PCDOE Practice Test 19 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with multiple node pools. They notice that their monthly costs are higher than expected. Upon review, they find that several preemptible VMs are being recreated frequently, leading to sustained usage costs. What is the most cost-effective solution to reduce costs?

Accepted Answer

Migrate to Spot VMs, which have a lower price and no maximum runtime.. Spot VMs are the recommended replacement for preemptible VMs, offering the same low price but without the 24-hour maximum runtime limit. This eliminates the frequent recreation and sustained usage costs caused by preemptible VMs being terminated and restarted, directly reducing monthly expenses.

Answer

Purchase committed use discounts for the preemptible VMs.

Answer

Increase the number of preemptible VMs to spread the workload.

Answer

Enable sustained use discounts for the existing VMs.

Question 2

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 3

A startup wants to implement infrastructure as code for their Google Cloud environment to ensure reproducibility. They are using Terraform and want to manage state securely. What is the recommended approach?

Accepted Answer

Store Terraform state in a Cloud Storage bucket with object versioning enabled.. Storing Terraform state in a Cloud Storage bucket with object versioning enabled is the recommended approach because it provides a centralized, remote backend that supports state locking (via Cloud Storage's object lease mechanism) and version history for rollback. This ensures consistency across team members and protects against state corruption or accidental deletion, aligning with infrastructure as code best practices for reproducibility.

Answer

Store Terraform state in a file in Cloud Shell home directory.

Answer

Store Terraform state in Cloud Source Repositories as a YAML file.

Answer

Store Terraform state locally on each developer's machine and use git to sync.

Question 4

An organization is setting up a new Google Cloud organization and wants to enforce consistent resource naming conventions and policies across all projects. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Organization Policies. Organization Policies allow you to centrally constrain specific behaviors and enforce consistent naming conventions across all projects in a Google Cloud organization using constraints like `constraints/gcp.resourceLocations` or custom constraints via the `OrganizationPolicy` API. This service is the correct choice because it directly applies hierarchical policy enforcement at the organization, folder, or project level, ensuring resource naming and other governance rules are uniformly applied without requiring per-project configuration.

Answer

VPC Service Controls

Answer

Cloud Run

Answer

Cloud Armor

Question 5

You are troubleshooting a performance issue with a Compute Engine instance that is part of a managed instance group serving a web application. Users report intermittent high latency. You run the command shown in the exhibit. Based on the output, what is the most likely cause of the performance issue?

Accepted Answer

The instance is under-provisioned for CPU.. The output shows high CPU utilization (e.g., 95%+), which directly correlates with the reported intermittent high latency. In a managed instance group, if the instance is under-provisioned for CPU, it cannot handle the workload spikes, causing queuing and increased response times. This is the most common cause of performance degradation in Compute Engine instances serving web applications.

Answer

The instance is hitting the network egress bandwidth limit.

Answer

The service account lacks the necessary scopes for Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Trace.

Answer

The boot disk is too small, causing I/O contention.

Question 6

A DevOps team is analyzing Google Cloud costs and notices that spending on BigQuery has increased significantly. They want to reduce costs without impacting ongoing analytical workloads. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Set custom cost controls like query quotas and maximum bytes billed per query.. Option C is correct because BigQuery allows you to set custom cost controls such as query quotas (e.g., concurrent queries per project) and maximum bytes billed per query. These controls cap resource usage at the query level, preventing runaway costs while still allowing analytical workloads to run within defined limits. This directly addresses cost spikes without blocking ongoing operations.

Answer

Switch to on-demand pricing to pay only for queries run.

Answer

Enable column-level security to restrict access to sensitive data.

Answer

Delete unused datasets to reduce storage costs.

Question 7

An organization uses Cloud CDN with an HTTP(S) Load Balancer to serve static content. They observe that cache hit ratio is lower than expected. The content is immutable and has long Cache-Control headers. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The requests include unique query parameters like session IDs.. When Cloud CDN serves content with long Cache-Control headers but unique query parameters (like session IDs) are appended to each request, the cache treats each URL as a distinct object. This causes cache misses because the load balancer forwards requests with different query strings to the origin, preventing the CDN from serving cached responses. The correct answer is A because this behavior directly undermines cache efficiency despite proper cache headers.

Answer

The Cache-Control max-age is set too short.

Answer

The load balancer is configured with SSL termination.

Answer

The content is served using signed URLs with expiration.

Question 8

A team is troubleshooting a slow response time on an App Engine standard environment application. The application uses Cloud SQL as its database. Which TWO actions should the team take to identify the bottleneck?

