Google PCA Practice Test 35 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company wants to run a stateful application on Google Kubernetes Engine that requires persistent storage with high read/write performance from multiple pods simultaneously. Which storage option should they use?

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

Accepted Answer

Filestore. Filestore provides a fully managed NFS file share that can be mounted by multiple pods simultaneously with high performance. Persistent Disk with ReadWriteMany access mode is not supported by GKE; it supports ReadOnlyMany. Cloud Storage is object storage not suitable for POSIX-like file systems. Local SSDs are ephemeral and cannot be shared across pods.

Answer

Cloud Storage FUSE

Answer

Local SSDs on each node

Answer

Persistent Disk with ReadWriteMany access mode

Question 2

A financial services company needs a globally distributed relational database that supports strong consistency across regions, with multi-region writes and sub-10ms latency for most queries. The database must also support SQL and ACID transactions. Which database should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is the only Google Cloud database that offers global distribution, strong consistency, multi-region writes, SQL support, and ACID transactions. Cloud SQL is single-region. Bigtable is NoSQL and does not support SQL or ACID. Firestore is NoSQL with limited transactional support.

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Bigtable

Question 3

A company uses GKE Standard with node pools of preemptible VMs for batch jobs. They notice that during preemption events, pods take several minutes to become ready on new nodes because container images are large. They need to reduce startup time. Which approach is most effective?

Accepted Answer

Configure a DaemonSet to pre-pull the container image on all nodes.. GKE with node auto-provisioning and a node pool of preemptible VMs using a daemonset to pre-pull images on all nodes ensures images are cached locally, reducing startup time after preemption.

Answer

Switch to GKE Autopilot.

Answer

Increase the size of the node pool.

Answer

Use a stateful set with persistent volumes to reuse data.

Question 4

A company wants to deploy a containerized microservices application on GCP with minimal operational overhead. They need automatic scaling, no node management, and pay only for requested resources. Which compute option is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless container platform that scales automatically, requires no node management, and charges per request.

Answer

GKE Standard with node auto-provisioning

Answer

GKE Autopilot

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Question 5

A financial services company wants to migrate a legacy monolithic Java application to Google Cloud with minimal changes to the code. They plan to containerise the application but want to avoid managing Kubernetes clusters. The application requires persistent storage and must be reachable via an internal IP address within the VPC. Which compute service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Run (fully managed). Cloud Run (fully managed) supports containers, can be configured for internal traffic only, and provides persistent storage via Cloud NFS or other volume mounts. It abstracts away cluster management.

Answer

Compute Engine with Docker installed

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Question 6

An e-commerce company is experiencing traffic spikes during flash sales. Their application runs on Compute Engine instances behind a TCP load balancer. They want to automatically scale the number of instances based on CPU utilization. Which configuration is required?

Accepted Answer

Create a managed instance group (MIG) with an autoscaling policy based on CPU utilization.. Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) with autoscaling based on CPU utilization is the correct approach. Cloud Functions and Cloud Run are not Compute Engine instance scaling. A global HTTP(S) Load Balancer is not required for TCP traffic.

Answer

Configure Cloud Run for autoscaling and rewrite the application to run in containers.

Answer

Create an unmanaged instance group with a static number of instances and configure Cloud CDN.

Answer

Use Cloud Functions to handle traffic spikes and redirect traffic from the load balancer.

Question 7

A company is deploying a multi-region web application that must provide sub-second read latency globally for a small dataset (under 100 MB) that is updated infrequently. They want a fully managed service that caches data close to users. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN. Cloud CDN with HTTP(S) Load Balancing caches static content at edge locations globally, providing low-latency access. For small, infrequently updated data, CDN is cost-effective and simple.

Answer

Memorystore for Redis with replication across regions

Answer

Cloud Spanner multi-region

Answer

Cloud Firestore in multi-region mode

Question 8

A company is deploying a web application on Compute Engine. They want to ensure that only authenticated users can access the application. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Identity-Aware Proxy. Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) is the correct choice because it enforces access control at the edge of Google's network, verifying user identity and context before allowing traffic to reach the Compute Engine instance. IAP uses OAuth 2.0 and signed headers to authenticate users, ensuring only authorized requests are forwarded to the backend, without requiring any changes to the application itself.

