PCDOE Practice Test 7 — 10 Questions

Question 1

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?

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

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 2

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.. Option D is correct because using a Dockerfile to define the build process is the standard, reproducible way to build containerized applications in a CI/CD pipeline, and Cloud Build natively supports Dockerfile-based builds (e.g., via the docker builder or `gcloud builds submit`), ensuring consistent images across environments. Option E is correct because Cloud Build substitutions (user-defined variables like `${_ENV}` or built-in ones like `$PROJECT_ID`) let you parameterize a single build configuration (cloudbuild.yaml) so the same pipeline can target dev, staging, and prod with different values, avoiding duplicated configs. Option A is wrong because storing service account keys in the build configuration file exposes long-lived credentials in source control; the recommended practice is Workload Identity Federation or attaching a user-managed service account to the build, not embedding keys. Option B is wrong because deploying straight to production after a successful build skips approval gates and progressive delivery, which is not a recommended CI/CD practice for production safety. Option C is wrong because a single monolithic pipeline for all microservices reduces isolation and blast radius control; per-service pipelines (or at least independent triggers) are recommended so services can build, test, and deploy independently.

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 3

A DevOps team is setting up a CI/CD pipeline using Cloud Build. They want the Cloud Build service account to have permission to deploy to Cloud Run within a specific project. Which IAM role should be granted to the Cloud Build service account?

Accepted Answer

roles/run.admin. The Cloud Build service account needs the `roles/run.admin` role to deploy services to Cloud Run. This role grants full control over Cloud Run resources, including creating, updating, and deleting services, which is required for a CI/CD pipeline to perform deployments. Without this role, the service account would lack the necessary permissions to modify Cloud Run configurations.

Answer

roles/run.invoker

Answer

roles/cloudbuild.builds.editor

Answer

roles/iam.serviceAccountUser

Question 4

A startup is bootstrapping a Google Cloud organization for DevOps. They need to create a project for their CI/CD tooling and a separate project for logging and monitoring. What is the recommended way to structure the resource hierarchy?

Accepted Answer

Create a folder called 'DevOps' and place both projects inside it, sharing a billing account.. The recommended Google Cloud resource hierarchy for DevOps bootstrapping is to create a folder (e.g., 'DevOps') under the organization node and place both projects inside it. This structure allows centralized policy inheritance (e.g., IAM, org policies) and shared billing via a single billing account, while maintaining logical separation between CI/CD and logging/monitoring workloads. It aligns with Google's best practices for multi-project isolation without unnecessary organizational complexity.

Answer

Create a single project for all workloads and use labels to differentiate environments.

Answer

Create both projects directly under the organization node, with separate billing accounts.

Answer

Create a separate organization for each project to ensure isolation.

Question 5

A team uses Cloud Load Balancing with backend NEGs. Users report intermittent high latency. How should they diagnose the root cause effectively?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Trace to analyze per-request latency spans. Cloud Trace provides end-to-end latency analysis by capturing per-request spans as they traverse the load balancer, backend NEGs, and other services. This allows you to pinpoint exactly which hop (e.g., load balancer processing, backend queuing, or application code) is causing the intermittent high latency, rather than relying on aggregate metrics or caching assumptions.

Answer

Increase the number of backend instances immediately

Answer

Enable Cloud Monitoring latency histogram for the load balancer

Answer

Check Cloud CDN cache hit ratio

Question 6

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

Answer

Use Cloud Endpoints for request authentication

Answer

Increase the memory limit per instance

Question 7

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 8

A company has a steady-state workload of 100 vCPUs running 24/7. They want to get the maximum discount possible without long-term commitment. What discount should they expect?

Accepted Answer

Sustained use discount of up to 30%. The correct answer is C: Sustained use discount of up to 30%. For steady-state workloads that run continuously, Google Compute Engine automatically applies sustained use discounts, and the maximum discount for instances running the full month is 30% (for N1 machine types). Because the company wants maximum discount without any long-term commitment, this automatic discount is exactly what they should expect. Option A is wrong because committed use discounts require a 1- or 3-year commitment, which the company explicitly wants to avoid. Option B is incorrect because the sustained use discount maximum is 30%, not 20%. Option D is wrong because sustained use discounts apply automatically to eligible steady-state usage.

Answer

Committed use discount of up to 57%

Answer

Sustained use discount of up to 20%

Answer

No discount available

Question 9

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 10

Which Google Cloud service provides a fully managed, private Git repository that integrates with Cloud Build for continuous integration?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Source Repositories. Cloud Source Repositories is the correct answer because it provides fully managed, private Git repositories hosted on Google Cloud. It integrates natively with Cloud Build, enabling automatic triggers for continuous integration (CI) pipelines whenever code is pushed to a repository branch or tag, without requiring external Git hosting.

Answer

Cloud Deployment Manager

Answer

Cloud Storage

Answer

Container Registry