Accepted Answer

Examine App Engine request logs for latency patterns.. Option A is correct because examining App Engine request logs reveals latency patterns, such as which endpoints or operations are slow, helping to pinpoint whether the bottleneck is in the application code, network, or database. Option C is correct because enabling Cloud SQL slow query logging identifies long-running SQL queries that could be causing database contention or inefficient data retrieval, directly addressing a common performance bottleneck in App Engine applications using Cloud SQL.

Answer

Increase the number of App Engine instances.

Answer

Enable Cloud CDN to cache responses.

Answer

Disable caching to ensure fresh data.

Question 9

A team deploys a microservice on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that processes user uploads. The service latency has increased over time. Monitoring shows that CPU utilization is low, but memory usage is high and garbage collection (GC) pauses are frequent. Which action is most likely to reduce latency?

Accepted Answer

Increase the memory limit and requests for the container.. Frequent GC pauses and high memory usage with low CPU indicate the JVM heap is too small, causing the garbage collector to run more often. Increasing the memory limit and requests gives the JVM more headroom to reduce GC frequency, directly lowering latency. This is a classic JVM tuning scenario in containerized environments like GKE.

Answer

Scale out the deployment by increasing the number of replicas.

Answer

Reduce the number of replicas to concentrate load.

Answer

Increase the CPU limit to allow faster processing.

Question 10

Your company runs a web application on Compute Engine behind a global HTTP(S) Load Balancer. You want to improve performance for users in Europe. You have already enabled Cloud CDN. What is the next best action to reduce latency?

Accepted Answer

Add Compute Engine instances in a European region (e.g., europe-west1) and add them to the load balancer's backend.. Adding Compute Engine instances in a European region (e.g., europe-west1) and adding them to the load balancer's backend reduces latency by bringing the origin server physically closer to European users. Even with Cloud CDN enabled, cache misses still require a round trip to the backend; having a backend in Europe minimizes that distance. The global HTTP(S) Load Balancer automatically routes requests to the closest healthy backend, so this directly improves performance for users in Europe.

Answer

Switch to a regional load balancer to route traffic more efficiently.

Answer

Configure a multi-regional Cloud CDN and enable cache warming for popular content.

Answer

Increase the machine type of existing instances to improve processing speed.

Question 11

Refer to the exhibit. A GKE pod is repeatedly crashing with the error shown. The deployment has resource requests of 512 MiB memory and limits of 1 GiB. What is the most likely cause and the best remediation?

Accepted Answer

The Java heap size exceeds the container memory limit; reduce the JVM heap size or increase the container memory limit. The error indicates an OutOfMemoryError (OOM) in the Java application, which occurs when the JVM heap size exceeds the container's memory limit. Since the deployment has a memory limit of 1 GiB, if the JVM is configured with a heap size larger than this limit (or if the heap plus other memory usage exceeds it), the container will be killed by Kubernetes. Reducing the JVM heap size or increasing the container memory limit directly resolves the mismatch.

Answer

The node is under memory pressure; add more nodes to the cluster

Answer

The container needs more CPU; increase CPU request and limit

Answer

The application has a memory leak; refactor the DataProcessor class

Question 12

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 13

A company runs a batch processing workload on Compute Engine that runs for 3 hours every night. They want to minimize costs while ensuring the job completes reliably. Which recommendation should they follow?

Accepted Answer

Use preemptible VMs and design the job to handle interruptions gracefully.. Preemptible VMs cost about 60-80% less than standard VMs and are ideal for batch workloads that can tolerate interruptions. Since the job runs for only 3 hours nightly, it can be designed to checkpoint progress and restart from the last checkpoint if a preemptible VM is terminated (which can happen at any time within 24 hours). This minimizes cost while ensuring reliability through graceful interruption handling.

Answer

Use sole-tenant nodes to isolate the workload.

Answer

Use standard (on-demand) VMs and enable sustained use discounts.

Answer

Purchase 1-year committed use discounts for the VMs.

Question 14

A company uses Cloud Storage to store archival data. They want to minimize storage costs while maintaining availability. Which storage class should they use?

Accepted Answer

Archive storage class.. The Archive storage class is the correct choice because it offers the lowest storage cost for archival data that is accessed less than once per year, with a 365-day minimum storage duration and retrieval costs that are higher than other classes. This aligns with the requirement to minimize storage costs while maintaining availability, as Archive data is still available for retrieval (though with a longer latency) and is replicated for durability.

Answer

Nearline storage class.

Answer

Standard storage class.

Answer

Coldline storage class.

Question 15

Arrange the steps to set up a Google Cloud Monitoring alerting policy for a Compute Engine instance.