PCD Practice Test 8 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A team wants to use Cloud Scheduler to trigger a Cloud Function that calls an external API every hour. The Cloud Function requires an API key for the external service. How should the team securely provide the API key to the function?

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

Accepted Answer

Store the API key in Secret Manager and access it via the Secret Manager API in the function code.. Secret Manager is Google Cloud's recommended service for storing secrets like API keys. It integrates natively with Cloud Functions, allowing secure access without exposing the key in environment variables or code. Option A is insecure because environment variables can be visible in the function configuration. Option C is insecure because hardcoding exposes the key in the source code. Option D is not the best practice; while Cloud Storage with CSEK provides encryption, it is not designed for secrets management and requires more complex access control.

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Pass the API key as an environment variable in the function's runtime environment.

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Hardcode the API key in the Cloud Function source code.

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Store the key in Cloud Storage with customer-supplied encryption key (CSEK).

Question 2

A company is migrating a monolithic Java application to microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The application uses a shared MySQL database. The team wants to adopt a testing strategy that validates service interactions without deploying to a full cluster. Which testing approach is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Consumer-driven contract testing with tools like Spring Cloud Contract.. Consumer-driven contract testing (CDC) with tools like Spring Cloud Contract validates the interactions between microservices by defining and verifying API contracts (e.g., request/response formats, headers, status codes) without requiring a full GKE cluster. This approach is ideal for a migration from a monolithic Java application because it ensures that each service adheres to its expected behavior when communicating over HTTP or messaging, catching integration issues early in the development cycle. It does not require deploying to a cluster, making it faster and more lightweight than end-to-end testing.

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Load testing to simulate production traffic.

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Unit testing with mocked dependencies.

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End-to-end testing in a staging environment.

Question 3

A developer wants to automatically deploy a new version of an application to App Engine Standard every time code is pushed to the main branch of a Cloud Source Repositories repository. Which service should be used?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Build. Cloud Build is the correct service because it is a fully managed CI/CD platform that integrates natively with Cloud Source Repositories and App Engine Standard. You can configure a Cloud Build trigger to automatically build and deploy your application whenever code is pushed to the main branch, using a cloudbuild.yaml file that specifies the build steps and the `gcloud app deploy` command.

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Cloud Run

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Cloud Scheduler

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Cloud Deploy

Question 4

A Cloud Spanner database has a table Orders with a child table OrderItems. Queries often join Orders and OrderItems on OrderID. Which schema design optimizes performance for these joins?

Accepted Answer

Make OrderItems an interleaved table under Orders. Interleaved tables store child rows with their parent row in the same split, colocating related data and reducing cross-node communication. This is the correct optimization for parent-child joins.

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Define a secondary index on OrderItems.OrderID

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Use a global index on Orders.OrderID

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Denormalize OrderItems data into the Orders table

Question 5

An operations team is configuring a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy for a critical application. They want to ensure that alerts are only fired when an anomaly persists for at least 5 minutes to reduce noise. Which condition configuration should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use a 'Metric Threshold' condition and set the 'for' parameter to 300 seconds.. The 'for' parameter in a Metric Threshold condition specifies the duration (in seconds) that a metric must continuously violate the threshold before the alert fires. Setting it to 300 seconds ensures the anomaly persists for at least 5 minutes, reducing noise from transient spikes. This is the standard approach in Cloud Monitoring for sustained condition evaluation.

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Configure 'Evaluation Missing Data' to '5 minutes'.

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Set the condition type to 'Metric Absence' with a 5-minute duration.

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Use 'Never retrigger' state with 5-minute window.

Question 6

A team is migrating a Teradata data warehouse to BigQuery using the BigQuery Data Transfer Service. They need to schedule regular incremental transfers. What is the correct configuration for the transfer?

Accepted Answer

Create a transfer config with source type 'Teradata', target dataset, and schedule frequency.. BigQuery Data Transfer Service for Teradata supports scheduled transfers. The correct setup is to configure a transfer config with a schedule (e.g., daily) and specify the dataset and table mappings. The service handles incremental loads based on a watermark column.

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Export Teradata data to Cloud Storage and use BigQuery load jobs scheduled via Cloud Scheduler.

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Use Cloud Data Fusion to create a batch pipeline from Teradata to BigQuery.

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Use a BigQuery scheduled query to SELECT * FROM Teradata via federated query.

Question 7

A mobile application developer needs a serverless NoSQL database that supports offline data synchronization across devices and real-time updates. Which Google Cloud database service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Firestore. Firestore is a serverless, NoSQL document database that provides built-in offline data synchronization across devices and real-time updates via snapshot listeners. It automatically handles conflict resolution and data replication, making it ideal for mobile applications that need to work offline and sync when connectivity is restored.

Answer

Cloud Bigtable

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Cloud SQL

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Cloud Spanner

Question 8

An e-commerce platform uses Cloud Spanner for transactions and Cloud Bigtable for session state and recommendations. They want to synchronize customer profile changes from Spanner to Bigtable in near real-time. Which three components should they use? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Cloud Spanner change streams. Spanner change streams capture changes, Pub/Sub provides a scalable messaging channel, and Dataflow can transform and write to Bigtable. Cloud Functions could be used but are less suitable for high-throughput. Cloud Scheduler is batch-oriented.

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Cloud Functions

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Cloud Scheduler

Question 9

A team is deploying a microservice application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They want to ensure high availability and minimize downtime during rolling updates. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Configure pod disruption budgets to limit the number of pods that can be unavailable simultaneously.. PodDisruptionBudgets (PDBs) allow you to specify the minimum number of pods that must remain available during voluntary disruptions like rolling updates, ensuring high availability. Option D is correct because readiness probes control when a pod is added to a Service's endpoints; during rolling updates, they prevent traffic from being sent to a pod until it is ready, minimizing downtime.

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Use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler to automatically adjust the number of pods based on CPU utilization.

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Enable liveness probes to automatically restart pods that become unresponsive.

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Enable node auto-repair to automatically replace unhealthy nodes.

Question 10

Your organization uses Cloud Functions (1st gen) to process events from Cloud Storage. Recently, you migrated to Cloud Functions (2nd gen) to take advantage of longer timeouts and concurrency. After the migration, some invocations fail with 'DeadlineExceeded' errors even though the total execution time is below the 60-minute limit. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The function is processing multiple concurrent requests per instance, causing a single request to exceed the HTTP timeout due to contention. Cloud Functions (2nd gen) supports concurrent request processing per instance. When multiple requests are handled simultaneously by the same instance, they share the instance's resources, including the HTTP timeout. If one request consumes excessive time due to contention (e.g., waiting for CPU or I/O), other concurrent requests may hit the HTTP request timeout (default 60 minutes for 2nd gen) even if their individual execution time is shorter. This is a common issue when migrating from 1st gen (which processes one request at a time) to 2nd gen with concurrency enabled.

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The function does not have enough memory allocated for the new workload

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The function is being cold-started more frequently due to reduced min instances

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The function timeout is still set to the 1st gen default of 9 minutes