Optimising Service Performance

Your GKE cluster is running a critical web application that experiences predictable traffic spikes during business hours. You want to minimize latency and avoid pod startup delays during scaling. The application uses CPU-intensive image processing. Which scaling strategy should you use?

You are running a Cloud Run service that performs background image processing tasks after responding to HTTP requests. Users report that tasks are sometimes not completed. You have set CPU to always-on, but you notice the service's concurrency is set to the default of 80. What is the most likely cause of incomplete tasks?

Your Cloud Spanner instance is experiencing high write latency and hot spots on a table that uses an auto-incrementing integer as the primary key. Which change would best mitigate the hot spots?

Your organization uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL for a reporting application with read-heavy workloads. Queries are slow and you need to reduce load on the primary instance. You also need to ensure that all read queries from the reporting tool are isolated from the primary. What should you do?

You are deploying a batch job on Compute Engine that processes large datasets and can tolerate interruptions. The job runs for about 6 hours every night. Which option would minimize cost while ensuring the job completes within the 6-hour window?

Your Cloud Run service processes requests from an external API that sends a burst of up to 100 requests per second. You want to maximize throughput while minimizing instances. The service is CPU-bound. What configuration should you use?

Your GKE cluster runs a stateful application that requires persistent storage. You want to use Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) to optimize resource requests, but you notice that pods are being terminated and recreated when VPA updates resource recommendations. You want to avoid pod restarts. Which VPA updateMode should you use?

Your Pub/Sub subscription is not keeping up with the message publishing rate. The subscriber is a Cloud Run service that processes each message in about 2 seconds. You have already increased the number of subscribers to 10. What is the next best step to increase throughput?

You want to ensure that a critical deployment on GKE has minimal downtime during rolling updates. You also want to ensure that at least 2 pods are always available. Which Kubernetes resource should you configure?

Your Cloud Run service experiences cold starts that add 5 seconds of latency to user requests. You want to eliminate cold starts for a baseline traffic level of 10 requests per second. The service uses about 2 GiB of memory. What should you do?

Your Cloud SQL for MySQL instance is experiencing high CPU usage due to a burst of concurrent connections. You want to handle up to 500 concurrent connections without over-provisioning the instance. What should you do?

Your Cloud Spanner database has a table with a secondary index that is used for range queries. You notice that the index queries are slow because they require back-and-forth between the index and the base table. How can you optimize the index to reduce this overhead?

Your GKE cluster uses node auto-provisioning to automatically create node pools. However, you notice that the cluster autoscaler is removing nodes too aggressively, causing frequent pod evictions. Which TWO configuration changes can you make to reduce the frequency of scale-down events? (Choose two)

Your Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database is experiencing slow query performance. You want to identify and optimize the slowest queries. Which TWO actions should you take? (Choose two)

Your organization uses Cloud Spanner for a global application with strong consistency requirements. You need to design a table schema to avoid hot spots while supporting queries that join two related entities (e.g., Customers and Orders). Which THREE design choices should you implement? (Choose three)

A company runs a GKE cluster for a web application. During peak traffic, the application experiences increased latency. The team has enabled the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) based on CPU utilization, but the scaling is not fast enough. Which approach would improve the responsiveness of the HPA?

A company is using Cloud Run to deploy a service that processes background tasks. The service takes a few seconds to initialize, and users experience high latency on cold starts. How can the company eliminate cold starts for this service?

A company uses Cloud Spanner for a global application. They notice high write latency and occasional hotspotting on a table with a monotonically increasing integer primary key. Which schema design change would best prevent hotspotting while maintaining read performance?

A company is running a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database and wants to improve read performance for reporting queries. They have already optimized the queries but still see high CPU usage on the primary instance. What is the most cost-effective solution?

A company uses Pub/Sub to ingest events from multiple services. They notice a backlog of unacknowledged messages and want to increase the throughput of their subscriber. The subscriber is a single process running on Compute Engine. What is the most effective way to increase throughput?

A company runs a batch data processing job on Compute Engine that is fault-tolerant. They want to reduce costs without affecting job completion time. The job can handle instance preemption gracefully. Which compute option should they use?

