PCDE Practice Test 48 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company has multiple GCP projects and wants to audit all IAM policy changes. They need a solution that captures who made the change, what was changed, and when. The solution should be cost-effective and require minimal setup. What should they use?

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

Accepted Answer

Enable Cloud Audit Logs for Admin Activity for all projects.. Cloud Audit Logs for Admin Activity automatically captures all API calls that modify IAM policies, including the identity of the caller, the change made, and the timestamp. This is enabled by default for all GCP projects at no additional cost, making it the most cost-effective and minimal-setup solution for auditing IAM changes.

Answer

Enable Access Transparency logs.

Answer

Use Cloud Asset Inventory to export IAM policies daily.

Answer

Set up Stackdriver (now Cloud Monitoring) alerts on IAM changes.

Question 2

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?

Accepted Answer

Set a PodDisruptionBudget with maxUnavailable=0 for the critical workloads. PodDisruptionBudgets (PDB) allow specifying the minimum number of available pods during voluntary disruptions like cluster autoscaler scale-down. By setting a PDB with maxUnavailable=0, the autoscaler will not drain nodes that would violate the budget. Node taints and tolerations control scheduling but not disruption. Cluster autoscaler flags like scale-down-delay only delay scale-down, not prevent it for specific pods. VPA does not affect node selection.

Answer

Use node taints and tolerations to pin pods to specific nodes

Answer

Set the cluster autoscaler flag --scale-down-delay to a high value

Answer

Configure Vertical Pod Autoscaler to increase pod resources

Question 3

A company wants to use Cloud Monitoring dashboards to display real-time metrics for their application, but they also need to version control the dashboard configurations. Which approach should they use?

Accepted Answer

Define dashboards as code using the Cloud Monitoring API and store the configuration in a Git repository.. Cloud Monitoring dashboards can be defined as JSON or YAML and managed via the Monitoring API or Terraform. This allows version control and CI/CD. Manually creating dashboards in the console is not reproducible.

Answer

Manually create dashboards in the Cloud Monitoring console and export them periodically.

Answer

Use Grafana with the Cloud Monitoring data source and export dashboard JSON.

Answer

Use Cloud Monitoring's built-in 'Clone' feature to backup dashboards.

Question 4

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.)

Accepted Answer

Use interleaved tables to store child rows within the parent row.. Interleaved tables physically store child rows with the parent, reducing cross-node communication. Secondary indexes help with non-key lookups. Using `spanner_interleave_in_parent` on indexes stores index entries with the parent. Splitting tables into smaller tables does not help joins. Bit-reversed keys prevent hotspots but not join performance.

Answer

Split the child table into multiple smaller tables.

Answer

Create a secondary index on the parent table's primary key.

Question 5

A DevOps engineer wants to trigger a Cloud Build pipeline automatically whenever a developer pushes a new Git tag in the format 'v*.*.*'. Which trigger configuration should be used?

Accepted Answer

Set the trigger event to 'Push a tag' with tag regex 'v.*'.. Cloud Build supports tag triggers that fire when a Git tag matching a regex is pushed. This is the correct way to trigger on tag creation.

Answer

Use a manual trigger invoked via gcloud builds submit --tag.

Answer

Set the trigger event to 'Pull request' and check the 'Ignore tags' box.

Answer

Set the trigger event to 'Push to a branch' with branch regex 'v*.*.*'.

Question 6

A developer needs to push a Docker image to Artifact Registry from their local machine. They have installed the gcloud CLI. Which command should they run first to authenticate Docker with Artifact Registry?

Accepted Answer

gcloud auth configure-docker. gcloud auth configure-docker configures Docker to use gcloud as a credential helper for all supported registries. gcloud auth login authenticates the user but does not configure Docker.

Answer

gcloud container clusters get-credentials

Answer

gcloud auth login

Answer

docker login -u oauth2accesstoken -p "$(gcloud auth print-access-token)" https://LOCATION-docker.pkg.dev

Question 7

An organization wants to implement a landing zone with shared VPC, centralized logging, and security projects. Which folder structure best follows Google Cloud's recommended landing zone design?

Accepted Answer

Create a 'common' folder for shared projects (shared VPC, logging, security) and environment folders (dev, staging, prod) for workload projects.. Google's landing zone design recommends a folder per environment (prod, staging, dev) with common projects (shared VPC, logging, security) placed in a 'common' folder that sits at the same level as environment folders, allowing organization policies to be applied consistently.

Answer

Create a folder per product with subfolders for environments. Place shared projects under the product folder.

Answer

Create one folder per team with subfolders for each environment. Place shared projects under the corresponding environment folder.

Answer

Create a flat structure with all projects at the organization level.

Question 8

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?

