PCDOE Managing Google Cloud costs — All Questions With Answers

Question 1mediummultiple choice

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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?

Question 2hardmultiple choice

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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?

Question 3easymultiple choice

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

Question 4mediummultiple choice

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A company is using BigQuery for analytics and wants to control costs. They have many queries that scan large amounts of data. Which approach is most effective in reducing query costs?

Question 5hardmultiple choice

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A company uses Cloud CDN to deliver content globally. They notice increasing egress costs. Which change will most effectively reduce egress costs?

Question 6mediummulti select

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A company is using Google Cloud and wants to monitor and control costs. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose two.)

Question 7hardmulti select

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A company runs a web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with multiple services. They want to reduce costs without impacting performance. Which THREE actions should they take? (Choose three.)

Question 8hardmultiple choice

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You are a DevOps engineer at a large e-commerce company that runs its production workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in the us-central1 region. The cluster has 500 nodes, each with 8 vCPUs and 32 GB of memory, and uses preemptible VMs for cost savings. Over the past month, the monthly GKE cost has increased by 30% unexpectedly. Upon reviewing the billing reports, you notice a significant spike in Compute Engine costs, specifically for 'Sustained Use Discount' line items, but the total cost is higher than expected. You also observe that the cluster's node utilization is inconsistent, with some nodes running at 90% CPU and memory while others are below 20%. Your team has been deploying stateless microservices and using Cluster Autoscaler with default settings. The application traffic is variable but predictable, with peaks on weekends. You need to reduce the GKE costs without impacting performance. What should you do?

Question 9hardmultiple choice

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A company runs a critical application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with 3 nodes (e2-standard-4). To reduce costs, the team is considering right-sizing the nodes. The application is latency-sensitive and experiences periodic traffic spikes. What is the most cost-effective approach that maintains performance during spikes?

Question 10mediummulti select

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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.)

Question 11easymultiple choice

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Refer to the exhibit. The output shows a recommendation from the Cloud Cost Optimization recommender for an instance in us-central1-a. The instance is a production web server that consistently runs at 25% CPU utilization during peak hours. What should the DevOps engineer do to implement this recommendation with minimal risk?

Network Topology

Question 12mediumdrag order

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Arrange the steps to troubleshoot a high latency issue on a Google Cloud HTTP(S) Load Balancer.

Drag steps to the numbered slots on the right, or tap a step then tap a slot.

Steps

Order

1Step 1

2Step 2

3Step 3

4Step 4

5Step 5

Question 13mediumdrag order

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Order the steps to respond to a Google Cloud security incident involving a compromised service account key.

Drag steps to the numbered slots on the right, or tap a step then tap a slot.

Steps

Order

1Step 1

2Step 2

3Step 3

4Step 4

5Step 5

Question 14mediummatching

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Match each SRE term to its description.

Drag a concept onto its matching description — or click a concept then click the description.

Concepts

Matches

Actual measured service performance

Target reliability level for a service

Contractual commitment to customers

Allowed downtime before SLO breach

Manual, repetitive operational work

Question 15mediummatching

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Match each cost optimization practice to its description.

Drag a concept onto its matching description — or click a concept then click the description.

Concepts

Matches

Discount for 1- or 3-year resource commitment

Automatic discounts for running instances most of month

Short-lived, low-cost instances for batch jobs

Adjusting machine type to match workload needs

Notifications when spending exceeds thresholds

Question 16mediummultiple choice

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A company uses Compute Engine with committed use discounts for 1-year. They need to reduce costs further. What should they do?

Question 17easymultiple choice

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A team wants to receive a notification when their monthly spending exceeds 80% of the budget. Which GCP feature should they configure?

Question 18hardmultiple choice

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A company uses BigQuery for analytics with many queries scanning terabytes daily. They need to reduce query costs without reducing usage. What is the most effective strategy?

Question 19easymultiple choice

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A DevOps engineer notices that the monthly compute cost is higher than expected for a Kubernetes Engine cluster. They want to identify which namespaces or workloads are contributing most to the cost. What should they do?

Question 20hardmultiple choice

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A company uses Cloud Storage with standard storage class for all data. They want to automatically move data that has been accessed more than 30 days ago to a lower-cost storage class, and after 90 days to archive. What should they configure?

Question 21easymultiple choice

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Which GCP tool provides recommendations for rightsizing Compute Engine VMs?

Question 22mediummultiple choice

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A company has multiple projects under an organization. They want to allocate costs to different departments based on project labels. They have applied labels to all resources, but the cost reports show 'Unlabeled' for many resources. What is the most likely cause?

Question 23hardmultiple choice

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A team uses Cloud SQL for MySQL. They have read-heavy traffic and want to reduce costs. Which strategy is most effective?

Question 24easymultiple choice

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What is the primary benefit of using preemptible VMs?

Question 25mediummulti select

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A company wants to control costs by limiting the maximum number of Compute Engine instances a project can create. Which TWO methods can achieve this? (Choose two.)

