PCDOE Practice Test 16 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A DevOps team uses Cloud Run for a containerized application that processes real-time financial data. The service has a concurrency setting of 80, and instances are scaled based on CPU usage. During market volatility, the service experiences high latency and some requests timeout. Cloud Monitoring shows that the average CPU utilization is 40%, but the instance count spikes to the maximum allowed. What is the most likely cause?

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

Accepted Answer

The concurrency setting is too low, causing many instances to be created.. With a concurrency setting of 80, each instance can handle up to 80 simultaneous requests. However, if the actual request rate exceeds 80 per instance, Cloud Run will spin up new instances. During market volatility, the request volume spikes, causing the instance count to hit the maximum even though average CPU utilization is only 40%. This indicates that the concurrency limit is too low for the burst traffic, forcing excessive instance creation and leading to high latency and timeouts due to instance startup overhead.

Answer

The max instances limit is set too low, causing requests to queue.

Answer

The service uses too much memory, causing cold starts.

Answer

The CPU utilization target for autoscaling is set too high, causing slow scaling.

Question 2

A company uses Cloud Build to compile a Java application. The build takes 15 minutes due to dependency downloads. They want to cache the Maven dependencies to speed up subsequent builds. What is the best approach?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Build's built-in caching mechanism by specifying volumes.. Cloud Build supports volumes that can be used to cache directories between builds. Specifically, you can specify a volume for the Maven local repository (.m2) to persist across runs, speeding up builds by avoiding repeated downloads. Option A is possible but less integrated and requires manual restoration. Option B is not ideal because layer caching depends on Docker image caching, not Maven dependencies. Option D is not a native Cloud Build feature; the correct approach is via volumes.

Answer

Use a Cloud Storage bucket to store the .m2 directory and restore it at the start of the build.

Answer

Use a Docker layer caching with a custom image that includes dependencies.

Answer

Use Cloud Build's 'cache' configuration to persist directories.

Question 3

A large stateful service running on Compute Engine experiences variable performance due to CPU throttling from noisy neighbors. Which solution provides the most consistent performance?

Accepted Answer

Use sole-tenant nodes to isolate the VMs. Sole-tenant nodes ensure that your VMs are the only ones running on the underlying physical server, eliminating resource contention from other tenants (noisy neighbors). This provides consistent CPU performance because the vCPUs are not oversubscribed and the full physical core capacity is dedicated to your instances.

Answer

Enable live migration for the VMs

Answer

Use preemptible VMs for stateful workloads

Answer

Purchase committed use discounts for lower cost

Question 4

A DevOps team wants to serve static content from a Cloud Storage bucket with low latency globally. They also need TLS termination. Which load balancer type should they use?

Accepted Answer

External HTTP(S) Load Balancer. External HTTP(S) Load Balancer is the correct choice because it provides global anycast IP addresses, TLS termination at the Google Front End (GFE), and integrates directly with Cloud Storage buckets as a backend. This enables low-latency content delivery worldwide while offloading SSL decryption to the load balancer.

Answer

External Network Load Balancer

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SSL Proxy Load Balancer

Answer

Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancer

Question 5

A company uses Cloud Source Repositories and wants automatic builds on pull requests to the main branch. Which Cloud Build trigger type should they configure?

Accepted Answer

Pull request (any). A pull request trigger in Cloud Build allows you to run builds automatically when a pull request is opened, synchronized, or updated.

Answer

Pull request (comment)

Answer

Push to a branch

Answer

Tag push

Question 6

Which TWO deployment strategies are directly supported by Cloud Deploy for GKE?

Accepted Answer

Canary. Options C and E are correct. Cloud Deploy for GKE directly supports canary (C) and blue-green (E) deployment strategies. Option A (Rolling update) is incorrect because rolling updates are managed natively by GKE itself, not as a Cloud Deploy strategy. Option B (A/B testing) is incorrect; A/B testing is a traffic management technique but not a built-in deployment strategy in Cloud Deploy. Option D (Shadow) is incorrect; shadow deployments are not supported by Cloud Deploy.

Answer

Rolling update

Answer

A/B testing

Answer

Shadow

Question 7

A company uses Cloud Source Repositories and Cloud Build to build and deploy a Node.js application to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The build step fails intermittently with an error 'npm ERR! network timeout'. What is the most efficient way to reduce build failures?

Accepted Answer

Configure npm to use a proxy and increase the timeout in the build step.. Configuring npm to use a proxy and increasing the timeout directly addresses network timeouts during package downloads. Option B is incorrect because using Artifact Registry to cache npm packages changes the registry URL but does not mitigate intermittent network timeouts; the npm client still needs to reach the registry. Option C is incorrect because setting the build to retry on failure in Cloud Build trigger only retries the entire build, which is inefficient and still may fail repeatedly due to the same timeout. Option D is incorrect because increasing the machine type does not resolve network timeouts; it only provides more CPU/memory.

Answer

Use Artifact Registry to cache npm packages and change npm registry url.

Answer

Set the build to retry on failure in the Cloud Build trigger configuration.

Answer

Increase the machine type to e2-highmem-4 in the cloudbuild.yaml.

Question 8

Which TWO options are valid methods to trigger a Cloud Build build when code is pushed to a Cloud Source Repository?

