PCDOE Practice Test 15 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A team is using Cloud Run for a containerized application. They notice that requests have high latency due to cold starts. Which configuration change would most effectively reduce cold start latency?

Accepted Answer

Set the min-instances parameter to a value > 0. Setting the `min-instances` parameter to a value greater than 0 keeps a baseline number of container instances always warm and ready to serve requests. This eliminates the cold start penalty because the runtime environment, including the container and its dependencies, is already initialized and listening for traffic. Cloud Run will scale down to this minimum count, ensuring that new requests are routed to pre-warmed instances rather than triggering a new container startup.

Answer

Enable concurrent requests

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Increase the function timeout

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Reduce the container image size

Question 2

Which TWO metrics should be included in a comprehensive monitoring strategy for a production Kubernetes workload to detect performance degradation and capacity issues?

Accepted Answer

Container CPU utilization. Container CPU utilization (Option B) is a direct indicator of resource pressure and potential performance degradation in a Kubernetes workload. High CPU utilization can lead to throttling, increased request latency, and pod evictions, making it essential for detecting capacity issues. Request latency percentiles (Option E) are the gold standard for measuring user-facing performance degradation, as they reflect the actual experience of end users and can reveal subtle slowdowns before resource metrics show saturation.

Answer

Disk read IOPS per pod

Answer

Number of nodes in the cluster

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Network bytes received per second

Question 3

Refer to the exhibit. A Cloud Function (2nd gen) is timing out. The function's timeout is set to 60 seconds. The function queries a Cloud SQL database. What is the most likely cause and the best action?

Accepted Answer

Add indexes to the database tables queried by the function. The most likely cause of the timeout is that the database queries are slow due to missing indexes, causing the function to wait longer than its 60-second timeout for results. Adding indexes to the queried columns reduces query execution time, resolving the timeout without changing the function's configuration. This aligns with best practices for optimizing Cloud SQL queries in serverless environments.

Answer

Reduce the function's allocated memory to decrease cold start time

Answer

Increase the function timeout to 120 seconds

Answer

Increase the Cloud SQL max connections setting

Question 4

Which TWO are best practices for implementing service monitoring strategies in Google Cloud?

Accepted Answer

Monitor the four golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) for every service.. A is correct because the four golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) are the foundational metrics recommended by Google SRE practices for monitoring any service. Monitoring these signals provides a comprehensive view of service health and user experience, enabling rapid detection of issues like high latency or resource exhaustion.

Answer

Rely solely on synthetic monitoring to measure user experience.

Answer

Use multiple monitoring tools to cover all aspects of the system.

Answer

Manually analyze logs and metrics to identify issues.

Question 5

A company uses Cloud CDN to deliver content globally. They notice increasing egress costs. Which change will most effectively reduce egress costs?

Accepted Answer

Configure Cloud CDN to cache more content and increase cache hit ratio.. Increasing the cache hit ratio reduces the number of requests that reach the origin server, which directly lowers the volume of data transferred from the origin to the CDN edge. Since egress costs are primarily driven by data served from the CDN edges to users, caching more content at the edge minimizes the need to fetch and serve data from the origin, thereby reducing overall egress traffic and associated costs.

Answer

Switch to a premium tier network for lower egress rates.

Answer

Enable gzip compression for all responses.

Answer

Use Cloud Armor to block malicious traffic.

Question 6

A company is bootstrapping a Google Cloud organization for DevOps. They have multiple teams that need to deploy infrastructure using a shared CI/CD pipeline. The security team requires that all deployments be reviewed and approved before production rollout. However, they also want to maintain a fast feedback loop for developers. What is the best way to balance these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use Spinnaker on GKE with a manual judgment stage between test and production. Spinnaker on GKE provides a native manual judgment stage that can be inserted between test and production deployments, enabling mandatory approval gates without sacrificing the fast feedback loop for developers. This balances security requirements with DevOps velocity by allowing automated testing to proceed quickly while blocking production rollout until explicit approval is given.

Answer

Use Cloud Build with a manual approval step triggered via Cloud Pub/Sub

Answer

Use Cloud Run for production and Cloud Functions for testing, with IAM roles controlling access

Answer

Use Cloud Source Repositories with branch restrictions requiring code review

Question 7

Which TWO practices are recommended for implementing CI/CD pipelines on Google Cloud?

Accepted Answer

Use a Dockerfile to define the build process for containerized applications.. Using a Dockerfile to define the build process for containerized applications is a recommended practice in CI/CD pipelines on Google Cloud. It ensures that the application is built consistently across all environments, leveraging Cloud Build's native support for Dockerfiles to produce container images that can be stored in Container Registry or Artifact Registry.

Answer

Store service account keys in the build configuration file for authentication.

Answer

Deploy to production directly after a successful build without any approval gate.

Answer

Create a single build pipeline that handles all microservices to reduce complexity.

Question 8

An e-commerce platform is using Cloud Load Balancing with a backend service that has a custom health check. The health check is failing intermittently, causing traffic to be routed away from healthy instances. The team has enabled Cloud Logging and wants to diagnose the issue. Which log view should they examine to see the health check probe results?