A company has a GKE cluster with cluster autoscaler enabled. They notice that after a batch job completes, the cluster takes a long time to scale down, leaving idle nodes running and incurring costs. Which configuration change would reduce the scale-down delay?

A company is using Cloud Run for a service that performs background computation even when there are no incoming requests. They find that the service is being throttled and not completing the background work. What is the most likely cause and solution?

A team is using Cloud Spanner and wants to create a secondary index that is stored with the base table data to avoid interleaved joins. Which option should they use when creating the index?

A company uses Cloud SQL for MySQL and notices slow queries. They have enabled slow query logging and found that some queries are performing full table scans. The table has millions of rows. What is the best immediate action to improve query performance?

A company is deploying a microservice on Cloud Run that needs to handle up to 1000 concurrent requests per instance. The default concurrency setting is 80. How should they configure the service to achieve the desired concurrency?

A company wants to use the Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) to automatically adjust resource requests for their pods. They want the VPA to update the resource requests of running pods without recreating them. Which VPA updateMode should they use?

A company runs a GKE cluster and wants to ensure that during a planned node upgrade, their application remains available with minimal disruption. Which TWO steps should they take? (Choose two.)

A company is experiencing slow query performance on Cloud Spanner. They have identified a query that joins a parent table with a child table frequently. Which THREE design choices can improve the performance of this join? (Choose three.)

A company uses Pub/Sub for event-driven processing and wants to ensure exactly-once delivery for critical messages. Which TWO configurations are required? (Choose two.)

A DevOps team has a GKE workload that experiences fluctuating traffic. They want to automatically adjust the number of pods based on CPU utilization. Which resource should they configure?

A team uses Cloud Run for a web application that experiences sporadic traffic. They want to minimize cold starts without incurring costs when there are no requests. Which configuration should they use?

A Cloud Spanner database uses a sequential customer ID as the primary key, causing frequent hotspotting on a single split. The team needs to eliminate hotspots. Which key design should they implement?

An application running on Cloud SQL experiences high read latency. The team wants to offload read traffic from the primary instance and improve performance. Which approach should they take?

A team wants to automatically adjust the node count in a GKE cluster based on pending pod resource requests. Which component should they enable?

A Pub/Sub subscription is processing messages but the subscriber cannot keep up. The team notices that many messages are being resent. Which parameter should they adjust to reduce duplicate processing?

A DevOps engineer is setting up a GKE cluster for a batch processing job that can tolerate interruptions. The job runs for a few hours daily. To optimize cost, they want to use preemptible VMs. What must they configure to ensure the job completes despite node preemptions?

A Cloud Run service needs to handle background tasks after responding to a client. Which CPU configuration is required to ensure background tasks complete?

A Cloud Spanner query is performing a join between two tables that are frequently accessed together. Which schema design can optimize this query?

A team has a Cloud SQL instance with high CPU usage from many concurrent connections. They want to reduce connection overhead and improve performance. Which combination of services should they implement?

A batch job on GKE needs to be resilient to node failures. The job creates several pods that run for a few minutes each. The team wants to ensure that during a voluntary node disruption (e.g., node upgrade), only a limited number of pods are affected. Which resource should they configure?

A team is using Cloud Spanner and wants to reduce latency for queries that filter on a column that is not part of the primary key. Which feature should they use?

A company runs a high-throughput pub/sub system. They need to improve message processing throughput. Which two actions should they take? (Choose TWO).

A DevOps engineer is optimizing a GKE workload that is CPU-bound. They want to ensure proper resource allocation to improve performance. Which three actions should they take? (Choose THREE).

A Cloud Spanner database is experiencing read performance issues. The team wants to optimize query performance. Which two approaches should they use? (Choose TWO).

A DevOps team is deploying a web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that experiences daily traffic spikes. They want to automatically adjust the number of pod replicas based on CPU utilization. Which Kubernetes resource should they use?

A Cloud Run service handles HTTP requests that each involve a short background task after the response is sent. The service currently has CPU throttled when not handling requests, causing background tasks to fail. Which configuration change ensures background tasks complete?

