchical and the app requires real-time synchronization across devices. Which Google Cloud database should they use?

Accepted Answer

Firestore. Firestore is a NoSQL document database designed for mobile apps, with real-time sync and offline support. Cloud SQL and Spanner are relational, not ideal for hierarchical data. Bigtable is for time-series/analytics, not mobile app data.

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud SQL

Question 3

An organization needs to apply security policies to protect their web application from DDoS attacks and SQL injection. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Armor. Cloud Armor is a web application firewall (WAF) that provides DDoS protection and security rules to block threats like SQL injection. Cloud CDN is for content caching. Load Balancing distributes traffic. Cloud NAT is for outbound connectivity.

Answer

Cloud NAT

Answer

Cloud Load Balancing

Answer

Cloud CDN

Question 4

A company wants to store archived data that must be retained for 10 years. They expect to access it less than once a year. Which Cloud Storage class is the MOST cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Archive. Archive storage is designed for data accessed less than once a year, with the lowest storage cost but higher retrieval fees and a 365-day minimum storage duration. Coldline has a 90-day minimum and higher cost. Nearline and Standard are more expensive and have shorter minimums.

Answer

Standard

Answer

Coldline

Answer

Nearline

Question 5

A team needs to run a machine learning model using custom code in Python with TensorFlow, and they want to train it at scale on GPU hardware without managing infrastructure. Which Google Cloud service is best suited?

Accepted Answer

Vertex AI. Vertex AI provides a unified platform for ML, including managed training jobs with GPU support, hyperparameter tuning, and model serving—all without managing infrastructure. Compute Engine requires manual setup. Cloud Functions and Cloud Run are not designed for distributed training.

Answer

Cloud Run

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

Cloud Functions

Question 6

Which Google Cloud service allows you to run code in response to events (e.g., file upload to Cloud Storage) without provisioning servers?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. Cloud Functions is a serverless event-driven compute service that executes code in response to events. Compute Engine and GKE require servers. App Engine is for web apps, not event-driven functions.

Answer

App Engine

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine

Question 7

A company is migrating a PostgreSQL database to Google Cloud. They want high performance, AI-optimized capabilities, and compatibility with existing PostgreSQL tools. Which service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

AlloyDB. AlloyDB is a PostgreSQL-compatible database optimized for high performance and AI workloads, with built-in ML integration. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL provides compatibility but lacks AI optimization. Spanner is a different architecture. Bigtable is NoSQL.

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Question 8

An engineer is troubleshooting a Cloud SQL instance that is running out of memory. They want to reduce memory usage without changing the machine type. Which action would help?

Accepted Answer

Reduce the max_connections flag. Enabling automatic storage increase helps with disk space but not memory. Reducing max_connections limits concurrent connections, saving memory. Adding a read replica shares read load but doesn't reduce memory per instance. Switching to MyISAM is not possible in Cloud SQL for InnoDB-based MySQL.

Answer

Enable automatic storage increase

Answer

Add a read replica

Answer

Switch from InnoDB to MyISAM

Question 9

A company wants to use a pre-trained model to extract text from scanned invoices. They need a fully managed API that can be called via REST. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Document AI. Document AI is a fully managed service for document processing, including OCR and extraction from invoices. Vision AI is for general image analysis. Natural Language AI handles text sentiment/entities. Vertex AI is a platform for custom models, not pre-built API for invoices.

Answer

Vision AI

Answer

Natural Language AI

Answer

Vertex AI

Question 10

A company is deploying a global web application and needs to serve users with low latency, protect against DDoS attacks, and scale automatically. Which two Google Cloud services should they combine? (Choose exactly 2.)

Accepted Answer

Cloud Armor. Cloud Load Balancing distributes traffic globally and scales automatically. Cloud Armor provides DDoS protection and WAF. Cloud CDN caches content but does not provide DDoS protection. Cloud DNS resolves domain names. Cloud NAT is for outbound connectivity.

Answer

Cloud CDN

Answer

Cloud NAT

Answer

Cloud DNS

Question 11

A data analytics team wants to analyze large datasets using SQL and create dashboards with minimal latency. They need a serverless data warehouse and a BI tool. Which two services should they use? (Choose exactly 2.)

Accepted Answer

Looker. BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse for SQL analytics. Looker is a BI platform integrated with BigQuery for dashboards. Dataflow is for data processing, not storage. Cloud Storage is for object storage, not SQL analytics. Looker Studio is free but less feature-rich for enterprise needs.

Answer

Dataflow

Answer

Looker Studio

Answer

Cloud Storage

Question 12

A company runs a batch processing job every hour using Cloud Dataflow. They notice increasing costs and want to optimize. Which three actions would reduce cost? (Choose exactly 3.)

Accepted Answer

Use preemptible VMs for worker nodes. Using preemptible VMs reduces cost significantly. Adjusting autoscaling settings avoids overprovisioning. Using streaming instead of batch would increase cost. Shutting down the job between runs is not feasible for batch. Using flexible resource scheduling (batch mode) can lower costs.

Answer

Shut down the Dataflow job between runs

Answer

Switch from batch to streaming mode

Question 13

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

BigQuery

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

Firestore

Question 14

A startup wants to deploy a containerised web application that scales automatically from zero to handle traffic spikes and charges only for the resources used during request processing. They want to avoid managing servers or Kubernetes clusters. Which compute service should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a serverless compute platform that runs containers, scales to zero when not in use, and charges for resources used during request processing. It fits the description perfectly.

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

App Engine Standard

Question 15

An engineer is deploying a globally distributed application that requires strong consistency across multiple continents with a 99.999% uptime SLA. The data model is relational with SQL queries. Which database service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is the only Google Cloud database that provides globally distributed, strongly consistent relational data with a 99.999% SLA.

Answer

Firestore in multi-region mode

Answer

Cloud SQL with cross-region replication

Answer

Bigtable with replication