Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Test 9 — 15 Questions

Question 1

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?

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

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 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

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 7

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 8

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 9

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 10

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 11

A developer wants to deploy a containerized web application that can scale to zero when not in use, and only pay for actual request processing time. Which Google Cloud compute service should the developer use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a serverless container runtime that scales to zero and charges per request, ideal for containerized apps with variable traffic. Cloud Functions is for smaller code snippets, not containers. Compute Engine runs VMs continuously, and GKE requires at least one node.

Answer

Cloud Functions

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Question 12

A data engineering team needs to process streaming data from Cloud Pub/Sub, perform transformations, and write the results to BigQuery. The team requires exactly-once processing semantics and automatic scaling. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Dataflow. Dataflow (Apache Beam) provides exactly-once processing, autoscaling, and native integration with Pub/Sub and BigQuery for streaming pipelines. Cloud Dataproc is for batch Spark/Hadoop, not streaming. Cloud Functions processes events one at a time without exactly-once guarantees across a pipeline. BigQuery itself does not transform streaming data.

Answer

Cloud Functions

Answer

Cloud Dataproc

Answer

BigQuery

Question 13

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 a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that provides pre-configured rules for OWASP Top 10 threats like SQLi and XSS. Cloud CDN is for caching, Cloud DNS for domain resolution, and VPC firewall rules operate at the network layer (not application layer).

Answer

Cloud CDN

Answer

VPC firewall rules

Answer

Cloud DNS

Question 14

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 PaaS that automatically scales, manages the runtime, and can scale to zero. App Engine Flexible runs in VMs, does not scale to zero, and costs more. Compute Engine requires manual scaling. Cloud Run is also serverless but for containers; App Engine Standard is simpler for code-based apps.

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

Compute Engine

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Question 15

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 managed Spark/Hadoop service that supports job-scoped clusters: you define a cluster configuration, submit a job, and the cluster is automatically deleted after completion. Compute Engine requires manual management. Dataflow is for Beam, not Spark. GKE is generic Kubernetes, not optimised for Spark batch jobs.

Answer

Cloud Dataflow

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance groups