A company stores time-series data in Cloud Spanner with a primary key composed of a timestamp prefix and a user ID suffix. They notice high write latency and hotspotting on a specific node. How should they redesign the primary key to distribute writes evenly?

A team runs a Cloud SQL MySQL instance serving an e-commerce application. Read traffic is growing and causing increased latency on the primary instance. They want to offload read queries with minimal application changes. Which solution should they implement?

A GKE cluster runs a stateful workload that requires persistent volumes. The nodes are managed by a node pool with autoscaling enabled. During scale-down, the cluster autoscaler sometimes removes nodes that host critical pods with local data. How can the team prevent this?

A company runs a batch processing job on Compute Engine VMs. The job is fault-tolerant and can handle individual VM failures by restarting tasks. To reduce costs, they want to use the cheapest possible VMs while ensuring the job completes within a flexible time window. Which VM option is MOST cost-effective?

A Cloud Pub/Sub subscription is processing a high volume of messages, but the subscriber frequently receives messages that have already been processed (duplicates). The subscriber's processing time varies from 100 ms to 10 seconds. Which parameter should be adjusted to reduce duplicates while maintaining throughput?

A team is using Cloud Spanner for a global user database. They frequently run JOIN queries between a Users table and an Orders table. The queries are slow and the team suspects they are causing cross-node fan-out. Which schema design technique would reduce latency by co-locating related data?

A Cloud Run service experiences cold starts on the first request after being idle, causing latency spikes. The team wants to eliminate cold starts entirely. Which configuration setting should they use?

A GKE cluster runs a mix of batch and latency-sensitive services. The batch jobs require occasional large CPU bursts, but the latency-sensitive services need consistent performance. The team wants to avoid CPU contention without over-provisioning nodes. Which approach should they take?

A company runs a Cloud SQL PostgreSQL instance for a SaaS application. They notice that the database CPU is consistently above 90% during peak hours, and queries slow down. The application is read-heavy and can tolerate some replication lag. Which action would MOST effectively reduce CPU load on the primary?

A team is using Cloud Spanner with a primary key of UUID v4 values. They notice that read performance is suboptimal for range scans over a subset of keys. Which index strategy improves range scan performance?

A company runs a microservices application on GKE. They want to automatically adjust both the number of pods (for varying load) and the resource limits of individual pods (to avoid resource waste). Which two Kubernetes resources should they configure together? (Choose two.)

A Cloud Pub/Sub subscription is used to ingest real-time events. The subscriber's processing rate is slower than the publish rate, causing messages to back up. The team needs to increase throughput without losing messages. Which three actions should they take? (Choose three.)

A company wants to optimize costs for their Compute Engine instances. They have a mix of workloads: some are fault-tolerant batch jobs, and others are stateful services requiring consistent uptime. Which two strategies should they use to reduce costs? (Choose two.)

A DevOps engineer is optimizing a Cloud Run service that performs background data processing tasks triggered by Pub/Sub messages. The tasks are CPU-intensive and can run up to 10 minutes each. The service currently experiences cold starts causing delays. Which configuration should the engineer apply to minimize cold starts and ensure the background tasks are not throttled?

A company is migrating a stateful web application from on-premises to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The application has variable traffic patterns, with occasional spikes. The team wants to optimize performance and availability while minimizing cost during spikes. The application is not fault-tolerant to instance restarts. Which TWO strategies should the team implement? (Choose TWO)

An engineer is tuning Cloud Spanner performance for a database that experiences high read latency on parent-child queries. The database schema uses a table for Users and a table for Orders with a foreign key on user_id. The Orders table has a secondary index on order_date. Which TWO actions can improve query performance? (Choose TWO)

A team is running a critical application on Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL) that serves both OLTP transactions and read-heavy reporting. The reporting queries are causing performance degradation for the OLTP traffic. The team needs to optimize performance with minimal application changes. Which THREE actions should they take? (Choose THREE)

A DevOps team is using Pub/Sub to process high-volume event streams. They notice that the subscriber is falling behind and messages are being redelivered frequently. They need to increase throughput. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose TWO)