PCD Practice Test 14 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A team is deploying a new version of an application on GKE using a rolling update. They want to ensure that the update proceeds only if the new pods are healthy. Which two steps should they include? (Choose two.)

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

Accepted Answer

Set the minReadySeconds field in the deployment.. Setting `minReadySeconds` in a Deployment ensures that a newly created Pod is considered ready only after it has been stable for that duration, preventing the rolling update from proceeding if the Pod fails shortly after startup. Option B is correct because a readiness probe determines whether a Pod is ready to serve traffic; during a rolling update, the Deployment controller waits for the new Pod's readiness probe to succeed before scaling down old Pods, ensuring the update only continues when new Pods are healthy.

Answer

Define a liveness probe for the container.

Answer

Set the revisionHistoryLimit to 10.

Answer

Use a postStart lifecycle hook to test health.

Question 2

A team uses Cloud Build to deploy a containerized application to Cloud Run. The build step fails intermittently with the error 'Failed to trigger build: Build timed out'. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The build exceeds the default Cloud Build timeout.. The error 'Failed to trigger build: Build timed out' indicates that the Cloud Build execution exceeded the maximum allowed duration. By default, Cloud Build has a timeout of 10 minutes for build steps. If the build process (e.g., pulling dependencies, building the container image) takes longer than this default timeout, the build is automatically terminated, resulting in this intermittent failure. Increasing the timeout in the build configuration or using a larger machine type can resolve this.

Answer

The build machine has insufficient memory.

Answer

The Dockerfile contains invalid syntax.

Answer

The Cloud Build service account lacks permissions to deploy to Cloud Run.

Question 3

A developer runs the above command and receives a successful deployment. However, the service is not accessible from the internet. The service is intended to be public. What should the developer check next?

Accepted Answer

The service IAM policy to ensure allUsers has Cloud Run Invoker role. Cloud Run services are private by default; even after a successful deployment, the service will not be accessible from the internet unless the IAM policy explicitly grants the `roles/run.invoker` role to `allUsers`. Without this permission, any HTTP request from outside the project will be denied with a 403 Forbidden error, regardless of the service's health or region.

Answer

The region us-central1 is not available

Answer

The Cloud Run service has a custom domain mapped

Answer

The container image is healthy

Question 4

Refer to the exhibit. A Cloud Build pipeline that deploys a Cloud Run service fails with the above error. The Cloud Build service account has the roles/run.admin role at the project level. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The Cloud Run API is not enabled in the project.. The error message indicates that Cloud Run is not available, which typically occurs when the Cloud Run API has not been enabled in the project. Without the API enabled, any attempt to deploy a Cloud Run service via Cloud Build will fail, regardless of the service account's IAM roles. Enabling the API is a prerequisite for using Cloud Run resources.

Answer

The service account used by Cloud Build does not have the Cloud Run Invoker role.

Answer

The Cloud Run service was deleted manually before the pipeline ran.

Answer

The region specified in the deploy step does not have Cloud Run enabled.

Question 5

A developer is designing a serverless event-driven application that processes messages from Pub/Sub and writes results to BigQuery. The workload is unpredictable but must scale to zero when idle. Which compute option should they choose?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Functions with Pub/Sub trigger. Cloud Functions with a Pub/Sub trigger is the correct choice because it is purpose-built for event-driven, serverless workloads that scale to zero when idle. It automatically scales from zero to thousands of concurrent invocations based on the volume of Pub/Sub messages, and it natively integrates with Pub/Sub via a background function that is invoked for each message, making it ideal for unpredictable, bursty workloads that must process messages and write results to BigQuery.

Answer

Cloud Run with Pub/Sub push subscription

Answer

Compute Engine with managed instance groups

Answer

Google Kubernetes Engine with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

Question 6

A team is migrating a monolithic .NET application to Cloud Run. The application uses .NET Framework 4.8 and depends on Windows-specific libraries. What is the recommended approach to containerize and deploy this application?

Accepted Answer

Port the application to .NET Core/.NET 6+ and run on Linux. Cloud Run only supports Linux containers, so a .NET Framework 4.8 application that depends on Windows-specific libraries cannot be directly deployed. The recommended approach is to port the application to .NET Core/.NET 6+ (now .NET 8/9), which is cross-platform and can run on Linux containers, enabling deployment to Cloud Run. This aligns with Google's guidance for modernizing legacy .NET applications to leverage serverless platforms.

Answer

Deploy the application on Compute Engine with Windows Server

Answer

Use Cloud Run for Anthos on a Windows node pool

Answer

Use a Windows base image and deploy to Cloud Run

Question 7

A team wants to implement automated testing for a Python application deployed on Cloud Run. They want the tests to run as part of the CI/CD pipeline after the image is built but before it is deployed. Which approach should they use?

Accepted Answer

Add a test step in Cloud Build that uses the built image to run integration tests before deploying. Cloud Build allows you to add a test step that runs the built container image before deploying it to Cloud Run. This ensures integration tests validate the application in an environment identical to production, catching issues early in the CI/CD pipeline. Running tests after the image is built but before deployment is a standard practice for shift-left testing.

