PCDOE Practice Test 13 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer is trying to create a new project using the Cloud Console. The project creation fails with a policy violation. The engineer has permissions on folders/12345678 and folders/87654321 but not on any other folders. They select folder/87654321 as the parent. What is the most likely reason for the failure?

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

Accepted Answer

The policy requires the project parent to be one of the allowed folders, and folder/87654321 is not listed.. The policy violation indicates that the organization has a constraint restricting which folders can be used as project parents. The engineer selected folder/87654321, but the policy explicitly lists only certain allowed folders, and folder/87654321 is not among them. This is a common organization policy (e.g., a list constraint) that enforces project creation only in approved folders, regardless of the engineer's IAM permissions on that folder.

Answer

The engineer is missing the resourcemanager.projects.create permission.

Answer

The policy is enforced at the organization level but the engineer's IAM role does not allow creating projects in that folder.

Answer

The policy is set at the folder level, and folder/87654321 has a different policy.

Question 2

During the bootstrapping of a Google Cloud organization, you need to ensure that all resources in a specific folder are subject to a particular VPC Service Controls perimeter. Which step is necessary to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Add the projects within the folder as members of the existing service perimeter.. VPC Service Controls perimeters are applied at the project level, not directly to folders. To enforce a perimeter on all resources within a folder, you must add each project in that folder as a member of the existing service perimeter. This ensures that all resources in those projects are subject to the perimeter's access restrictions.

Answer

Use resource tags to label the projects and then create a tag-based perimeter.

Answer

Apply the perimeter to the folder directly.

Answer

Create an organization policy that forces all projects in the folder to be in a perimeter.

Question 3

You created the above alert policy to detect high CPU utilization in your GKE cluster. However, you are receiving too many false positive alerts. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

The crossSeriesReducer is set to REDUCE_SUM, which sums CPU across containers, so a namespace with many containers can trigger the alert even if each container uses less than 80%.. The crossSeriesReducer set to REDUCE_SUM aggregates CPU utilization across all containers in a namespace. This means that even if each container uses only 20% CPU, a namespace with five containers would show a total of 100%, triggering the alert when the threshold is 0.8 (80%). This causes false positives because the alert fires on the sum, not on individual container utilization.

Answer

The threshold value of 0.8 is too low; it should be 0.9 for production.

Answer

The duration of 300 seconds (5 minutes) is too short; it should be longer to avoid transient spikes.

Answer

The filter does not specify a specific namespace, causing alerts from all namespaces.

Question 4

Match each SRE term to its description.

Accepted Answer

SLI: A carefully defined quantitative measure of some aspect of the level of service.. The correct matches are: SLI with a quantitative measure, SLO with a target value, SLA with a contract including consequences, and Error Budget with remaining unreliability. Common confusions include swapping Error Budget with SLI or confusing SLO with SLA.

Answer

SLI: The acceptable amount of unreliability remaining before the SLO is violated.

Answer

SLO: A contract with users that includes consequences.

Question 5

A DevSecOps team is configuring Cloud Monitoring alerts for proactive incident response. Which two practices are recommended for effective alerting? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Define clear escalation paths for different alert severities.. Recommended practices include defining clear escalation paths for different severities and creating separate alerts for different symptom classes to reduce noise and ensure proper routing.

Answer

Alert on every microsecond of latency increase.

Answer

Use a single high-level alert that covers all symptoms.

Answer

Set alert thresholds based on arbitrary guesses.

Question 6

Which THREE actions should be taken when bootstrapping a CI/CD pipeline on Google Cloud? (Select exactly 3)

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Build with a Dockerfile.. Cloud Build can use a Dockerfile to build a container image from source code, which is a fundamental step in bootstrapping a CI/CD pipeline. This allows automated builds triggered by code changes, enabling continuous integration and delivery to services like Cloud Run or GKE.

Answer

Store secrets in Cloud Source Repositories.

Answer

Enable the Cloud Run API.

Question 7

A team uses Cloud Monitoring alerting policies with multiple conditions. They want an incident to fire only when both conditions are met simultaneously. What should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Set the alerting policy combiner to 'AND'. Cloud Monitoring alerting policies support a 'combiner' field that can be set to 'AND' to require that all conditions are met simultaneously before the incident fires. This ensures the alert triggers only when both conditions are true at the same evaluation window, rather than when either condition is met.

Answer

Create two separate alerting policies

Answer

Create a single condition with a ratio metric

Answer

Use a log-based metric condition

Question 8

A company runs a stateful workload on Compute Engine VMs with persistent disks. They observe that disk I/O latency spikes periodically. The workload is sensitive to latency. What should they do to improve performance?

Accepted Answer

Use SSD persistent disks instead of standard persistent disks.. SSD persistent disks provide consistent, low-latency I/O performance compared to standard persistent disks, which use spinning media and can exhibit periodic latency spikes under sustained load. For latency-sensitive stateful workloads, SSD persistent disks offer predictable IOPS and throughput, directly addressing the periodic spikes observed.

