Google ACE Practice Question: Has deployed a Compute Engine VM instance running…

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  The VM does not have an HTTP health check configured.

  Why it's wrong here

  HTTP health checks are used by load balancers and managed instance groups to determine whether a backend VM is ready to receive traffic. They are not a prerequisite for direct HTTP access to a Compute Engine VM. A VM with no health check configured can still respond normally to requests sent directly to its external IP address, as long as the web server process is listening and a firewall rule allows ingress. Therefore, the absence of a health check would not, by itself, make the VM unreachable over HTTP.

• ✓

  The web server service is not running on the VM.

  Why this is correct

  The web server service (such as Apache, Nginx, or another HTTP daemon) must be running and listening on the expected port for the VM to respond to HTTP requests. If the service is not installed, stopped, or crashed, the VM's network stack will still be reachable at the IP layer, but the TCP connection to port 80 or 443 will be refused or time out. Checking the service status with systemctl status nginx (or equivalent) is a standard first troubleshooting step. Without an active web server process, no HTTP response can be produced, which directly explains the failure.

• ✗

  The VPC network's default firewall rule blocks ingress traffic.

  Why it's wrong here

  The default VPC firewall rule behaves as a catch-all that allows egress and denies ingress; however, Google Cloud's default VPC also includes automatic allow rules for HTTP and HTTPS traffic. In this scenario, the organization has already created a custom firewall rule that explicitly permits ingress HTTP traffic to the VM, so the default rule's deny-ingress behavior is effectively overridden. Firewall rules are evaluated by priority, and the custom rule (with a higher priority number, meaning lower precedence) allows the traffic. Therefore, the default firewall rule is not the reason the VM is unreachable; the custom allow rule should permit the connection.

• ✗

  The VM is not in the same region as the global load balancer.

  Why it's wrong here

  This option misunderstands the scenario because no load balancer is present—the user is attempting to reach the VM directly via its external IP address. Direct VM access is independent of any load balancer region, and a global load balancer, if one existed, would not be bound to a single region anyway. Global load balancers route traffic to healthy backends across any region based on the backend service configuration. Since there is no load balancer involved, the VM's region relative to one is irrelevant to whether the HTTP request succeeds.

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