Accepted Answer

Use a Cloud Pub/Sub message sent to the Cloud Build topic to create a build.. Options A and D are correct. Cloud Build triggers can be based on branch or tag push, and can also be triggered via Pub/Sub message. Option B is incorrect - Cloud Build does not directly listen to Cloud Pub/Sub subscriptions without a trigger. Option C is incorrect - builds are not automatically triggered by Cloud Logging. Option E is incorrect - Cloud Scheduler cannot directly trigger a build without a Pub/Sub or HTTP intermediary.

Answer

Have Cloud Logging monitor the repository and create a build via a logs-based metric.

Answer

Set up a Cloud Pub/Sub subscription that forwards events to Cloud Build.

Answer

Configure Cloud Scheduler to call the Cloud Build API periodically.

Question 9

A DevOps engineer is setting up a CI/CD pipeline for a Python application using Cloud Build. The build takes too long because pip install is downloading packages every time. What is the best approach to speed up the build?

Accepted Answer

Configure a volume mount to a Cloud Storage bucket for pip cache and set PIP_CACHE_DIR.. Configuring a volume mount to a Cloud Storage bucket for pip cache and setting PIP_CACHE_DIR allows packages to be cached across builds, significantly reducing download time. Option A is incorrect: custom base images require maintenance and may not cover all dependencies. Option B is incorrect: increasing machine type does not address the network-bound pip download bottleneck. Option C is incorrect: Kaniko cache is for Docker image layer caching, not for pip package caching.

Answer

Use a custom base image that includes all dependencies pre-installed.

Answer

Increase the machine type to a higher CPU and memory instance.

Answer

Use Kaniko cache in Cloud Build with a remote cache location.

Question 10

A build step needs to access a secret stored in Secret Manager. How should the secret be passed to the build step?

Accepted Answer

Use availableSecrets in cloudbuild.yaml. Cloud Build's availableSecrets field allows you to securely access secrets from Secret Manager and inject them as environment variables or volumes.

Answer

Use an environment variable with the secret directly in cloudbuild.yaml

Answer

Use gcloud command inside the build step to fetch the secret

Answer

Use a script to fetch the secret from an encrypted file

Question 11

A DevOps team wants to automate the deployment of a containerized application to multiple GKE clusters across different regions. They are using Cloud Build to build the container and Cloud Deploy for deployment. Which Cloud Deploy resource should they configure to define the deployment order and target clusters?

Accepted Answer

A delivery pipeline with multiple targets defined.. A delivery pipeline in Cloud Deploy defines the deployment order and target clusters, allowing you to specify a sequence of targets (e.g., dev, staging, prod) across different GKE clusters. Option A is incorrect because a Cloud Build trigger initiates builds but does not define deployment order or targets. Option B is incorrect because a rollout object targets a single target, not multiple. Option D is incorrect because a release configuration represents a specific version of an application, not the deployment pipeline.

Answer

Cloud Build trigger with a multi-cluster deployment step.

Answer

A rollout object with target clusters specified.

Answer

A Cloud Deploy release configuration.

Question 12

A company has a monorepo with multiple microservices. They want to only build and deploy the service that changed. What CI/CD practice should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Use git diff to conditionally run steps for changed services.. Using git diff to detect changes in specific paths allows conditional build steps in Cloud Build, triggering only the affected service.

Answer

Use a multi-branch pipeline where each branch represents a service.

Answer

Use Cloud Build triggers with inline substitution for each service.

Answer

Use separate repositories for each service.

Question 13

A DevOps team wants to get a monthly report of GCP costs broken down by service and project. What is the simplest way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Use the Cloud Billing reports page to export a CSV directly. The simplest way to get a monthly report of GCP costs broken down by service and project is to use the Cloud Billing reports page. This page provides pre-built reports that can be filtered by service and project, and allows direct CSV export without any additional setup or complexity. Option A (BigQuery export) is more complex and requires scheduling queries. Option B (gcloud CLI) requires manual execution each month. Option D (Cloud Function) is overkill for a simple monthly report.

Answer

Export billing data to BigQuery and run a scheduled query

Answer

Use the gcloud CLI to run a billing query each month

Answer

Set up a Cloud Function to call the Cloud Billing API and generate a report

Question 14

A company wants to set budgets and alerts for a GCP project. Which two steps are required to enable budget notifications via email? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Create a budget alert threshold in the Cloud Console. Options B and C are required. You must create a budget alert threshold in the Cloud Console to define the spending limit, and then add email recipients in the budget configuration to receive notifications. Option A (Enabling the Cloud Billing API) is not a prerequisite for email notifications; it is needed for programmatic access. Options D and E are for programmatic notifications, not email.

Answer

Enable the Cloud Billing API for the project

Answer

Create a Pub/Sub topic and subscribe to it

Answer

Set up a Cloud Function to send emails

Question 15

A startup wants to reduce their Google Cloud costs for a batch processing job that runs nightly for 3 hours. The job is fault-tolerant and can tolerate interruptions. What is the most cost-effective compute option?

Accepted Answer

Preemptible VM. Preemptible VMs (Option D) are the most cost-effective because they offer up to 60-91% discount and are suitable for fault-tolerant, interruptible batch jobs. Standard VMs (Option A) are more expensive. Shielded VMs (Option B) provide security features but no cost savings. Sole-tenant nodes (Option C) provide isolation but are more costly.

Answer

Standard VM

Answer

Shielded VM

Answer

Sole-tenant node