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ACE Practice Question: Designing an environment where a CI/CD pipeline…
This ACE practice question tests your understanding of designing an environment where a ci/cd pipeline…. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. 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.
You are designing an environment where a CI/CD pipeline running in GitHub Actions needs to deploy Cloud Run services without storing any long-lived service account keys. Your organization's security policy prohibits downloading SA keys. Which approach meets these requirements?
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.
A
Distractor review
Create a service account key, base64-encode it, and store it as a GitHub Actions secret.
This stores a long-lived SA key, which directly violates the organization's security policy.
B
Best answer
Use Workload Identity Federation to allow GitHub Actions to impersonate a service account using OIDC tokens.
WIF exchanges the GitHub OIDC token for a short-lived GCP credential. No SA key is created or stored anywhere.
C
Distractor review
Use Cloud Build triggers instead of GitHub Actions to avoid key management.
Cloud Build is a valid alternative but does not solve the GitHub Actions key requirement; it bypasses the constraint rather than addressing it.
D
Distractor review
Grant the GitHub Actions runner VM's default service account the necessary roles.
GitHub Actions runners are not GCE VMs; they do not have a GCP-attached service account or access to the GCE metadata server.
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.
Related practice questions
Related ACE practice-question pages
Use these pages to review the topic behind this question. This is how one missed question becomes focused revision.
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
What is the correct order of the Google Cloud resource hierarchy from highest to lowest level?
Question 2
A compliance archive stores legal documents accessed at most once per quarter. Which Cloud Storage class minimizes storage cost while meeting that access pattern?
Question 3
Which gcloud command creates a Compute Engine VM named 'web-01' using the e2-medium machine type in zone us-central1-a?
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: Use Workload Identity Federation to allow GitHub Actions to impersonate a service account using OIDC tokens. — Workload Identity Federation (WIF) allows external workloads (GitHub Actions, AWS, etc.) to exchange short-lived OIDC tokens for Google OAuth 2.0 access tokens, eliminating the need to store SA keys. The GitHub Actions OIDC provider is configured as a trusted identity pool in GCP. The pipeline authenticates using its OIDC token, which is exchanged for a short-lived GCP credential — no SA key is ever downloaded or stored.
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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