PCD Practice Test 22 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is deploying a production Cloud Bigtable instance for time-series data. They want high availability across zones and the ability to serve reads from a secondary location. Which TWO configurations should they implement?

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

Accepted Answer

Add a second cluster in a different zone within the same region. To achieve high availability across zones, you add a second cluster in a different zone within the same region. For read scaling or cross-region DR, you can add a cluster in another region. A production instance is required for multi-cluster. Replication is asynchronous, so eventual consistency. A development instance does not support multiple clusters.

Answer

Create a development instance type

Answer

Disable replication to avoid conflicts

Answer

Use HDD storage to reduce costs

Question 2

Match each Cloud CDN feature to its benefit.

Accepted Answer

Caching: Reduces latency by serving content from edge locations. Cloud CDN features like caching, SSL/TLS termination, and compression each provide distinct benefits. Caching reduces latency, SSL/TLS termination improves security, and compression reduces bandwidth. Distractors often mix up these benefits.

Answer

Caching: Improves security by blocking malicious requests

Answer

SSL/TLS termination: Reduces latency by speeding up content delivery

Question 3

A company deploys a containerized application to Cloud Run using Cloud Build. They want to implement a rolling update strategy with zero downtime. Which two actions should they take? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Gradually shift traffic to the new revision using the gcloud run services update-traffic command.. The `gcloud run services update-traffic` command allows you to gradually shift traffic from the current revision to a new revision, enabling a rolling update with zero downtime. This command supports percentage-based traffic splitting, which ensures that the new revision is incrementally exposed to users while the old revision remains active, thus maintaining service availability throughout the deployment.

Answer

Create a new Cloud Run service for the new revision.

Answer

Set the min-instances attribute to 1 to keep at least one instance running.

Answer

Use the gcloud run deploy command with the --concurrency flag.

Question 4

You need to create an uptime check for an external HTTPS endpoint and configure an alert that sends a notification if the check fails for 3 consecutive attempts. Which configuration is correct?

Accepted Answer

Create an uptime check with check interval 1 min and alert condition with duration 3 min. To trigger an alert after 3 consecutive failures with a 1-minute check interval, the alert condition must have a duration of 3 minutes. This ensures that the alert fires only when the endpoint has been down for three successive checks, matching the requirement exactly.

Answer

Create an uptime check with check interval 5 min and alert condition with duration 3 min

Answer

Create an uptime check with check interval 5 min and alert condition with downtime 15 min

Answer

Create an uptime check with check interval 1 min and alert condition with duration 1 min

Question 5

A team uses Cloud Monitoring alerting policies with multiple conditions. They want to notify only when both CPU utilization is above 80% and error rate is above 5% for 5 minutes. Which type of condition should be used?

Accepted Answer

Single condition with AND logic. Cloud Monitoring alerting policies support a single condition with multiple threshold expressions combined using AND logic. This allows you to trigger a notification only when both CPU utilization exceeds 80% and the error rate exceeds 5% simultaneously for the specified 5-minute duration.

Answer

A log-based metric condition

Answer

Two separate conditions with OR logic

Answer

A condition with a custom predicate

Question 6

A team is migrating a Teradata data warehouse to BigQuery. They use BTEQ scripts for ETL. What is the best approach to migrate the BTEQ scripts?

Accepted Answer

Rewrite BTEQ scripts as BigQuery SQL using GoogleSQL syntax, manually handling differences.. Teradata BTEQ scripts use Teradata SQL dialect. BigQuery uses GoogleSQL (or legacy SQL). Direct translation is needed. The BigQuery Data Transfer Service can automate loading from Teradata but does not convert BTEQ scripts. Manual rewriting or using a SQL translation tool is required. Some BTEQ commands have no BigQuery equivalent (e.g., .EXPORT).

Answer

Use a third-party tool like Ora2Pg to convert BTEQ scripts.

Answer

Use BigQuery Data Transfer Service to automatically convert BTEQ scripts to BigQuery SQL.

Answer

Run BTEQ scripts directly in BigQuery using the BigQuery Connector for Teradata.

Question 7

Which Google Cloud database is serverless and automatically scales to zero when not in use, making it cost-effective for variable workloads?

Accepted Answer

BigQuery. BigQuery is serverless and scales automatically; it charges per query / storage and can scale to zero (no compute when idle). Firestore is serverless but not exactly 'scales to zero' as it charges for data stored.

Answer

Memorystore

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

Cloud SQL

Question 8

You are a developer for an e-commerce platform running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a Cloud SQL backend. The application uses Cloud Memorystore for Redis for session caching. During a flash sale, you notice that the application latency spikes and some users are unable to complete checkout. You suspect the Redis instance is overwhelmed. The Redis instance is currently a Standard tier instance with 5 GB of memory. You need to increase throughput without significant architectural changes. You have the following options: A) Use client-side caching to reduce load on the Redis instance. B) Switch to a Memorystore Standard tier instance with a higher capacity and enable scaling. C) Migrate to a Memorystore Basic tier instance with a larger memory size. D) Enable for Redis clustering on the existing instance to distribute load across shards. Which option should you choose?

Accepted Answer

Switch to a Memorystore Standard tier instance with a higher capacity and enable scaling.. Enabling scaling on a Memorystore Standard tier instance allows you to increase the instance's capacity and throughput without architectural changes. Scaling up the memory size increases the available CPU and network bandwidth, directly addressing the latency spike during the flash sale. This approach maintains the existing Redis configuration and requires no application code changes, unlike clustering or client-side caching.

