PCDOE Practice Test 34 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer notices that instance-1 runs on older CPU platform. The application is sensitive to CPU features that are only available on Skylake or newer. Which action should be taken to optimize performance?

Accepted Answer

Stop instance-1 and update the minimum CPU platform to Skylake.. Option D is correct because stopping the instance and updating the minimum CPU platform to Skylake ensures that the instance is rescheduled onto a host that meets the required CPU feature set. This action directly addresses the application's sensitivity to CPU features available only on Skylake or newer, without requiring a full recreation or risking compatibility issues during live migration.

Answer

Live migrate instance-1 to a different host.

Answer

Use Terraform to add a lifecycle rule to ignore changes.

Answer

Terminate instance-1 and recreate it with a newer machine type.

Question 2

A backend service receives bursts of requests that cause timeouts. The team wants to smooth out the load while ensuring all requests are processed eventually. Which strategy should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Tasks to queue incoming requests and process at a controlled rate. Cloud Tasks is designed to decouple request processing by queuing incoming requests and then dispatching them to a target handler at a controlled rate. This allows the backend to process requests smoothly, preventing timeouts during bursts, while ensuring every request is eventually processed through retry and dead-letter mechanisms.

Answer

Implement client-side rate limiting

Answer

Use Cloud Load Balancing with connection draining

Answer

Increase the number of backend instances

Question 3

A company runs a microservices architecture on GKE and notices high network latency between services. Which THREE actions can improve inter-service communication performance?

Accepted Answer

Implement caching at the API gateway to reduce redundant requests. Option C is correct because implementing caching at the API gateway reduces redundant requests, which directly decreases network round trips and lowers latency for repeated data retrievals. This is a common performance optimization in microservices architectures, as it offloads backend services and minimizes inter-service chatter.

Answer

Use Istio mTLS for all service-to-service communication

Answer

Increase the number of nodes in the cluster

Question 4

Which service should be used to monitor the health of HTTP endpoints from multiple locations?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Monitoring. Cloud Monitoring (formerly Stackdriver Monitoring) includes uptime checks that can be configured to probe HTTP endpoints from multiple global locations, measuring latency, availability, and response content. This makes it the correct service for monitoring the health of HTTP endpoints from diverse geographic regions.

Answer

Cloud Trace

Answer

Cloud Logging

Answer

Cloud Debugger

Question 5

Which storage class provides the lowest cost for data accessed less than once a year?

Accepted Answer

Archive. Archive storage class is the correct answer because it is specifically designed for long-term data retention where access is extremely infrequent, such as less than once a year. It offers the lowest storage cost among Google Cloud Storage classes, but with higher retrieval costs and a minimum storage duration of 365 days, making it ideal for data that is rarely accessed.

Answer

Nearline

Answer

Standard

Answer

Coldline

Question 6

Which service is commonly used for time-series data and real-time analytics?

Accepted Answer

Bigtable. Bigtable is a fully managed, scalable NoSQL database optimized for large analytical and operational workloads, including time-series data and real-time analytics. It provides sub-10ms latency for high-throughput reads and writes, making it ideal for IoT, monitoring, and financial data streams. Its column-oriented storage and automatic sharding support efficient time-based queries and aggregation.

Answer

Cloud SQL

Answer

Firestore

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Question 7

Which tool can be used to capture and analyze latency spikes in a distributed application?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Trace. Cloud Trace is the correct tool for capturing and analyzing latency spikes in a distributed application because it provides end-to-end latency tracking by instrumenting requests as they traverse microservices. It collects trace spans with timing data, allowing you to identify bottlenecks and pinpoint the exact service or operation causing the spike.

Answer

Cloud Logging

Answer

Cloud Debugger

Answer

Cloud Monitoring

Question 8

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 9

A team wants to simulate real-world user traffic to identify performance bottlenecks before a launch. Which tool should they use to generate load from multiple regions?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Load Testing (Distributed Load Testing on GCP). Cloud Load Testing (Distributed Load Testing on GCP) is the correct choice because it is a managed service that can generate synthetic traffic from multiple geographic regions simultaneously, simulating real-world user distribution. This allows the team to identify performance bottlenecks across different network paths and regional endpoints before launch.

Answer

Cloud Monitoring

Answer

gcloud beta load test

Answer

ab (Apache Benchmark)

Question 10

Refer to the exhibit. A team runs a batch processing job on these instances. The job is CPU-bound and can tolerate interruptions. Which instance is the most cost-effective for this workload?

Accepted Answer

instance-1. Instance-1 is the most cost-effective because it is a preemptible (or spot) VM, which is significantly cheaper than standard on-demand instances. Since the batch processing job is CPU-bound and can tolerate interruptions, preemptible instances are ideal for this workload, offering up to 60-91% cost savings while still providing the necessary compute capacity.

Answer

instance-3

Answer

None, they should use a different machine type

Answer

instance-2

Question 11

Refer to the exhibit. A team is troubleshooting a pod crash loop. Based on the exhibit, which infrastructure change should be prioritized to resolve the issue and optimize service performance?

Accepted Answer

Mount a ConfigMap or volume containing the missing file. The exhibit indicates a pod crash loop caused by a missing file, which is a configuration issue rather than a resource or scheduling problem. Mounting a ConfigMap or volume that provides the missing file directly resolves the crash by ensuring the pod has the required configuration at startup. This fix also optimizes service performance by eliminating unnecessary restarts and allowing the pod to serve traffic consistently.

Answer

Increase the pod's CPU request

Answer

Increase the maximum number of pods per node

Answer

Enable pod anti-affinity

Question 12

A Cloud Run service experiences high cold start latency. The team has already set min-instances to 1. Which additional optimization can further reduce cold start impact?

Accepted Answer

Reduce container image size and enable CPU boost during startup. Option B is correct because reducing the container image size decreases the time required to pull and unpack the container on a cold start, and enabling CPU boost during startup temporarily allocates additional CPU resources to accelerate the initialization process. Together, these directly address the root causes of cold start latency by minimizing both the image loading time and the application initialization time, even when min-instances is already set to 1.

Answer

Use HTTP/2 to speed up request handling

Answer

Place the service on Cloud Run for Anthos on GKE

Answer

Increase the container memory limit

Question 13

A company serves static assets (images, CSS) to global users. Users in distant regions experience slow load times. Which service should they use to optimize delivery?

Accepted Answer

Cloud CDN. Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network) caches static assets (images, CSS) at edge locations worldwide, reducing latency for distant users by serving content from a nearby point of presence (PoP). This directly addresses slow load times caused by geographic distance, as the origin server is no longer the sole source of delivery.

Answer

Cloud Load Balancing

Answer

Cloud NAT

Answer

Cloud Armor

Question 14

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 15

A company uses Cloud SQL for their transactional database. They are experiencing slow read performance. Which THREE actions can improve read throughput? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Add a read replica. Adding a read replica offloads read queries from the primary Cloud SQL instance, distributing the read workload and improving read throughput. This is a common pattern for scaling read-heavy workloads in Cloud SQL, as replicas serve read traffic asynchronously without impacting the primary instance's write performance.

Answer

Enable query caching

Answer

Use Cloud SQL Proxy for connections

PCDOE Practice Test 34 — 15 Questions

Exhibit

PCDOE Practice Test 34 — 15 Questions

Exhibit