Answer

Cloud Load Balancing

Answer

Cloud CDN

Answer

Cloud DNS

Question 9

A company is designing a microservices architecture on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They need to expose a set of internal microservices to other services within the same VPC, but not to the internet. Which GKE service type should they use?

Accepted Answer

ClusterIP. A ClusterIP service exposes the service on a cluster-internal IP, accessible only within the cluster. A NodePort service exposes on each node's IP but is not suitable for internal-only VPC access. A LoadBalancer service creates an external load balancer, which is internet-facing unless configured as internal. An Internal Load Balancer (via ingress) can be used but is more complex; the simplest internal-only service type is ClusterIP with a proxy.

Answer

LoadBalancer

Answer

NodePort

Answer

ExternalName

Question 10

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. They want to adopt microservices and improve deployment frequency. Which THREE practices should they adopt? (Choose 3.)

Accepted Answer

Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform.. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform enables declarative, version-controlled provisioning of cloud resources. This supports the microservices migration by allowing teams to spin up consistent, repeatable environments for each service, which is essential for increasing deployment frequency without manual configuration errors.

Answer

Build a single deployment pipeline for all services.

Answer

Implement blue/green deployments.

Question 11

A company is deploying a new application on Compute Engine and wants to automate the installation of a custom agent on every newly created VM in a specific project. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Accepted Answer

VM Manager (OS Config) with a guest policy to install the agent.. VM Manager (OS Config) with a guest policy is the correct choice because it provides a native, agent-based configuration management service that can enforce the installation of a custom agent on all existing and newly created VMs in a project without requiring changes to instance templates or startup scripts. Guest policies are evaluated and applied at VM boot time and periodically thereafter, ensuring consistent agent deployment across the fleet.

Answer

Instance templates with startup scripts.

Answer

Deployment Manager with a template that includes the agent installation.

Answer

Cloud Build triggered on new VM creation events.

Question 12

A company has a production GKE cluster running in Autopilot mode. They need to use a DaemonSet for a logging agent that must run on every node. However, they find that the DaemonSet pods are not being scheduled. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

GKE Autopilot does not support DaemonSets. In GKE Autopilot, the control plane manages node resources and does not allow DaemonSets because Autopilot schedules pods without exposing nodes. DaemonSets require direct node access and are not supported in Autopilot. The cluster is 'node-less' from the user's perspective. Workloads must be deployed as Deployments, StatefulSets, or Jobs. Node taints and resource quotas are not the issue because Autopilot handles them automatically.

Answer

The nodes have node taints that prevent the DaemonSet from scheduling

Answer

The cluster has a node pool with insufficient resources

Answer

The DaemonSet does not have resource requests set

Question 13

A data analytics team needs to run complex SQL queries on a large dataset stored in Cloud Storage (CSV files). The queries are ad-hoc and require fast execution. The data is updated daily. Which Google Cloud service should they use to query the data directly in Cloud Storage with minimal setup?

Accepted Answer

BigQuery. BigQuery can query external data sources including Cloud Storage using federated queries, but for ad-hoc SQL on CSV files, BigQuery is the best choice. Cloud SQL is not designed for external data. Dataproc is for Spark/Hadoop. Dataflow is for stream/batch processing.

Answer

Dataproc

Answer

Dataflow

Answer

Cloud SQL

Question 14

A company wants to store infrequently accessed archival data that must be retained for 7 years. They need low storage cost and retrieval times of a few hours are acceptable. Which TWO storage classes should they consider? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Coldline. Coldline has a 90-day minimum storage duration and is for data accessed less than once a quarter. Archive has a 365-day minimum and is for data accessed less than once a year. Both are suitable for archival with retrieval times in hours (Coldline) or longer (Archive). Standard and Nearline are for more frequently accessed data.

Answer

Nearline

Answer

Standard

Answer

Regional

Question 15

A developer needs to build a serverless event-driven application that responds to Cloud Storage object uploads by processing the file and storing results in Firestore. Which compute service is the best fit?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions. Cloud Functions is a serverless event-driven compute service that can be triggered directly by Cloud Storage events, ideal for simple processing tasks.

Answer

App Engine Flexible Environment

Answer

Cloud Run for Anthos

Answer

Compute Engine with startup scripts