Google PCA Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes Practice Test 6 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company wants to analyze their Google Cloud spending and receive recommendations for rightsizing resources. Which tool provides this functionality?

Accepted Answer

Active Assist. Active Assist includes recommendations for rightsizing Compute Engine VMs, Cloud SQL instances, and more. BigQuery Reservations is for slot management. Cloud Billing reports show costs but not recommendations. Pricing Calculator estimates costs.

Answer

BigQuery Reservations

Answer

Google Cloud Pricing Calculator

Answer

Cloud Billing reports

Question 2

A company runs a global application that requires strong consistency across regions for financial transactions. Which database should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner. Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, strongly consistent database service that provides ACID transactions across regions. It is designed for applications that require strong consistency and high availability across multiple regions, making it ideal for financial transactions.

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

Answer

Firestore

Question 3

A company wants to implement blameless postmortems as part of their SRE practices. Which THREE principles should they follow?

Accepted Answer

Create actionable recommendations to prevent recurrence. Option B is correct because blameless postmortems must produce concrete, actionable recommendations and follow-up items that reduce the likelihood or impact of recurrence, rather than stopping at description. Option C is correct because the core of blameless postmortems is analyzing systemic and contributing causes of the incident without attributing fault to individuals, which encourages honest reporting. Option E is correct because findings, timelines, and lessons learned should be documented and shared with relevant stakeholders so the whole organization benefits and improves. Option A is incorrect because limiting participation to senior management excludes the engineers and responders who hold the technical details and undermines learning. Option D is incorrect because assigning responsibility to the team that caused the incident is blame-oriented and contradicts the blameless principle.

Answer

Only involve senior management in the review

Answer

Assign responsibility to the team that caused the incident

Question 4

A company runs batch analytics workloads each night on Compute Engine VMs. The workloads are fault-tolerant and can be interrupted. The finance team wants to reduce compute costs. Which Compute Engine pricing model should they use?

Accepted Answer

Preemptible VMs. Preemptible VMs are short-lived, heavily discounted Compute Engine instances (up to ~80% off) that can be terminated by Google at any time with a 30-second notice. They are ideal for fault-tolerant, interruptible batch workloads like nightly analytics jobs, which is exactly the scenario described.

Answer

Committed use discounts (1-year or 3-year)

Answer

Sustained use discounts

Answer

Sole-tenant nodes

Question 5

An organization deploys a web application on Compute Engine behind a global HTTPS load balancer. They want to reduce latency for users worldwide and minimize load on backend instances. Which GCP service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN. Cloud CDN uses Google's global edge caches to serve content closer to users, reducing latency and backend load. Cloud Armor provides security, Cloud NAT is for outbound connectivity, and VPC peering is for network connectivity, not caching.

Answer

Cloud Armor

Answer

Cloud NAT

Answer

VPC Network Peering

Question 6

A company has a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance that experiences high connection overhead. Developers frequently open and close connections. Which solution reduces connection overhead without code changes?

Accepted Answer

Configure PgBouncer as a sidecar. PgBouncer is a lightweight connection pooler that sits between the application and Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, maintaining a pool of persistent backend connections and multiplexing many short-lived client connections onto them. This eliminates the TCP/TLS handshake and PostgreSQL authentication overhead per request without any application code changes, since the app simply connects to PgBouncer's endpoint instead of directly to the database.

Answer

Increase max_connections in Cloud SQL

Answer

Switch to Private IP

Answer

Use Cloud SQL Auth Proxy

Question 7

A company stores infrequently accessed data in Cloud Storage Standard class. To reduce costs, they want to automatically move objects older than 90 days to a lower-cost storage class. Which approach should they use?

Accepted Answer

Configure a lifecycle policy to transition to Archive class. Object Lifecycle Management in Cloud Storage is designed exactly for this use case: automatically transitioning objects to lower-cost storage classes based on age or other conditions. Configuring a lifecycle rule to transition objects older than 90 days to the Archive class (A) reduces cost while preserving durability and access when needed. Lifecycle policies run asynchronously and are the standard, supported mechanism for automated class transitions.

Answer

Use gsutil rewrite to manually change storage class

Answer

Set up Pub/Sub notifications for object changes

Answer

Enable object versioning

Question 8

A company wants to migrate a MySQL database running on-premises to Cloud SQL with minimal downtime. Which GCP service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Database Migration Service. Database Migration Service (DMS) is purpose-built for migrating MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server databases to Cloud SQL with minimal downtime. It handles continuous replication and cutover, which is exactly what's needed for a live database migration.

Answer

Migrate for Compute Engine

Answer

Storage Transfer Service

Answer

Transfer Appliance

Question 9

An e-commerce application uses Firestore for product catalog. They need to run complex analytical queries on the catalog data, such as aggregations and joins, without impacting production performance. What is the best approach?

Accepted Answer

Export Firestore data to BigQuery for analytics. The best approach is to export Firestore data to BigQuery for analytics. BigQuery is a columnar, serverless analytics warehouse designed for aggregations and joins at scale, and it can query exported Firestore data without touching the production Firestore instance. This isolates analytical workloads from production traffic and provides the SQL capabilities Firestore lacks.

