PCDOE Practice Test 6 — 10 Questions

Question 1

Which TWO tools should be used for real-time incident collaboration and communication?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Monitoring Incident Response (beta).. Cloud Monitoring Incident Response (beta) provides a dedicated interface for real-time incident management, including automated notifications, escalation policies, and a centralized timeline for collaboration. Google Chat with a dedicated incident room enables real-time communication and coordination among incident responders, allowing them to share updates, logs, and runbooks in a structured channel. Together, these tools fulfill the need for both incident orchestration and synchronous collaboration during active incidents.

Answer

Google Meet only.

Answer

Jira.

Answer

Cloud Trace.

Question 2

A team needs to monitor the availability of an HTTPS endpoint that requires a Bearer token in the request header. What is the simplest way to configure this with Cloud Monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Configure the Uptime Check to include a custom header with the Bearer token.. Cloud Monitoring's Uptime Checks natively support custom HTTP headers, including Authorization headers with Bearer tokens. This allows you to directly monitor an authenticated HTTPS endpoint without any additional infrastructure, scripting, or log-based workarounds. It is the simplest and most straightforward configuration for this requirement.

Answer

Deploy a sidecar container that handles the authentication and exposes a plain endpoint.

Answer

Use a synthetic monitor from Cloud Monitoring that handles authentication via a script.

Answer

Export the endpoint logs to Cloud Logging and set up a log-based metric for availability.

Question 3

You are a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) for an e-commerce platform running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a microservices architecture. Your team uses Cloud Monitoring for alerting and Cloud Logging for centralized logs. Recently, during a flash sale event, you observed intermittent latency spikes in the checkout service, causing checkout failures and abandoned carts. The latency spikes last 1-2 seconds and occur roughly every 5-10 minutes during peak traffic. The checkout service runs as a Deployment with 10 replicas, each with resource requests of 500m CPU and 512Mi memory. The service has a Service Level Objective (SLO) of 99.9% of requests completing in under 1 second (p99 latency < 1s). Current p99 latency is 2.1s during peak. You reviewed the Cloud Monitoring dashboard and noticed that CPU utilization across pods is around 60%, memory around 50%, and there are no OOM kills. The logs show occasional 'connection reset by peer' errors in the checkout service logs, but no consistent pattern. You suspect the issue might be related to the database (Cloud SQL) or a downstream dependency. After checking the database, you find that query latency is normal. You also notice that the checkout service makes a synchronous HTTP call to a payment validation service that runs as a separate Deployment with 3 replicas. The payment service's p99 latency is 500ms, but its error rate is below 1%. Your task is to identify the most likely cause of the intermittent latency spikes and propose a remediation. Which action should you take first?

Accepted Answer

Check the garbage collection logs of the checkout service pods to identify if long GC pauses coincide with the latency spikes.. The intermittent latency spikes every 5-10 minutes with no CPU/memory pressure or database issues strongly suggest a periodic process like garbage collection. Java-based services (common in microservices) can experience stop-the-world GC pauses that cause latency spikes of 1-2 seconds, matching the observed pattern. Checking GC logs is the fastest way to confirm this before making architectural changes.

Answer

Increase the number of replicas of the payment validation service to 10 to handle peak load.

Answer

Enable connection pooling and retries with exponential backoff in the checkout service for the HTTP call to the payment service.

Answer

Investigate the checkout service pod restarts due to liveness probe failures, as 'connection reset by peer' indicates pod instability.

Question 4

Which GCP tool provides recommendations for rightsizing Compute Engine VMs?

Accepted Answer

Recommender.. The Recommender tool in GCP uses machine learning to analyze historical usage patterns and provides actionable recommendations, including rightsizing suggestions for Compute Engine VMs. It identifies underutilized VMs and suggests optimal machine types to reduce costs without compromising performance, making it the correct choice for this task.

Answer

Cloud Console Cost Table.

Answer

Cloud Monitoring.

Answer

Cloud Billing Reports.

Question 5

A company deploys a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They notice increased latency during peak hours. The application uses a Cloud SQL database for state. The team wants to optimize service performance. What should they do first?

Accepted Answer

Enable Cloud SQL connection pooling.. The primary bottleneck during peak hours for a microservices application using Cloud SQL is often the number of database connections. Connection pooling reuses a fixed set of connections, reducing the overhead of establishing new connections and preventing connection exhaustion, which directly addresses increased latency without requiring architectural changes.