Answer

Use Cloud Function to run tests triggered by a Pub/Sub message after the image is published

Answer

Run unit tests before building the image using Cloud Build, but skip integration tests

Answer

Deploy the image to a staging environment, run tests, and then promote to production

Question 8

Which THREE are best practices for building applications on GKE? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Set resource requests and limits for CPU and memory. Setting resource requests and limits for CPU and memory is a best practice because it allows Kubernetes to make informed scheduling decisions and ensures that pods do not exceed their allocated resources, preventing resource starvation for other workloads. Requests guarantee a minimum amount of resources for the pod, while limits cap the maximum, enabling the cluster autoscaler and scheduler to optimize node utilization and maintain stability.

Answer

Use nodeSelector to pin pods to specific node instances for performance consistency

Answer

Use StatefulSets for all applications to preserve state across restarts

Question 9

A team is designing a Cloud Spanner schema for a hierarchical product catalog with categories and products. They want to ensure that products are stored in the same split as their parent category for low-latency queries. Which feature should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use interleaved tables with the products table interleaved in the categories table. Cloud Spanner interleaved tables allow storing child rows (products) with their parent row (category) in the same split, providing low-latency joins and locality. The parent-child relationship is defined using the `INTERLEAVE IN PARENT` clause.

Answer

Use a composite primary key with category ID as the first part, but no interleaving

Answer

Use Cloud Spanner's commit timestamp feature

Answer

Define a global secondary index on the category ID

Question 10

A developer runs the above command to build and push a container image to Container Registry, but receives the error shown. The developer has the 'Cloud Build Editor' role on the project. What is the most likely cause of the error?

Accepted Answer

The Cloud Build service account has not been enabled or does not have permission to act on behalf of the user.. The error occurs because the Cloud Build service account (typically the Compute Engine default service account or a user-specified service account) lacks the necessary permissions to push the container image to Container Registry. Even though the developer has the 'Cloud Build Editor' role, Cloud Build itself needs a service account with appropriate IAM roles (e.g., Storage Object Admin) to write to the registry. The error is not about the developer's direct permissions but about the service account that Cloud Build uses to execute the build and push.

Answer

The Cloud Storage bucket for storing build artifacts does not exist.

Answer

The developer's user account has been revoked access to the project.

Answer

The developer does not have the 'cloudbuild.builds.create' permission because the Cloud Build Editor role does not include it.

Question 11

A company wants to design a highly available web application that serves users globally. They plan to use Cloud Load Balancing. Which two design choices should they make to ensure high availability and low latency? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Enable Cloud CDN to cache static content closer to users.. Enabling Cloud CDN caches static content at Google's global edge locations, reducing latency by serving content from a point of presence (PoP) close to the user. This offloads requests from backend instances, improving overall availability and performance for global users.

Answer

Use a single-zone backend instance group for simplicity.

Answer

Use Cloud Armor to filter malicious traffic.

Answer

Deploy separate regional load balancers in each region and use DNS-based routing.

Question 12

A company is deploying a global microservices application on Cloud Run. They need to design for high availability, scalability, and low latency. Which three practices should they implement? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Enable Cloud CDN for caching static assets.. Cloud CDN caches static assets at Google's global edge locations, reducing latency for users worldwide and offloading requests from Cloud Run. This improves performance for static content like images, CSS, and JavaScript, which is essential for a global microservices application requiring low latency.

Answer

Use Cloud Scheduler to trigger services periodically.

Answer

Set a limit on the number of Cloud Run containers per revision to control costs.

Question 13

Your team is building a Node.js application for Google App Engine Standard Environment. The application uses a custom runtime and must run background tasks. However, you notice that background tasks are being terminated after a few seconds. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

App Engine Standard Environment does not support background threads; use App Engine Flexible or Cloud Run instead. In Google App Engine Standard Environment, background threads are not supported because the runtime can terminate idle instances or scale down to zero, killing any background tasks. The correct solution is to use App Engine Flexible Environment or Cloud Run, which support long-running background processes, or to offload tasks to a service like Cloud Tasks or Cloud Pub/Sub. Option D correctly identifies this fundamental limitation of the Standard Environment.

Answer

The application should use Cloud Tasks instead of background threads

Answer

The application is not configured with max_concurrent_requests set to 1

Answer

You are using an automatic scaling instance class that does not support background threads

Question 14

A company is designing a global e-commerce application that needs low-latency access for users worldwide. The application serves static content (images, CSS) and dynamic API responses. Which Google Cloud service should they use to cache both types of content at the edge?

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN. Cloud CDN is the correct choice because it uses Google's global edge cache to deliver both static content (e.g., images, CSS) and dynamic API responses (via cacheable dynamic content or cache-fill from origin). It integrates with HTTP(S) Load Balancing to cache responses at edge locations, reducing latency for users worldwide.

Answer

Cloud Armor

Answer

Cloud Storage

Answer

HTTP(S) Load Balancing

Question 15

Refer to the exhibit. A developer writes the above Dockerfile for a Cloud Run service. The service fails to start. The logs indicate that the container exited immediately. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The server.js file is missing from the build context. The most likely cause is that the server.js file is missing from the build context. When the Dockerfile contains a COPY command (e.g., COPY . .) to copy application files, the server.js file must exist in the source directory from which the build is run. If it is absent, the container will have no entry point, and the CMD instruction (e.g., CMD ["node", "server.js"]) will fail because the file does not exist inside the image, causing the container to exit immediately. Cloud Run requires the container to start a listening process; without server.js, no process runs.

Answer

The WORKDIR is set to a directory that doesn't exist

Answer

The CMD instruction is incorrectly formatted

Answer

The EXPOSE 8080 instruction is unnecessary and may cause conflicts