Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Test 8 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. They want to reduce operational overhead by eliminating server management while keeping the ability to run containers. The application has unpredictable traffic patterns and needs to scale to zero when idle. Which compute option is the best fit?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a serverless container platform that automatically scales to zero when idle, eliminating server management and cost during idle periods. GKE requires cluster management, Compute Engine is not serverless, and App Engine Flex requires VMs always running.

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance groups

Question 2

What is the primary benefit of using preemptible VMs on Compute Engine?

Accepted Answer

Cost savings for fault-tolerant workloads. Preemptible VMs are significantly cheaper than standard VMs but can be terminated at any time. They are ideal for fault-tolerant, batch workloads.

Answer

Support for live migration

Answer

Higher performance than standard VMs

Answer

Guaranteed availability of resources

Question 3

An online retailer stores product images in a Cloud Storage bucket. Current access patterns: images uploaded once and read frequently for 30 days, then accessed rarely after 90 days, and must be retained for 7 years for compliance. Which storage class transition strategy minimizes cost while meeting requirements?

Accepted Answer

Upload to Standard, lifecycle rule to Nearline at 30 days, then to Archive at 90 days. Start in Standard for frequent reads, then transition to Nearline after 30 days (lower cost for infrequent access), then to Archive after 90 days for long-term retention at lowest cost.

Answer

Upload to Nearline, lifecycle rule to Archive at 30 days

Answer

Upload to Standard, lifecycle rule to Nearline at 30 days, then to Coldline at 90 days

Answer

Upload to Standard, lifecycle rule to Coldline at 30 days, then to Archive at 90 days

Question 4

A development team runs a web application on Cloud Run. They need to store session state across requests. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Memorystore for Redis. Cloud Run instances are stateless; for session state, use an external caching layer like Memorystore (Redis). Pub/Sub is for messaging, Cloud SQL for relational data, and Cloud Storage for objects.

Answer

Cloud Storage

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Cloud Pub/Sub

Question 5

A financial services company needs a relational database with global strong consistency, horizontal scaling, and 99.999% availability SLA. Which database should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner offers global distribution, strong consistency, automatic horizontal scaling, and a 99.999% SLA. Cloud SQL does not scale globally, Firestore is NoSQL, and Bigtable lacks strong consistency.

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Firestore

Question 6

Which Google Cloud service is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse for running SQL queries on petabyte-scale datasets?

Accepted Answer

BigQuery. BigQuery is the serverless data warehouse for analytics SQL queries. Dataflow is for stream processing, Dataproc for Hadoop/Spark, and Cloud SQL for OLTP.

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Cloud Dataflow

Answer

Cloud Dataproc

Question 7

A company uses Cloud Functions to process image uploads. Each image triggers a function that uses Vision API to extract text and stores results in Firestore. The function sometimes fails due to timeout when images are large. How should they redesign for reliability and scale?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Tasks with Cloud Run to process images asynchronously. Cloud Functions has a timeout limit (9 minutes max for gen2). For long-running operations, use Cloud Run or migrate processing to a queue. Cloud Tasks with Cloud Run decouples and allows async processing with longer timeouts.

Answer

Use Cloud Scheduler to trigger the function every minute

Answer

Increase the function timeout to 60 minutes

Answer

Use Compute Engine VMs with startup scripts

Question 8

A data engineer needs to process streaming clickstream data in real-time, apply transformations, and write the output to BigQuery. Which Google Cloud service is built for this use case?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Dataflow. Dataflow is a managed stream and batch processing service perfect for real-time transformations and writing to BigQuery. Pub/Sub is for ingestion, Dataproc for Spark, and Cloud Functions for simple event-driven code.

Answer

Cloud Dataproc

Answer

Cloud Pub/Sub

Answer

Cloud Functions

Question 9

An organization runs a multi-region web application behind a global external HTTP(S) load balancer. They want to protect against DDoS attacks and filter traffic based on IP reputation and request headers. Which service should they integrate with the load balancer?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Armor. Cloud Armor provides WAF and DDoS protection, including IP blacklisting/whitelisting, rate limiting, and custom rules. Cloud CDN caches content, Cloud NAT provides outbound connectivity, and VPC Firewall rules are for network-level filtering inside VPC.

Answer

Cloud CDN

Answer

VPC firewall rules

Answer

Cloud NAT

Question 10

Which Google Cloud service provides a unified platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning models at scale?

Accepted Answer

Vertex AI. Vertex AI is the unified ML platform covering all stages of ML workflow. AutoML is a component, Dataflow is for data processing, and BigQuery ML runs ML models in SQL.

Answer

BigQuery ML

Answer

AutoML

Answer

Cloud Dataflow

Question 11

A company uses App Engine Standard environment for a Python web app. During a traffic spike, they notice increased latency. They want to improve performance without changing code. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Increase the maximum idle instances in automatic scaling settings. Increasing the number of automatic scaling instances or enabling min instances can reduce cold start latency. Changing machine type is not available in Standard. Moving to Flex is a bigger change. Using Cloud CDN caches static content but not dynamic.

Answer

Configure manual scaling with a larger machine type

Answer

Migrate to App Engine Flexible Environment

Answer

Enable Cloud CDN in front of the app

Question 12

An analytics team needs to create dashboards and visualizations from data stored in BigQuery. They want a free solution that integrates natively. Which tool should they use?

Accepted Answer

Looker Studio. Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) is a free visualization tool that connects to BigQuery. Looker is a paid BI platform. Dataflow is for processing, and Sheets is not native.

Answer

Cloud Dataflow

Answer

Looker

Answer

Google Sheets

Question 13

A company is building a real-time leaderboard for an online game using Google Cloud. They need a database that can handle millions of updates per second with low latency and serve the current top scores. Which TWO services should they use together? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Cloud Bigtable. Cloud Bigtable can ingest high-velocity score updates, and Memorystore (Redis) can maintain a sorted set for the leaderboard. BigQuery is too slow for real-time updates; Firestore is not designed for millions of writes per second.

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Firestore

Answer

BigQuery

Question 14

A DevOps team wants to implement infrastructure as code for deploying a multi-service application on GKE. They need to store container images, automate builds on code commits, and manage Kubernetes YAML configurations. Which THREE services should they use? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Deployment Manager. Artifact Registry stores container images, Cloud Build automates builds on commits, and Deployment Manager (or Config Sync) can manage Kubernetes configs. Cloud Source Repositories is for source code, not containers; Cloud Run is serverless, not GKE.

Answer

Cloud Source Repositories

Answer

Cloud Run

Question 15

A startup wants to build a serverless event-driven application where a file upload to Cloud Storage triggers a function that sends a notification email. Which TWO services are essential? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. Cloud Functions is triggered by Cloud Storage events, and Cloud Pub/Sub can decouple the function from email sending. Alternatively, using Cloud Functions directly, but Pub/Sub is typical for async notifications. Cloud Scheduler is for cron jobs, Cloud Run is not event-driven, and Cloud Tasks is for task queuing.

Answer

Cloud Scheduler

Answer

Cloud Tasks

Answer

Cloud Run