Answer

Use client-side caching to reduce load on the Redis instance.

Answer

Migrate to a Memorystore Basic tier instance with a larger memory size.

Answer

Enable for Redis clustering on the existing instance to distribute load across shards.

Question 9

A team is setting up a CI/CD pipeline using Cloud Build for a Node.js application. They want to ensure that only code from the main branch is deployed to production. Which TWO practices should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Use branch triggers to run tests only on push to main.. Using a branch trigger that runs only on push to main ensures that only main branch code triggers the pipeline. Adding a manual approval step in Cloud Deploy before promoting to production adds a gate to prevent automatic deployment of untested code. Storing secrets or using substitutions are good practices but do not specifically restrict deployment to the main branch.

Answer

Store secrets in Cloud Build and use them in build steps.

Answer

Use Cloud Build substitutions to inject environment variables.

Answer

Use Cloud Build's inverted match with branch pattern to exclude non-main branches.

Question 10

An operations team has set up a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy that fires when the 99th percentile latency of a service exceeds 200ms for 1 minute. They notice that the alert fires frequently during normal traffic patterns. What is the most likely issue with the alert configuration?

Accepted Answer

The alerting policy uses a rolling window that is too short for the metric's natural variation.. The alert fires frequently during normal traffic because the 1-minute rolling window is too short to smooth out natural latency spikes. A short window captures transient variations as if they were sustained, causing false positives. Lengthening the window (e.g., to 5 minutes) would reduce noise and better reflect true performance trends.

Answer

The metric's alignment period is set to align by rate instead of mean.

Answer

The service is actually experiencing high latency, and the threshold should be lowered.

Answer

The alerting policy is using a forecast threshold instead of a metric threshold.

Question 11

A team is designing a data pipeline that uses Cloud Storage for input files, Cloud Functions to process each file, and writes results to BigQuery. The pipeline must guarantee exactly-once processing of each file, even if the function fails and retries. Which approach should the team take?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Pub/Sub to store file notification events and use Dataflow for processing with exactly-once guarantees. Using Cloud Pub/Sub to store file notification events and Dataflow for processing provides exactly-once guarantees. Option A may lead to duplicates because Cloud Storage triggers are at-least-once. Option C with Cloud Tasks can deduplicate tasks but processing may still be at-least-once if not idempotent. Option D with Cloud Workflows does not inherently provide exactly-once.

Answer

Use Cloud Storage triggers with event filters and configure the function to delete the file after successful processing

Answer

Use Cloud Tasks to queue file processing tasks and configure retries with deduplication

Answer

Use Cloud Workflows to orchestrate the pipeline and use idempotent writes to BigQuery

Question 12

An e-commerce platform uses Cloud SQL for MySQL for transactional data and wants to run complex analytical queries on that data without affecting production performance. The analytics queries often join with data from Google Cloud Storage. What is the MOST cost-effective and performant approach?

Accepted Answer

Use BigQuery federated queries to query Cloud SQL and GCS directly. BigQuery federated queries allow you to query Cloud SQL (MySQL) and Google Cloud Storage (GCS) directly using BigQuery's SQL engine, without moving data. This approach is cost-effective (no storage costs for duplicated data) and performant (BigQuery handles complex analytical joins efficiently), while avoiding any impact on the Cloud SQL production instance since queries are executed externally.

Answer

Set up a Dataflow pipeline to continuously copy Cloud SQL changes to BigQuery

Answer

Export the Cloud SQL data to CSV files in GCS and load them into BigQuery nightly

Answer

Replicate the Cloud SQL data to Cloud Bigtable and query it from there

Question 13

Drag and drop the steps to deploy a containerized application to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in the correct order.

Accepted Answer

Create GKE cluster, authenticate kubectl with the cluster, apply Kubernetes manifest files, expose the application via Service or Ingress. Deploying to GKE requires creating a cluster, authenticating, then applying manifests and exposing the service.

Answer

Authenticate kubectl with the cluster, create GKE cluster, apply Kubernetes manifest files, expose the application via Service or Ingress

Answer

Create GKE cluster, apply Kubernetes manifest files, authenticate kubectl with the cluster, expose the application via Service or Ingress

Answer

Create GKE cluster, expose the application via Service or Ingress, authenticate kubectl with the cluster, apply Kubernetes manifest files

Question 14

Drag and drop the steps to configure a Cloud Storage bucket with uniform bucket-level access in the correct order.

Accepted Answer

Create the bucket, then enable uniform bucket-level access (either during creation or after), then configure IAM policies. Uniform bucket-level access is configured during bucket creation by selecting the appropriate access control settings.

Answer

Configure IAM policies first, then create the bucket, then enable uniform bucket-level access

Answer

Enable uniform bucket-level access globally, then create the bucket, then configure IAM policies

Answer

Create the bucket with fine-grained access, then configure IAM policies, then change to uniform bucket-level access

Question 15

What is the primary benefit of using Cloud Load Balancing with global anycast IP?

Accepted Answer

Reduces latency for users worldwide. Cloud Load Balancing with a global anycast IP directs user traffic to the nearest available backend instance based on network topology and latency. This minimizes the number of network hops and reduces round-trip time, providing lower latency for users worldwide compared to a single-region deployment.

Answer

Provides DDoS protection

Answer

Supports WebSocket

Answer

Enables cross-zone failover