Accepted Answer

Load balancer logs (type: 'loadbalancing.googleapis.com'). Load balancer logs (type: 'loadbalancing.googleapis.com') contain detailed records of health check probes, including the probe source IP, target instance, response code, and latency. This is the exact log view that captures health check probe results, enabling the team to identify intermittent failures by correlating probe timestamps with instance health status changes.

Answer

VPC flow logs

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Cloud Audit Logs (Admin Activity)

Answer

Instance serial port output logs

Question 9

Which THREE are valid methods to enforce resource location restrictions in a Google Cloud organization? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Use VPC Service Controls to limit resource access to specific regions.. VPC Service Controls allow you to define perimeters that restrict resource access based on attributes such as region, preventing data exfiltration and ensuring resources are only accessible from allowed locations. This is a dedicated security feature that enforces location restrictions at the network level, complementing organization policies.

Answer

Use folder-level IAM policies to restrict locations.

Answer

Use Cloud Audit Logs to detect and alert on resources created in non-compliant locations.

Question 10

Which TWO are best practices when bootstrapping a Google Cloud organization for DevOps? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use separate service accounts for each environment.. The question asks to select two best practices. Options A and B are correct: using separate service accounts per environment enforces least privilege, and using separate folders for environments enables policy isolation and cost tracking. Option C (enabling audit logging at the organization level) is also a recommended practice but is not required as one of the two selected. Choosing three would exceed the selection limit, so the correct choices are A and B.

Answer

Enable audit logging for all projects at the organization level.

Answer

Create a single service account for all environments to simplify permissions.

Answer

Disable audit logging to reduce costs.

Question 11

Which TWO metrics should be monitored to detect a potential memory leak in a Compute Engine VM?

Accepted Answer

Process count. A memory leak causes processes to consume increasing amounts of memory without releasing it, leading to a growing process count as new instances of the leaking process are spawned or existing processes remain active. Monitoring the process count helps detect abnormal growth that correlates with memory exhaustion. Option C is correct because memory usage percentage directly reflects how much of the VM's available RAM is consumed; a steady upward trend without a corresponding increase in workload indicates a leak.

Answer

CPU utilization

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Disk read IOPS

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Network bytes sent

Question 12

An application running on GKE experiences high tail latency. The team is optimizing performance. Which THREE techniques should they consider? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Use pod anti-affinity to spread pods across nodes. Pod anti-affinity spreads pods across different nodes, reducing the risk of a single node becoming a hotspot and causing contention for resources like CPU, memory, or network bandwidth. By distributing pods, you minimize queuing delays and improve tail latency, as no single node is overloaded with too many pods competing for the same resources.

Answer

Enable Istio sidecar injection for all pods

Answer

Use pod affinity to pack pods on same node

Question 13

Refer to the exhibit. You are reviewing an alert policy for CPU utilization. What is a potential problem with this configuration?

Accepted Answer

The duration is too short, which may cause noise during spikes.. A short duration in a CPU utilization alert policy means the threshold must be breached for only a brief period before triggering an incident. This can cause noise during transient spikes that are not indicative of a sustained problem, leading to false positives and alert fatigue for operations teams.

Answer

The autoClose time is too long.

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The threshold is set too low.

Answer

The combiner should be 'AND'.

Question 14

An organization uses Cloud Build with a private pool to build container images that require access to on-premises Artifactory. After moving to a new VPC, builds fail with 'Connection refused' when fetching dependencies. What is the best step to troubleshoot?

Accepted Answer

Verify that VPC Network Peering is established between the Cloud Build private pool's service producer VPC and the customer VPC, and that routes to on-premises are present.. The error 'Connection refused' indicates that the Cloud Build private pool's worker VMs cannot reach the on-premises Artifactory server. Private pools are deployed in a Google-managed service producer VPC that must be connected to the customer VPC via VPC Network Peering. Without this peering and the correct routes to the on-premises network (e.g., via Cloud VPN or Dedicated Interconnect), traffic from the private pool is dropped, causing the connection refusal.

Answer

Verify that the Cloud Build service account has the dns.networks.bindPrivateZone permission.

Answer

Check that the Cloud Build service account has the storage.objectViewer role on the Artifactory bucket.

Answer

Ensure that Cloud NAT is configured in the private pool's VPC.

Question 15

An application running on App Engine standard environment has high instance startup latency, leading to slow first requests. What is the most effective configuration change to reduce cold starts?

Accepted Answer

Set min_idle_instances to a value greater than 0. Setting min_idle_instances to a value greater than 0 ensures that a baseline number of instances are always running and ready to serve requests, eliminating the need to spin up new instances on the first request. This directly reduces cold start latency because the application does not have to wait for instance initialization, which includes loading dependencies and running startup scripts.

Answer

Use manual scaling instead of automatic scaling

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Use Cloud Endpoints for request authentication

Answer

Increase the memory limit per instance