Google PCA Analyze and optimize technical and business processes Practice Test 3 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company uses Cloud Composer to manage Apache Airflow workflows. They want to optimize costs. Which practice is most effective?

Accepted Answer

Configure auto scaling for the Cloud Composer environment. Cloud Composer supports autoscaling for its workers, which dynamically adjusts the number of worker pods based on the Airflow task queue depth. This directly optimizes costs by scaling down during low-load periods and scaling up only when needed, avoiding over-provisioning.

Answer

Use preemptible VMs for Airflow schedulers

Answer

Replace Cloud Composer with Cloud Functions for all workflows

Answer

Use small machine types for all Composer components

Question 2

A company uses Cloud Armor to protect their HTTP load balancer. They need to block traffic from a specific set of IP addresses and also prevent SQL injection attacks. Which two configurations should they use? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Security policies with IP deny rules. Cloud Armor security policies allow you to create IP deny rules to block traffic from specific IP addresses or ranges at the edge of Google's network, before it reaches your load balancer. Option E is correct because Cloud Armor also provides preconfigured WAF rules, including SQL injection detection, which can be added to the same security policy to inspect HTTP/HTTPS requests and block malicious payloads.

Answer

IAM roles to restrict access

Answer

Firewall rules on the VM instances

Answer

Ingress rules on the VPC network

Question 3

A data analytics team uses BigQuery to run large queries. They want to reduce query costs. Which three practices should they adopt? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Use clustered tables on commonly filtered columns. Clustering tables on commonly filtered columns in BigQuery allows the query engine to prune blocks of data that don't match the filter, reducing the amount of data scanned and thus lowering query costs. This is especially effective when combined with partitioning, as it further narrows the scan to relevant clusters within a partition.

Answer

Use query caching

Answer

Always use SELECT * to ensure all columns are available

Question 4

A startup deploys a microservices application on GKE. They need to ensure high availability of the services. Which two strategies should they implement? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Use regional persistent disks for stateful components. Regional persistent disks provide synchronous replication across two zones within a region, ensuring that stateful workloads (e.g., databases) remain available even if an entire zone fails. This is critical for high availability of stateful components in a GKE cluster, as it prevents data loss and allows pods to be rescheduled in another zone with the same persistent volume.

Answer

Use horizontal pod autoscaling

Answer

Use node auto-repair

Answer

Use cluster autoscaler

Question 5

Refer to the exhibit. A Cloud Run service is experiencing high latency and returns 502 errors when traffic spikes. What should the team adjust first?

Accepted Answer

Decrease containerConcurrency to 10. The 502 errors and high latency during traffic spikes indicate that the Cloud Run service is overwhelmed by concurrent requests. Decreasing `containerConcurrency` to 10 limits the number of simultaneous requests each container instance can handle, which reduces the likelihood of request timeouts and 502 errors by forcing Cloud Run to scale out more instances sooner. This directly addresses the root cause—excessive concurrency per container—without incurring additional cost or requiring code changes.

Answer

Increase the maximum number of instances

Answer

Increase the CPU limit to 2000m

Answer

Increase the memory limit to 512Mi

Question 6

Refer to the exhibit. A Cloud Function processes files uploaded to Cloud Storage. It usually completes within 2 minutes, but recently it has been timing out after 540 seconds. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

A user uploaded a file larger than the maximum allowed size for the function (e.g., 6 GB), causing the processing time to exceed the 540s timeout. Cloud Functions have a maximum execution timeout of 540 seconds (9 minutes). If a file larger than the function's memory and processing capacity is uploaded, the function may take longer than this hard limit to process it, resulting in a timeout. The exhibit indicates the function usually completes within 2 minutes, so a sudden spike to exactly 540 seconds strongly suggests the file size exceeded the function's ability to finish within the maximum allowed timeout.

Answer

The function's maximum timeout was set to 540 seconds, causing it to always take that long

Answer

The function's memory limit is too low, causing thrashing and slowdown

Answer

The function entered an infinite loop

Question 7

Refer to the exhibit. A team wants to grant the ability to run queries (but not modify) on BigQuery datasets to a new set of users who have email addresses in the 'example.com' domain. What is the simplest way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

No action needed; new users with 'example.com' accounts already have the dataViewer role through the existing domain membership. The exhibit shows an existing IAM policy binding that grants the 'roles/bigquery.dataViewer' role to 'domain:example.com'. IAM domain-based bindings automatically apply to all authenticated users with email addresses in that domain. When new users with 'example.com' accounts are added, they inherit this role without any additional configuration, as IAM evaluates domain membership at access time.

Answer

Create a new binding with role 'roles/bigquery.dataViewer' and include the new users as members

Answer

Remove the domain binding and only grant access to individual users

Answer

Add the new users to the existing 'domain:example.com' member list

Question 8

A company wants to reduce Google Cloud costs for a batch processing workload. They currently use n1-standard-4 VMs running 24/7. The workload runs for 2 hours each night. What is the most cost-effective recommendation?