Answer

Implement a caching layer with Memorystore.

Answer

Move the database to Cloud Spanner.

Answer

Increase the number of replicas in the GKE deployment.

Question 6

A DevOps team is migrating their infrastructure to Google Cloud. They have a complex environment with multiple VPC networks, shared services, and separate development and production projects. They want to bootstrap a new organization that supports: (1) centralized network management with shared VPC, (2) separate folders for dev and prod, (3) consistent firewall rules across all projects, (4) a single Cloud NAT for outbound traffic. They have an existing on-premises VPN that must connect to all projects. What is the most efficient approach?

Accepted Answer

Create a host project for Shared VPC, attach all projects as service projects, and configure Cloud NAT and VPN in the host project. Use organization policies to enforce firewall rules.. Shared VPC allows you to create a host project that centrally manages network resources (VPC, subnets, firewall rules, Cloud NAT, VPN) while attaching development and production projects as service projects. This satisfies all requirements: centralized network management, separate folders for dev/prod, consistent firewall rules via organization policies, a single Cloud NAT for outbound traffic, and a single VPN connection to on-premises that routes to all service projects through the host project's VPC.

Answer

Create separate VPCs for each project and peer them all together, then configure Cloud NAT and VPN in each project.

Answer

Use a single project for all environments and rely on VPC subnets and firewall rules to isolate workloads.

Answer

Create a folder for networking and a folder for projects, then use a Cloud VPN appliance from the Marketplace.

Question 7

A company uses a Shared VPC and wants to enforce a set of firewall rules across all projects in a folder. They want these rules to be immutable by project owners. Which approach should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use hierarchical firewall policies at the folder level.. Hierarchical firewall policies allow you to enforce firewall rules at the folder level, which are inherited by all projects within that folder. These policies are immutable by project owners because they are managed at the folder level, not the project or VPC level, and cannot be overridden or deleted by lower-level roles unless explicitly granted permission.

Answer

Use network tags and service accounts to enforce rules.

Answer

Use organization policy constraints to prevent project owners from modifying firewall rules.

Answer

Create firewall rules at the VPC level and assign them to the folder.

Question 8

A company uses Cloud Build for CI/CD. They want to allow Cloud Build to deploy to Cloud Run. What is the minimum IAM role to assign to the Cloud Build service account?

Accepted Answer

roles/run.admin. The Cloud Build service account needs permission to create and manage Cloud Run resources, including deploying new revisions. The `roles/run.admin` role provides full control over Cloud Run services, which is the minimum required for deployment. The `roles/cloudbuild.builds.builder` role only allows building and managing Cloud Build triggers, not deploying to Cloud Run.

Answer

roles/cloudbuild.builds.builder

Answer

roles/editor

Answer

roles/run.invoker

Question 9

A DevOps engineer is setting up a Cloud Build trigger that deploys to Cloud Run. The build succeeds but the deployment fails with 'Permission denied on the Cloud Run service'. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The Cloud Build service account lacks the roles/run.admin role.. The Cloud Build service account (typically the Compute Engine default service account or a user-specified service account) requires the roles/run.admin role to deploy to Cloud Run. This role grants permission to create, update, and manage Cloud Run services. Without it, the deployment step fails with a 'Permission denied' error, even though the build itself succeeds.

Answer

The Cloud Run service account lacks the roles/cloudbuild.builds.builder role.

Answer

The trigger is missing the required deployment configuration.

Answer

The cloudbuild.yaml file has an incorrect image tag.

Question 10

A DevOps team is designing a CI/CD pipeline using Cloud Build and Spinnaker. They want to ensure secrets are managed securely. Which three recommended practices should they implement? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Grant Cloud Build service account access to secrets via IAM.. A is correct because Cloud Build's service account must be granted IAM roles (e.g., roles/secretmanager.secretAccessor) on the Secret Manager secret to allow the pipeline to retrieve the secret value at build time. Without explicit IAM binding, the service account lacks permission to access the secret, causing the build to fail. This follows the principle of least privilege and ensures that only authorized identities can read secrets.

Answer

Use Cloud KMS to encrypt secrets before storing in Cloud Storage.

Answer

Base64 encode secrets and store them in Cloud Build substitutions.