Answer

Create a second Firestore database for analytics

Answer

Use Cloud SQL to query Firestore directly

Answer

Use Firestore `!=` operator to filter data

Question 10

A team uses Cloud CDN to cache static assets. They update assets by deploying new versions with new URLs. However, sometimes they need to invalidate the cache for a critical fix immediately without changing the URL. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Use cache invalidation to remove the cached objects. Cache invalidation is the correct mechanism when content must be refreshed immediately without changing the URL. Cloud CDN supports explicit invalidation requests that purge cached objects from edge locations, forcing subsequent requests to fetch fresh content from the origin. This is the only option that removes already-cached content on demand rather than waiting for TTL expiry or relying on URL changes.

Answer

Increase the TTL to max

Answer

Change the URL to a new version

Answer

Set a short TTL (e.g., 1 minute)

Question 11

A company wants to improve the performance of their Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance. They notice many idle connections and slow queries. Which THREE actions could help? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Add appropriate indexes. Option A (Add appropriate indexes) is correct because missing indexes force sequential scans on large tables, and creating B-tree or other suitable indexes lets PostgreSQL satisfy WHERE, JOIN, and ORDER BY clauses with index scans, directly reducing slow query latency. Option B (Add read replicas) is correct because Cloud SQL read replicas offload read-only SELECT traffic from the primary instance, increasing read throughput and reducing contention on the primary for read-heavy workloads. Option C (Use PgBouncer for connection pooling) is correct because PgBouncer multiplexes many client connections over a small pool of backend PostgreSQL connections, which directly addresses the many idle connections consuming memory and backend process slots. Option D (Enable private IP) is not correct because private IP only changes network routing and security exposure; it does not improve query performance or reduce idle connections. Option E (Increase disk size) is not correct because disk size affects storage capacity and, on some tiers, IOPS, but it does not address idle connections or slow queries caused by poor indexing or connection churn.

Answer

Enable private IP

Answer

Increase disk size

Question 12

A financial services firm runs batch risk calculations nightly using a large Compute Engine VM with a GPU. Jobs complete in 4 hours but are not time-sensitive. To reduce costs without sacrificing reliability, the firm enables preemptible VMs but finds that jobs are interrupted and restarting from scratch causes delays. What is the best approach to improve reliability while maintaining cost savings?

Accepted Answer

Use a managed instance group with preemptible VMs and implement checkpointing to save progress periodically.. Preemptible VMs are up to 80% cheaper but can be terminated at any time with only a 30-second warning, so long-running jobs must be resilient to interruption. Combining a managed instance group (MIG) with preemptible VMs allows automatic recreation of terminated instances, and implementing checkpointing lets the batch job resume from the last saved state rather than restarting from zero. This preserves the cost savings while dramatically improving reliability for the 4-hour nightly job.

Answer

Request a committed use discount for the GPU and use a standard VM without preemptible.

Answer

Use a non-preemptible VM but downgrade the GPU type to reduce cost.

Answer

Use a spot VM with a high availability SLA, relying on low preemption rates.

Question 13

A media company stores video files in Cloud Storage for streaming. Infrequently accessed videos older than 90 days are currently in Standard storage. To reduce costs, they want to automatically move these files to a lower-cost storage class and delete them after 3 years. Which configuration should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use a lifecycle rule with condition 'age > 90 days' to set storage class to Nearline, and another rule with 'age > 1095 days' to delete.. Cloud Storage lifecycle rules are the native, automated way to transition objects between storage classes and delete them based on age. A rule with condition 'age > 90 days' setting storage class to Nearline (or Coldline) reduces cost for infrequent access, and a second rule with 'age > 1095 days' (3 years) deletes the objects. This is declarative, server-side, and requires no custom code.

Answer

Configure a Pub/Sub notification on object changes and process via Dataflow.

Answer

Use gsutil rewrite command with -s option manually for each file.

Answer

Create a Cloud Function that moves objects monthly using a cron job.

Question 14

A startup is migrating its on-premises MySQL database (5 TB) to Cloud SQL. The database is mission-critical and downtime must be minimized. Which migration service should they use to reduce downtime?

Accepted Answer

Database Migration Service (DMS). Database Migration Service (DMS) supports continuous replication from on-premises MySQL to Cloud SQL, minimizing downtime. Other options like Transfer Appliance or Storage Transfer Service are for file transfers, not live databases.

Answer

Transfer Appliance

Answer

gcloud sql import command

Answer

Storage Transfer Service

Question 15

A development team uses BigQuery for analytical queries. They want to reduce query costs for a large table that is frequently filtered by a date column and a customer_id column. Which TWO table design strategies will reduce the amount of data scanned? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Partition the table by date.. Option A is correct because partitioning the table by the date column means BigQuery only scans the partitions that match the query's date filter, dramatically reducing bytes processed for date-filtered queries. Option E is correct because clustering on customer_id physically sorts and co-locates data by that column, so filters on customer_id prune blocks within partitions and further cut data scanned. Together, partitioning by date and clustering by customer_id directly address the two frequent filter columns in this scenario. Option B is incorrect because BigQuery does not support traditional secondary indexes on columns like customer_id; clustering is the equivalent mechanism. Option C is incorrect because wildcard tables with date suffixes are a query-time convenience for sharding, not a table design that reduces scanned data by itself. Option D is incorrect because normalizing into multiple tables does not inherently reduce bytes scanned and may even require more joins and data reads.

Answer

Create an index on customer_id.

Answer

Use wildcard tables with date suffixes.

Answer

Normalize the table into multiple tables.