Google PCA Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is migrating 50 on-premises VMs to Compute Engine. They need to minimise downtime and want an automated lift-and-shift migration that replicates disks incrementally. Which Google Cloud service should be used?

Accepted Answer

Migrate for Compute Engine. Migrate for Compute Engine (formerly Velostrata) performs agentless, incremental replication of VM disks to Compute Engine, enabling minimal downtime migrations.

Answer

Database Migration Service

Answer

Storage Transfer Service

Answer

Transfer Appliance

Question 2

A company runs batch analytics workloads on Compute Engine that can tolerate interruptions. They want to reduce compute costs by up to 60-90%. Which compute option is the most cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Preemptible VMs. Preemptible VMs offer significant discounts (60-90%) for interruptible workloads. Spot VMs are the newer equivalent with same discounts but no max runtime limit.

Answer

On-demand VMs

Answer

Committed use discounts (1-year)

Answer

Sustained use discounts

Question 3

An organization is planning to move 500 TB of archival data from on-premises to Cloud Storage. The data is not frequently accessed, and the network bandwidth is limited to 100 Mbps. What is the most efficient migration approach?

Accepted Answer

Use Transfer Appliance. Transfer Appliance is a physical device for shipping large amounts of data when bandwidth is low. At 100 Mbps, 500 TB would take over 500 days; Transfer Appliance bypasses network constraints.

Answer

Use gsutil rsync with parallel composite uploads

Answer

Use Migrate for Compute Engine

Answer

Use Storage Transfer Service over the internet

Question 4

A company's BigQuery costs are higher than expected. They run many ad-hoc queries with filters on the 'transaction_date' column and 'customer_id' column. They also have a materialized view that is rarely used. Which combination of actions will MOST effectively reduce query costs?

Accepted Answer

Partition on transaction_date, cluster on customer_id, and drop the unused materialized view. Partitioning by transaction_date reduces scanned data for date filters. Clustering by customer_id further reduces bytes billed for queries filtering on that column. Dropping unused materialized views avoids storage costs.

Answer

Convert to a clustered table on transaction_date and disable caching

Answer

Use flat-rate pricing for all queries and cluster on transaction_date

Answer

Partition on customer_id and use materialized views for all queries

Question 5

A team wants to provide a consistent, low-latency experience for global users accessing static content (images, CSS, JS) hosted on Cloud Storage. They also need to be able to invalidate cached content quickly when updates occur. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN. Cloud CDN caches content at edge locations for low latency. Cache invalidation allows purging updated content, which is essential for static assets.

Answer

Cloud NAT

Answer

Cloud Load Balancing with backend bucket

Answer

Cloud Storage transfer service

Question 6

An application uses Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL) and experiences high connection overhead, often exhausting the max connections limit. The team wants to maintain a pool of persistent connections without modifying application code. Which solution should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Deploy PgBouncer on a Compute Engine instance. PgBouncer is a connection pooler for PostgreSQL that manages a pool of connections, reducing overhead and preventing exhaustion. It can be deployed on Compute Engine or using Cloud SQL Auth Proxy with connection pooling.

Answer

Use Cloud Memorystore as a connection cache

Answer

Increase the max connections flag in Cloud SQL

Answer

Configure Cloud SQL Auth Proxy with max connections

Question 7

A company needs to choose between Cloud Spanner and Firestore for a global inventory application that requires strong consistency and horizontal scaling. The application has a fixed schema with complex joins. Which database is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed relational database with strong consistency and supports complex joins. Firestore is a NoSQL document database with eventual consistency (strong consistency only within a single document).

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Question 8

Which Google Cloud service automatically computes the optimal size or tier for underutilized Compute Engine instances and generates recommendations to reduce cost?

Accepted Answer

Recommender (Active Assist). Active Assist includes rightsizing recommendations that analyze VM utilization and suggest appropriate machine types or tiers to reduce cost without sacrificing performance.

Answer

Cloud Monitoring

Answer

Cloud Profiler

Answer

Cost Management

Question 9

A company wants to use BigQuery with a predictable monthly cost, regardless of query volume. They have a steady state of around 500 concurrent slots. Which pricing model should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Slot reservations (flat-rate). BigQuery slot reservations (flat-rate) provide a fixed monthly cost based on reserved slots, suitable for predictable workloads. On-demand pricing charges per query and can vary.

Answer

Sustained use discounts

Answer

Committed use discounts for BigQuery

Answer

On-demand pricing

Question 10

An engineer is designing a Bigtable schema for time-series data consisting of sensor readings. Each sensor emits a reading every second. The access pattern is to retrieve all readings for a specific sensor within a time range. Which row key design will provide the best performance?