Answer

Increase the size of the persistent disk.

Answer

Migrate to local SSDs for better performance.

Answer

Configure a snapshot schedule to offload I/O.

Question 9

Which TWO of the following are best practices when bootstrapping a Google Cloud organization for DevOps?

Accepted Answer

Create separate projects for development, staging, and production environments.. Creating separate projects for development, staging, and production environments enforces resource isolation, simplifies IAM policy management, and aligns with Google Cloud's recommended multi-project architecture for DevOps. This approach allows you to apply distinct organization policies, budgets, and monitoring per environment, reducing the risk of accidental changes to production.

Answer

Use the default Compute Engine service account for all DevOps automation.

Answer

Create a service account in each project that needs it, rather than a central admin project.

Answer

Set organization policies only at the project level, not at the folder or organization level.

Question 10

Your team uses a canary deployment strategy on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). During a rollback, you notice that the rollback caused a brief period of downtime because the previous version's readiness probe was not properly configured. Which of the following best prevents this issue in the future?

Accepted Answer

Ensure that the readiness probe is tested as part of the pre-deployment validation.. The root cause of the downtime was a misconfigured readiness probe on the previous version. By testing the readiness probe as part of pre-deployment validation, you ensure that the probe correctly reflects the application's ability to serve traffic before it is used in a rollback. This prevents the scenario where a rollback deploys a version that fails its readiness check, causing the service to be removed from the load balancer and resulting in downtime.

Answer

Perform a gradual rollback with a managed instance group.

Answer

Use a blue/green deployment instead.

Answer

Use a Kubernetes Job to run a post-deployment validation.

Question 11

Which TWO of the following are best practices for managing incident response on Google Cloud?

Accepted Answer

Establish a clear escalation path and ensure that on-call engineers are aware of their roles.. A clear escalation path with defined roles ensures that on-call engineers know exactly whom to contact for different severity levels, reducing response time and preventing miscommunication. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) supports structured escalation policies through alerting channels and notification routing, making this a foundational best practice for incident management.

Answer

Automatically escalate all incidents to the engineering manager.

Answer

Assign only one engineer to be on call to reduce confusion.

Answer

Use only one notification channel (e.g., email) to keep the team focused.

Question 12

Your GKE cluster runs a batch job that processes large files from Cloud Storage. The job uses CPUs inefficiently, with low utilization. You want to reduce cost while maintaining throughput. Which approach should you take?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Storage FUSE to stream files directly into containers, avoiding local storage.. Cloud Storage FUSE allows containers to stream files directly from Cloud Storage without first downloading them to a local disk. This eliminates the I/O bottleneck of writing to local storage and reduces CPU overhead from disk operations, enabling the batch job to process files more efficiently and maintain throughput while using fewer CPU resources.

Answer

Configure the node pool to use spot VMs.

Answer

Use local SSDs for faster file access.

Answer

Increase the CPU request for the job pods.

Question 13

An application running on GKE experiences high latency during traffic spikes. The team wants to scale pods based on request latency. Which metric should they use in the HorizontalPodAutoscaler?

Accepted Answer

Custom metric: request latency percentile (e.g., p95). To scale based on request latency, the HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) must use a custom metric that directly reflects the application's response time, such as the p95 latency percentile. CPU or memory utilization are system-level metrics that do not capture the user-perceived performance degradation caused by traffic spikes. Custom metrics like request count correlate with load but not directly with latency, making the p95 latency percentile the correct choice for latency-based autoscaling.

Answer

Custom metric: request count

Answer

Memory utilization

Answer

CPU utilization

Question 14

Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer observes that a GKE cluster's node performance is degraded during high I/O workloads. Based on the exhibit, which change would most likely improve disk I/O performance?

Accepted Answer

Change diskType to pd-ssd. The exhibit shows a GKE node pool using the default pd-standard disk type, which is backed by HDDs and has lower IOPS and throughput compared to SSDs. Changing diskType to pd-ssd directly improves disk I/O performance by providing higher IOPS and lower latency, which is critical for high I/O workloads.

Answer

Change machineType to n2-standard-4

Answer

Change imageType to UBUNTU

Answer

Change serviceAccount to a custom one

Question 15

A Cloud Run service is experiencing increased cold start latency. The service is written in Python and uses several large dependencies. Which action would most effectively reduce cold start latency?

Accepted Answer

Set a minimum number of instances to keep containers warm.. Setting a minimum number of instances ensures that the Cloud Run service always has a pool of warm containers ready to serve requests, eliminating the cold start penalty. Cold starts in Python are particularly severe due to the time required to import large dependencies (e.g., NumPy, TensorFlow) and initialize the runtime. By keeping containers alive, you bypass the entire initialization phase, directly addressing the root cause of increased latency.

Answer

Set concurrency to 1 to ensure each request gets a dedicated container.

Answer

Increase the CPU allocation to 4 vCPUs.

Answer

Increase memory to 2 GiB.