PCD Practice Exam 4 — 20 Questions

Question 1

You are designing a monitoring strategy for a microservices architecture running on GKE. Each service emits custom business metrics (e.g., order processing time). You want to create a dashboard that shows the 99th percentile latency for each service over the last 7 days. Which approach should you take?

Accepted Answer

Write custom metrics to Cloud Monitoring and create a dashboard with the 99th percentile aligner.. Option B is correct because Cloud Monitoring supports custom metrics and provides built-in aligners, including a 99th percentile aligner, which can be applied directly in a dashboard chart. This allows you to compute the 99th percentile latency for each service over the last 7 days without manual calculation or exporting logs. Custom metrics are the appropriate mechanism for business metrics like order processing time, as they are designed for numeric time-series data.

Answer

Export logs to Cloud Logging and use Log Analytics to compute percentiles.

Answer

Use Metrics Explorer to view the metrics and manually compute percentiles.

Answer

Use Prometheus monitoring built into GKE and query the avg() function.

Question 2

Match each Cloud Storage class to its typical use case.

Question 3

Match each IAM role to its description.

Question 4

Match each Cloud CDN feature to its benefit.

Question 5

Match each Cloud Logging and Monitoring concept to its definition.

Question 6

Match each Google Cloud service to its primary purpose.

Question 7

Match each Cloud SQL database engine to its description.

Question 8

Match each command-line tool to its primary use.

Question 9

Match each error code to its meaning in Google Cloud.

Question 10

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 11

A developer needs to test a Cloud Function locally before deploying. Which tool should they use?

Accepted Answer

Functions Framework for your language.. The Functions Framework is the correct tool because it is an open-source library that allows you to run Cloud Functions locally on your machine, emulating the Cloud Functions runtime environment. This enables you to test your function's behavior, including HTTP triggers and event handling, without deploying to Google Cloud. Option D is correct because the Functions Framework is specifically designed for local development and testing of Cloud Functions.

Answer

Docker container with a custom entrypoint.

Answer

gcloud functions call command.

Answer

Cloud Code for VS Code or IntelliJ.

Question 12

A team uses Cloud Source Repositories for version control and Cloud Build for CI. The build configuration file (cloudbuild.yaml) includes a step that runs unit tests. The team wants to ensure that the build fails if any test fails. What should the developer do?

Accepted Answer

Ensure the test command in the build step returns a non-zero exit code when tests fail.. Option B is correct because Cloud Build executes each step as a container, and the build step's success or failure is determined by the exit code of the command run inside that container. If the test command (e.g., `npm test` or `pytest`) returns a non-zero exit code when tests fail, Cloud Build will automatically mark that step as failed and stop the build. No special configuration or custom builder is required beyond ensuring the test command itself propagates the failure exit code.

Answer

Use Cloud Build's built-in test runner that automatically fails the build on test failure.

Answer

Create a custom builder that runs tests and emits a non-zero exit code on failure.

Answer

Add a pre-build step that checks test results and triggers a build failure if needed.

Question 13

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 14

You are designing a CI/CD pipeline using Cloud Build. You want to automatically trigger a build when code is pushed to a specific branch in Cloud Source Repositories. What is the correct configuration?

Accepted Answer

Create a build trigger in Cloud Build with a regex pattern for the branch name.. Option D is correct because Cloud Build natively supports build triggers that can be configured to automatically start a build when code is pushed to a specific branch in Cloud Source Repositories. The trigger uses a regex pattern to match the branch name, and Cloud Build listens for repository push events directly without requiring additional services.

Answer

Create a Cloud Function that invokes Cloud Build via API when a push event occurs.

Answer

Add a build step in cloudbuild.yaml that polls the repository.

Answer

Configure a Cloud Pub/Sub topic to notify Cloud Build on push events.

Question 15

Which THREE components are essential for a complete application performance monitoring (APM) solution on Google Cloud?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Monitoring for metrics and alerting.. Cloud Monitoring is essential for an APM solution because it provides metrics, dashboards, and alerting policies to track application health and performance. It integrates with other services like Cloud Trace and Cloud Logging to offer a unified observability platform, enabling proactive detection of issues such as latency spikes or error rate increases.

Answer

Cloud Scheduler for job scheduling.

Answer

Cloud CDN for content caching.

Question 16

A company runs a stateful application on Compute Engine with regional persistent disks. They want to achieve high availability with automatic failover in case of a zone failure. Which architecture meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use regional persistent disks with a managed instance group spanning two zones. Option D is correct because regional persistent disks synchronously replicate data across two zones, and when combined with a managed instance group (MIG) spanning those same two zones, the application can automatically fail over to the healthy zone if one zone fails. The MIG's autohealing and health-check mechanisms detect the failure and recreate instances in the surviving zone, while the regional PD remains accessible from either zone, ensuring high availability without manual intervention.

Answer

Use Cloud Storage FUSE to mount a multi-regional bucket as a filesystem

Answer

Use standard persistent disks with scheduled snapshots to a multi-region bucket

Answer

Use zonal persistent disks with a managed instance group in a single zone

Question 17

A company deploys a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The operations team needs to monitor API latency between services. Which Google Cloud service should they use to trace requests across services?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Trace. Cloud Trace is the correct choice because it is a distributed tracing system designed to capture latency data as requests propagate through microservices. It provides end-to-end visibility by collecting trace spans from each service, allowing the operations team to identify bottlenecks and measure API latency between services in a GKE environment.

Answer

Error Reporting

Answer

Cloud Logging

Answer

Cloud Monitoring

Question 18

A company uses Cloud Monitoring to create an uptime check for their external HTTP endpoint. The check fails periodically even though the service is healthy. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The firewall is blocking the uptime check IP ranges. The most likely cause is that the firewall is blocking the uptime check IP ranges. Cloud Monitoring uses specific source IP ranges for its uptime checks, and if these are not explicitly allowed through the firewall, the checks will fail even though the service itself is healthy. This is a common configuration issue where the firewall rules are not updated to include the monitoring system's probe IPs.

Answer

The service is down during those periods

Answer

The SSL certificate is expired

Answer

The endpoint has high latency

Question 19

Which THREE are valid uses of Cloud Trace? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Identifying latency bottlenecks in a distributed application. Cloud Trace is a distributed tracing system that captures latency data from applications, allowing you to identify performance bottlenecks across services. Option A is correct because Cloud Trace provides detailed traces that show the time spent in each component of a distributed application, enabling you to pinpoint where delays occur.

Answer

Monitoring CPU usage of a Compute Engine instance

Answer

Exporting traces to Prometheus for long-term storage

Question 20

Refer to the exhibit. A developer is configuring Cloud Build to build a Docker image from a Cloud Source Repository. The build fails with a permission error. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

The service account is missing the roles/source.reader role to access the repository. The build fails with a permission error because the Cloud Build service account does not have the `roles/source.reader` role on the Cloud Source Repository. Without this role, the service account cannot read the source code from the repository, which is required to trigger the build. The error is not about building permissions but about accessing the source.

Answer

The service account lacks the roles/cloudbuild.builds.builder role

Answer

The Cloud Source Repository does not have the build trigger enabled

Answer

The build config file is missing the 'source' field