Accepted Answer

Use row key: [sensor_id]#[reverse_timestamp]. Bigtable stores rows sorted by key. A row key structured as [sensor_id]#[reverse_timestamp] ensures that all data for a sensor is contiguous, and sorting by reverse timestamp allows recent data to be retrieved first. A single row key per sensor with column qualifiers would cause hotspots and limit scalability.

Answer

Use a single row per sensor with column qualifiers as timestamps

Answer

Use timestamp as the row key and sensor ID as column qualifier

Answer

Use a random prefix to distribute writes evenly

Question 11

A company wants to set a monthly spending limit for their Compute Engine usage and receive alerts when spending exceeds a threshold. Which tool should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Budget alerts. Budget alerts in Cloud Billing allow you to set a spending budget and receive notifications when actual spending exceeds thresholds. They can be scoped to projects or services.

Answer

Cloud Monitoring

Answer

Cloud Logging

Answer

Cloud Armor

Question 12

A financial services company requires a storage solution for transaction logs that must be retained for 7 years due to regulatory compliance. After 90 days, the data is rarely accessed but must be retrievable within 1 hour. After 1 year, it must be archived with retrieval within 24 hours. Which Cloud Storage lifecycle policy should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Transition to Nearline after 90 days, then to Archive after 1 year. Cloud Storage lifecycle policies allow automatic transitions between storage classes. After 90 days, data is rarely accessed but must be retrievable within 1 hour. Nearline provides low-cost storage with retrieval times in milliseconds, satisfying the 1-hour requirement. Coldline also meets retrieval times but is designed for data accessed less than once a quarter, making Nearline a better fit for this scenario where data may still be accessed occasionally. After 1 year, data must be archived with retrieval within 24 hours. Archive offers the lowest cost with retrieval times up to 15 minutes, well within the 24-hour window. Therefore, transitioning to Nearline after 90 days and then to Archive after 1 year is the correct lifecycle policy. Option A is incorrect because Coldline is intended for even less frequent access, and while it could be used, Nearline is more appropriate for the given access pattern. Options C and D do not meet the retention requirements.

Answer

Transition to Coldline after 90 days, then to Archive after 1 year

Answer

Transition to Archive after 90 days

Answer

Transition to Standard after 90 days, then to Archive after 1 year

Question 13

An e-commerce platform uses Cloud SQL (MySQL) for its transactional database. They are experiencing performance degradation during peak hours due to high read traffic. They need to improve read throughput without modifying the application code. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Increase the number of vCPUs on the primary instance. To improve read throughput without modifying application code, the best approaches are increasing the number of vCPUs on the primary instance (B) to handle more concurrent read operations, and enabling read replicas (E) to offload read traffic from the primary instance. Cloud SQL Auth Proxy (A) only provides a secure tunnel and does not offer connection pooling; connection pooling requires separate middleware. Using Memorystore (C) for session data caching reduces database load but does not directly improve read throughput for transactional queries, and query caching (D) is deprecated and not recommended.

Answer

Add a Cloud SQL Auth Proxy with connection pooling

Answer

Use Cloud Memorystore for caching session data

Answer

Enable query caching in Cloud SQL

Question 14

A company is moving a legacy application to Compute Engine. The application has inconsistent resource usage and the team wants to optimise costs without performance degradation. They are evaluating committed use discounts (CUDs) and other discount types. Which THREE statements are correct about CUDs? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Spend-based CUDs are applied automatically to all eligible projects in the billing account. CUDs offer discounts for 1-year or 3-year commitments. Resource-based CUDs apply to specific machine types in a region. Spend-based CUDs apply to total compute spend. CUDs can be combined with sustained use discounts, but sustained use discounts are automatic and not required to be purchased.

Answer

CUDs require a minimum of 10 instances to qualify

Answer

CUDs cannot be combined with sustained use discounts

Question 15

A company is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application running on Compute Engine. The application requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 4 hours. Which TWO strategies meet these requirements? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Warm standby: run a scaled-down version of the environment in another region. Pilot light involves replicating data and having a minimal environment ready to scale. Warm standby maintains a partially scaled environment. Both can achieve RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 4 hours with proper setup. Multi-region deployment and active-passive are not defined in terms of RPO/RTO.

Answer

Multi-region deployment with Cloud Load Balancing

Answer

Backup and restore: daily backups to Cloud Storage

Answer

Cold standby: periodic snapshots to another region