Question 26mediummulti select

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Which THREE actions can help optimize Cloud Storage costs? (Choose three.)

Question 27hardmulti select

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A company uses BigQuery on-demand pricing. They want to reduce costs without changing usage patterns. Which THREE strategies are effective? (Choose three.)

Question 28mediummultiple choice

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Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer wants to reduce compute costs immediately. Which action is most effective?

Exhibit

The output of `gcloud compute instances list --format="table(name,zone,machineType,preemptible,status)"` shows:
```
NAME        ZONE           MACHINE_TYPE   PREEMPTIBLE  STATUS
instance-1  us-central1-a  n1-standard-4  true         RUNNING
instance-2  us-central1-b  n1-standard-8  false        RUNNING
instance-3  us-central1-a  n1-standard-2  false        TERMINATED
```

Question 29hardmultiple choice

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Refer to the exhibit. The company received an alert when the threshold was triggered. What does this alert indicate?

Exhibit

Below is a budget alert configuration in JSON format:
```json
{
  "budgetId": "abc-123",
  "displayName": "monthly-budget",
  "amount": {
    "specifiedAmount": {
      "units": "5000",
      "currencyCode": "USD"
    }
  },
  "thresholdRules": [
    {
      "thresholdPercent": 0.5,
      "spendBasis": "CURRENT_SPEND"
    }
  ],
  "notifications": {
    "pubsubTopic": "projects/my-project/topics/budget-alerts",
    "emailRecipients": ["admin@example.com"]
  }
}
```

Question 30easymultiple choice

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Refer to the exhibit. What does this recommendation suggest?

Network Topology

Question 31easymultiple choice

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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?

Question 32mediummultiple choice

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A company has multiple projects in an organization. They want to set a budget of $5000 per month on a specific project and receive notifications when spending reaches 50% and 90%. What should they do?

Question 33hardmultiple choice

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A large enterprise manages costs across multiple GCP projects using a shared billing account. They want to apply a 10% discount on all committed use discounts (CUDs) to specific departments based on resource labels. How should they allocate the CUD savings?

Question 34mediummulti select

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A DevOps engineer is reviewing GCP costs and notices high network egress charges. Which two actions can help reduce network egress costs? (Choose two.)

Question 35easymulti select

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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.)

Question 36hardmulti select

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An organization wants to optimize BigQuery costs. Which three practices should they implement? (Choose three.)

Question 37mediummultiple choice

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Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer noticed that the nightly batch processing costs are higher than expected. After running the above command, what is the most likely cause?

Network Topology

Question 38hardmultiple choice

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Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer configured a budget alert with Pub/Sub notifications. However, the team is not receiving alerts. The Pub/Sub subscription is set up correctly and messages can be published manually. What is the most likely reason the budget alerts are not being sent?

Network Topology

Question 39easymultiple choice

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Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer needs to view the cost report for a project. Which role should be granted at the organization level to allow viewing billing data for all projects in the organization?

Network Topology

Question 40easymultiple choice

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A company uses BigQuery on-demand pricing. To control costs, they want to prevent any single query from scanning more than 1 TB of data. How can they enforce this?

Question 41mediummultiple choice

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A DevOps engineer is responsible for cost optimization of GKE clusters. They have identified that many nodes are underutilized. What is the best approach to reduce costs without impacting availability?

Question 42hardmultiple choice

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A company has purchased Compute Engine committed use discounts (CUD) for 1 year for vCPU and memory. After 3 months, they need to upgrade some VMs to a larger machine type. What happens to the CUD coverage?

Question 43easymultiple choice

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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?

Question 44mediummultiple choice

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A company uses BigQuery flat-rate pricing with 1000 slots. During peak hours, queries are queued, but during off-peak, many slots are idle. What is the most cost-effective way to handle the idle slots?

Question 45hardmultiple choice

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A DevOps engineer notices that the budget alerts for a project are not triggering even though spending exceeds thresholds. The budget is configured at the billing account level, filtering for that project only. The project is linked to the correct billing account. What is the most likely cause?

Question 46easymultiple choice

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A company wants to receive notifications when their Google Cloud costs exceed $5000 in a month. They have set a budget alert at the billing account level. What is the minimum configuration required to ensure they get alerted?

Question 47easymultiple choice

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A data processing company runs nightly batch jobs that can tolerate interruptions. They want to minimize compute costs. Which compute option should they use?

Question 48mediummultiple choice

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A company stores historical log data in Cloud Storage. The logs are accessed rarely after 30 days. They want to reduce storage costs while maintaining immediate access for occasional audits over the next year. What should they use?

Question 49mediummultiple choice

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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?

Question 50hardmultiple choice

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A company uses BigQuery for analytics. They notice high costs due to queries scanning large amounts of data. They want to reduce costs without sacrificing performance for urgent queries. Which approach is most cost-effective?

Question 51easymulti select

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A company is moving large amounts of data between regions. Which two actions can reduce network egress costs? (Choose two.)