Accepted Answer

Use preemptible VMs with a startup script and persistent disk.. D is correct because the workload runs for only 2 hours per night, making preemptible VMs ideal — they cost up to 80% less than on-demand VMs and can be terminated at any time. A startup script ensures the job resumes if the VM is preempted, and using a persistent disk preserves data across interruptions. This combination provides the lowest cost for a short, fault-tolerant batch job.

Answer

Use on-demand VMs and rely on sustained use discounts.

Answer

Use a custom machine type with fewer vCPUs.

Answer

Use committed use discounts for 1 year.

Question 9

A company is deploying a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They want to optimize costs without sacrificing availability. They have varying traffic patterns. Which strategy should they recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use node auto-provisioning with preemptible nodes.. Node auto-provisioning with preemptible nodes allows the cluster to automatically scale and use low-cost, short-lived instances for fault-tolerant workloads. Preemptible nodes are up to 60-91% cheaper than regular instances, and node auto-provisioning ensures that only the required node types are created, optimizing cost without sacrificing availability for stateless microservices that can handle interruptions.

Answer

Use committed use discounts with a 3-year term on all nodes.

Answer

Use GKE Autopilot with a single node pool.

Answer

Use a regional cluster with node pools of different machine types.

Question 10

A company runs a large-scale data processing pipeline using Dataflow with streaming data from Pub/Sub. They notice increasing costs due to high data shuffle operations. They want to optimize the pipeline performance and cost. Which approach should they take?

Accepted Answer

Optimize the pipeline by partitioning data and using Combine transforms.. Optimizing pipeline logic to minimize shuffle reduces resource usage and cost. Increasing workers or using larger machine types may improve performance but increase cost. Switching to batch mode would lose real-time processing capability.

Answer

Use a larger machine type for workers.

Answer

Increase the number of workers to reduce shuffle.

Answer

Switch to batch mode overnight.

Question 11

A company is using Cloud Storage for backups and wants to minimize costs. The backups are accessed infrequently and can tolerate retrieval delays. Which storage class is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Archive. Archive storage class is the most cost-effective option for backups that are accessed infrequently and can tolerate retrieval delays. It offers the lowest storage cost among Google Cloud Storage classes, with a default retrieval time of minutes to hours, making it ideal for long-term backup data that does not require immediate access.

Answer

Standard

Answer

Coldline

Answer

Nearline

Question 12

A company migrated their on-premises database to Cloud SQL and now experiences high latency for read-heavy workloads. How can they optimize performance?

Accepted Answer

Add read replicas.. Adding read replicas is the correct optimization because Cloud SQL read replicas offload read traffic from the primary instance, reducing latency for read-heavy workloads. Read replicas asynchronously replicate data from the primary using MySQL or PostgreSQL native replication, allowing queries to be distributed across multiple instances. This directly addresses the high latency by scaling read capacity horizontally without impacting write performance.

Answer

Switch to a higher machine type.

Answer

Enable automatic storage increase.

Answer

Use connection pooling.

Question 13

A company is using BigQuery for analytics and wants to optimize query costs. They have many ad-hoc queries that scan large tables. What is the best practice?

Accepted Answer

Use clustering and partitioning on tables.. Clustering and partitioning reduce the amount of data scanned by BigQuery for each query, directly lowering query costs (which are based on bytes processed). Partitioning allows queries to skip entire partitions based on a date or timestamp column, while clustering sorts data within partitions, enabling block-level pruning for filter predicates. This is the most effective and scalable way to optimize ad-hoc queries on large tables without changing the query logic.

Answer

Use flat-rate pricing.

Answer

Use BI Engine.

Answer

Use materialized views.

Question 14

A company wants to optimize their network costs for inter-region traffic using Cloud VPN. What is the most cost-effective configuration?

Accepted Answer

Use a single VPN tunnel with dynamic routing.. A single VPN tunnel with dynamic routing (BGP) is the most cost-effective configuration for inter-region traffic using Cloud VPN. Cloud VPN charges per tunnel-hour and per GB of data processed, so using a single tunnel minimizes the hourly cost while dynamic routing ensures automatic failover and route advertisement without needing multiple tunnels.

Answer

Use partner interconnect.

Answer

Use Cloud NAT.

Answer

Use dedicated interconnect.

Question 15

A company is using Cloud CDN to accelerate content delivery. They notice increased costs from cache misses. What can they do?

Accepted Answer

Pre-cache popular content.. Pre-caching popular content ensures that the most frequently requested objects are already stored in Cloud CDN edge caches before users request them. This directly reduces cache misses because the content is proactively loaded, eliminating the need for the first user to trigger a fetch from the origin. By targeting high-demand assets, you minimize origin requests and lower the cost associated with cache misses.

Answer

Use a larger cache size.

Answer

Increase cache TTL.

Answer

Use compression.