ACE Practice Question: A security team wants to ensure that a service…
This ACE practice question tests your understanding of a security team wants to ensure that a service…. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A security team wants to ensure that a service account created for an application cannot create new service accounts or modify IAM policies within the project. Which IAM role restriction achieves this?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
Distractor review
Disable the IAM API for the project so service accounts cannot manage IAM
Disabling the IAM API would break all IAM operations including normal authentication — not a viable security control.
Distractor review
Set an organization policy constraint restricting service account creation to admin users only
Organization policies apply broadly — they'd restrict all users, not just this specific service account. Least-privilege IAM bindings are more targeted.
Distractor review
Create an IAM deny policy blocking iam.serviceAccounts.create and iam.projects.setIamPolicy for the service account
IAM deny policies can enforce this, but they're typically used for exceptions to existing allow policies — not granting the role in the first place is simpler and more maintainable.
Best answer
Grant the service account only the specific roles its application requires — omitting IAM admin roles
IAM permissions are additive — not granting `iam.serviceAccountAdmin` and `resourcemanager.projectIamAdmin` naturally prevents the service account from performing those actions. Least privilege is the approach.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
Key takeaway
NAT direction and interface roles matter as much as the IP address mapping. Inside/outside designation controls which traffic is translated.
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More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
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Question 2
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Question 3
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Question 4
A team wants to receive an email alert when the average CPU utilization of VMs in a managed instance group exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes. What should they create in Cloud Monitoring?
Question 5
A junior developer needs read-only access to all GCP resources in a project. Which IAM role grants the minimum permissions required?
Question 6
A startup creates its first Google Cloud project. Before deploying any paid resources, what must be linked to the project?
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FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this ACE question test?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Grant the service account only the specific roles its application requires — omitting IAM admin roles — By not granting the service account `roles/iam.serviceAccountAdmin` (which creates service accounts) or `roles/resourcemanager.projectIamAdmin` (which modifies IAM policies), the service account is naturally restricted. The principle is to grant only the specific roles the application needs — never broad IAM management roles to application service accounts.
What should I do if I get this ACE question wrong?
Review the four NAT address types (inside local, inside global, outside local, outside global), PAT port overload, and static vs dynamic NAT use cases. Then practise related ACE NAT questions on configuration and troubleshooting.
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