Question 52mediummulti select

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A company wants to optimize costs for their Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters. Which three best practices should they implement? (Choose three.)

Question 53easymultiple choice

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A startup runs a batch data processing job every night. The job processes large datasets and takes about 6 hours to complete. The job is designed to handle interruptions gracefully by saving checkpoint files to Cloud Storage every few minutes. The startup wants to minimize compute costs. The current setup uses a managed instance group with 10 n1-standard-4 VMs running for the entire 6-hour window. They are considering using preemptible VMs. However, they are concerned about cost stability and potential preemption. What should they do?

Question 54mediummultiple choice

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A mid-size company has multiple Google Cloud projects for different departments. The finance team wants to set up budget alerts to track spending across all projects. They have enabled billing export to BigQuery. The budget should trigger alerts when total cumulative spending exceeds 80% and 100% of the monthly budget of $10,000. The budget must be applied across all projects in the organization. They created a budget at the billing account level with amount $10,000, set alert thresholds at 80% and 100%, and added email recipients. However, after two weeks, spending in one project alone has exceeded $8,000 but no alert was triggered. What is the most likely cause?

Question 55hardmultiple choice

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A company runs a large-scale data processing workload on Dataflow. The pipeline processes streaming data from Pub/Sub and writes results to BigQuery. The current monthly Dataflow cost is $50,000, and the company wants to reduce it. They have already optimized the pipeline code and reduced data shuffling. They notice that the Dataflow workers are running at 100% CPU for most of the time, but the job's autoscaling is set to 'throughput-based' and currently uses 20 workers. The job's latency SLAs are tight. They consider switching to 'flexible resource scheduling' (FlexRS) to reduce costs. What should they evaluate before enabling FlexRS?

Question 56hardmultiple choice

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An e-commerce company uses Cloud SQL for MySQL to support their online store. The database has a 500GB dataset. They notice that monthly costs have increased significantly. On reviewing the billing export to BigQuery, they see that the highest cost is from 'Cloud SQL - Storage' and 'Cloud SQL - Backups'. They currently have automated backups enabled with a retention of 7 days. They also take manual backups before every deployment, which are stored for 30 days. They want to reduce backup storage costs without compromising disaster recovery. What should they do?

Question 57mediummulti select

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A company runs a nightly batch data processing job on Compute Engine instances. The job runs for approximately 2 hours each night and is fault-tolerant (can resume from checkpoint). The team wants to minimize costs. Which TWO strategies should they implement? (Choose two.)

Question 58easymultiple choice

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Refer to the exhibit. A budget alert has fired for project dev-123 indicating that the cost has exceeded the budget of $1000. What should the team do next to investigate the cost overrun?

Exhibit

{
  "budgetName": "projects/my-project/budgets/my-budget",
  "costAmount": 1500.00,
  "budgetAmount": 1000.00,
  "alertThresholdExceeded": 1.0,
  "budgetFilter": {
    "projects": ["projects/dev-123"],
    "creditTypesTreatment": "INCLUDE_ALL_CREDITS"
  }
}

Question 59hardmultiple choice

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A company runs a production workload on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with cluster autoscaling enabled. The cluster has three node pools: one for general-purpose workloads (n1-standard-4), one for memory-intensive workloads (n2-highmem-8), and one for GPU-accelerated jobs (with 1 NVIDIA Tesla T4 per node). The workloads are a mix of stateless microservices and stateful databases. Over the past month, the monthly GKE cost has increased by 40% despite no significant change in application traffic or resource requests. The team has verified that vertical pod autoscaling and node auto-provisioning are enabled. They have also checked that there are no orphaned resources. They suspect that overspending is due to inefficient resource utilization or node selection. What should the team do to identify and reduce the unnecessary cost?

The output of `gcloud compute instances list --format="table(name,zone,machineType,preemptible,status)"` shows: ``` NAME ZONE MACHINE_TYPE PREEMPTIBLE STATUS instance-1 us-central1-a n1-standard-4 true RUNNING instance-2 us-central1-b n1-standard-8 false RUNNING instance-3 us-central1-a n1-standard-2 false TERMINATED ```

Below is a budget alert configuration in JSON format: ```json { "budgetId": "abc-123", "displayName": "monthly-budget", "amount": { "specifiedAmount": { "units": "5000", "currencyCode": "USD" } }, "thresholdRules": [ { "thresholdPercent": 0.5, "spendBasis": "CURRENT_SPEND" } ], "notifications": { "pubsubTopic": "projects/my-project/topics/budget-alerts", "emailRecipients": ["admin@example.com"] } } ```

{ "budgetName": "projects/my-project/budgets/my-budget", "costAmount": 1500.00, "budgetAmount": 1000.00, "alertThresholdExceeded": 1.0, "budgetFilter": { "projects": ["projects/dev-123"], "creditTypesTreatment": "INCLUDE_ALL_CREDITS" } }