Accepted Answer

Set minInstances to 2 to keep instances always warm.. Cloud Run cold starts can be eliminated by setting a minimum number of instances that are always warm. The minInstances flag ensures that the specified number of instances are always running and ready to serve requests. For a baseline of 10 RPS, you need to estimate how many instances are needed; but the question asks to eliminate cold starts, so setting minInstances to at least 1 (or more) will keep instances warm. Setting CPU always-on does not eliminate cold starts. Gen2 execution environment may reduce cold start time but not eliminate them.

Answer

Use the Gen2 execution environment to reduce cold start time.

Answer

Increase the concurrency to 1 to minimize instance count.

Answer

Set CPU always-on to keep the instance active.

Question 9

A team manages infrastructure across multiple Google Cloud projects using Terraform. They want to centralize state file management in a GCS bucket and ensure that each project's state is isolated. Which backend configuration best achieves this?

Accepted Answer

Use a single bucket with a separate prefix for each project; configure the backend for each project with its own prefix.. Terraform backend configuration allows specifying a GCS bucket and prefix. Using a separate prefix per project (e.g., `project-a/terraform.tfstate`) isolates state files. Workspaces are not needed; the prefix approach is simpler.

Answer

Use a separate bucket for each project.

Answer

Use local state files and commit them to Git.

Answer

Store all state files in the same bucket under the same prefix and use workspaces.

Question 10

A data team uses BigQuery and wants to ensure data freshness for BI reports with low latency. Which three techniques can help achieve near-real-time updates? (Select THREE).

Accepted Answer

Use a live view that queries the source table directly. A live view (also known as a logical view) queries the source table directly each time it is accessed, ensuring that BI reports always see the most current data without any materialization delay. This provides near-real-time freshness by avoiding periodic refresh cycles.

Answer

Create a scheduled query that rewrites the entire table every hour

Answer

Use BigQuery's BI Engine for caching

Question 11

A startup is building a BI stack on Google Cloud. They have moderate data volumes and need to run ad-hoc analytical queries and real-time dashboards. Which Google Cloud database service is most appropriate for this workload?

Accepted Answer

BigQuery. BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable data warehouse designed for analytical queries and real-time dashboards. It supports ad-hoc SQL queries on large datasets with fast execution via its columnar storage and distributed query engine, making it ideal for BI workloads with moderate data volumes.

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Cloud SQL

Question 12

A BI developer needs to write a query that calculates total sales by month for the current year. They create a Common Table Expression (CTE) to define monthly aggregates, then reference it in a final SELECT. What is the main benefit of using a CTE over a subquery in this scenario?

Accepted Answer

CTEs enhance query readability and maintainability.. CTEs improve query readability and maintainability by allowing you to define a named temporary result set once and reference it multiple times in the final SELECT. In this scenario, the CTE clearly separates the monthly aggregation logic from the final output, making the query easier to understand and modify compared to nesting subqueries.

Answer

CTEs are always faster than subqueries.

Answer

CTEs reduce the amount of memory used by the query.

Answer

CTEs automatically cache results for subsequent queries.

Question 13

A database engineer is designing a data model for a BI dashboard that tracks daily sales by product category. The data source is a transactional database with a normalized schema. Which BigQuery feature should they use to update the fact table incrementally each day?

Accepted Answer

Scheduled queries with MERGE statements. Scheduled queries with MERGE statements allow incremental updates by inserting new rows and updating existing ones based on a unique key, such as date and product category. This avoids full table reloads, making it efficient for daily fact table refreshes from a normalized transactional source.

Answer

Streaming inserts

Answer

BigQuery Data Transfer Service

Answer

Load jobs with WRITE_TRUNCATE

Question 14

A company is designing a disaster recovery plan for Cloud SQL for MySQL. They need to ensure the database can be recovered with minimal data loss (RPO of minutes) in case of a regional outage. Which TWO actions should they take?

Accepted Answer

Create a cross-region read replica. To achieve low RPO across regions, enable binary logging for PITR and configure a cross-region replica. Automated backups alone have a RPO of up to 24 hours.

Answer

Set up a same-region read replica

Answer

Enable automatic storage increase

Answer

Configure automated daily backups

Question 15

A database engineer is designing a Cloud SQL for MySQL schema for a multi-tenant SaaS application. Each tenant's data is isolated. Which TWO strategies are appropriate for tenant isolation?

Accepted Answer

Create a separate database for each tenant.. Options A and D are correct because they provide strong tenant isolation. Option A: Creating a separate database per tenant leverages MySQL's native database boundaries, preventing cross-tenant data access at the schema level. It also simplifies per-tenant backup/restore operations. Option D: Using a separate Cloud SQL instance per tenant offers physical isolation at the compute level, which is appropriate when tenants require complete resource isolation or have compliance needs. Options B, C, and E are incorrect: B relies on application filtering which can be error-prone and does not enforce isolation at the database level; C (column-level security) and E (row-level security) are not supported in MySQL and are features of other database engines like PostgreSQL or SQL Server.

Answer

Use a single table with a tenant_id column and enforce filtering in application queries.

Answer

Use column-level security to hide tenant data.

Answer

Use row-level security policies to restrict access per tenant.