ACE · domain
Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution
This domain covers translating business needs into GCP architecture: choosing compute, storage, networking, and database services, sizing and placing resources, and estimating cost. Questions present a scenario with constraints like budget, latency, availability, or traffic pattern, then ask you to pick the service or configuration that best satisfies them.
Focused practice
Practice Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution questions
Scored sessions drawing only from this domain — pick a length below.
Start 20-question practice test →What this domain covers
What to know about Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution
Be able to map a scenario's cost, availability, and traffic constraints to the right GCP service and configuration. The single most important thing: justify each choice against the stated constraint, especially HA VPN for 99.99% and scale-to-zero compute for spiky or idle workloads.
Selecting Compute Engine machine types, preemptible/Spot VMs, and committed use discounts for cost goals
Choosing between Cloud VPN HA, Dedicated Interconnect, and Partner Interconnect for hybrid connectivity SLAs
Matching storage classes (Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive) and BigQuery/Cloud Storage to retention and access patterns
Deploying stateless containers on Cloud Run or GKE Autopilot to scale to zero and cut operations
Watch out for
Common Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution exam traps
- ▸Picking a single Cloud VPN tunnel when the scenario demands high availability; HA VPN with two interfaces and two tunnels is required for the higher SLA.
- ▸Choosing Persistent Disk or Filestore for high-frequency write-once log ingestion instead of Cloud Storage or BigQuery, which handle thousands of writes per second.
- ▸Ignoring scale-to-zero for variable or zero traffic; leaving a always-on VM or node pool running when Cloud Run or Autopilot would be cheaper.
Question index
All Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution questions (61)
Click any question to see the full explanation, or start a practice session above.
A company wants to use Cloud Run to deploy a containerized API that requires up to 8 GB of memory per request. The API experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. They want to minimize cost while ensuring fast cold starts. Which configuration should they use?
Medium2A company wants to set up a hybrid network between their on-premises data center and Google Cloud. They need a highly available VPN connection with 99.99% SLA. Which VPN solution should they choose?
Medium3A company wants to run a stateless containerized web application that scales to zero when not in use. The application receives HTTP requests and must be billed only for the resources consumed during request processing. Which Google Cloud compute service is most appropriate?
Easy4A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application has unpredictable traffic patterns and long-running connections. The team wants to minimize operational overhead and only pay for resources when the application is processing requests. Which compute option should they choose?
Medium5An organization needs a NoSQL document database with real-time synchronization across multiple client devices. Which Google Cloud service should they use?
Easy6A user wants to estimate the monthly cost of running a Compute Engine VM with 8 vCPUs, 32 GB of memory, and a 100 GB persistent disk in us-central1 for one year. They plan to use the VM 24/7. Which tool should they use?
Easy7A company wants to run a stateful application that requires persistent storage on individual VMs. The VMs are not part of a managed instance group. Which Google Cloud storage option is best for this use case?
Easy8A DevOps engineer is using the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to estimate the monthly cost of a Compute Engine VM running 24/7 for one month. The engineer selects a machine type and adds sustained use discounts. What is the correct way to apply sustained use discounts in the calculator?
Medium9An engineer needs to create a Cloud Storage bucket for storing archival data that will be accessed less than once a year. The data must be stored durably and cost-effectively. Which storage class should the engineer use?
Easy10A company needs to provide outbound internet access to private Compute Engine instances that do not have external IP addresses. The instances must be able to download updates from the internet. Which service should be configured?
Medium11An organization stores sensitive data in Cloud Storage. They need to ensure that objects are encrypted at rest using a key that they manage and rotate themselves. Which Cloud Storage encryption option should they use?
Medium12A developer needs to run a one-time SQL query against a large dataset stored in Cloud Storage in Parquet format. The query result will be used for ad-hoc analysis. They want to minimize cost and avoid provisioning any servers. Which service should they use?
Easy13An organization has a VPC with private instances that need outbound internet access for software updates. The instances have no external IP addresses. Which Google Cloud service should be configured?
Medium14A company has a Compute Engine instance that needs to access the internet for software updates, but the instance only has an internal IP address. Which TWO steps are required to enable outbound internet connectivity while keeping the instance private?
Medium15A company is planning a lift-and-shift migration of an on-premises monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application runs on a single server and requires a specific kernel module that is not supported by Google Cloud's container-optimized OS. Which compute service should they use?
Medium16A company wants to migrate a large on-premises MySQL database to Cloud SQL with minimal downtime. Which TWO steps should they take?
Hard17A company needs to store and analyze large amounts of log data (hundreds of terabytes) with occasional SQL queries. The data is rarely accessed after 30 days and must be kept for compliance for 7 years. They want to minimize storage costs. Which three actions should they take? (Choose THREE.)
Hard18A company has a private VPC with instances that have only internal IP addresses. These instances need to download updates from the internet. Which Google Cloud service should they use to provide outbound internet connectivity?
Medium19A company is running a stateful application on a Compute Engine instance with a 200 GB persistent disk. They want to reduce costs by moving the disk to a lower-cost storage class, but the disk is currently in use. They plan to take a snapshot of the disk and create a new disk from the snapshot with the new storage class. However, they need minimal downtime. What is the correct approach?
Hard20An engineer is designing a VPC for a multi-tier application. The application has web servers that need direct internet access, and a private database tier that must not have public IP addresses. The database tier needs outbound internet access to download updates. Which network configuration should the engineer implement?
Hard21A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application consists of a web frontend, a business logic layer, and a MySQL database. They want to minimise operational overhead and use managed services where possible. Which two services should they choose? (Choose TWO.)
Medium22A company wants to run a batch job that processes files from a Cloud Storage bucket and writes results to BigQuery. The job runs once daily and can take up to 30 minutes. Which compute option is the most cost-effective and requires the least operational overhead?
Medium23A developer is using Cloud Functions (Gen 2) which is based on Cloud Run. They need to handle events from Cloud Storage when a new object is uploaded. Which event type should they use?
Medium24A company needs to store petabytes of time-series IoT sensor data and query it with single-digit millisecond latency at millions of reads per second. The data has a simple key-value structure with timestamps. Which Google Cloud database is MOST appropriate?
Medium25Which Google Cloud service is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse for analytics at petabyte scale, with built-in machine learning capabilities and automatic scaling?
Easy26A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application requires persistent storage and must be highly available with automatic failover across zones. The workload has a moderate number of reads and writes. Which storage solution meets these requirements?
Medium27A developer needs to deploy a containerized web application that experiences unpredictable traffic patterns, including long periods of no traffic. They want to minimize costs and only pay for resources when the application is serving requests. Which Google Cloud compute service is most suitable?
Easy28An organization needs to run a batch analytics job daily that processes 500 GB of data stored in Cloud Storage. The job runs for 2 hours each day and can tolerate occasional failures. The team wants to minimize compute costs. Which compute option is most cost-effective?
Hard29A team needs to deploy a microservice that processes events from Pub/Sub and writes the results to Firestore. The service is stateless and should not incur cost when idle. The expected load is low but can spike unpredictably. Which compute service is the most cost-effective and operationally simple?
Medium30A developer wants to deploy a containerized web application that receives HTTP requests and can scale to zero when not in use. The application is stateless and has a startup time of less than 2 seconds. Which Google Cloud compute option is the most cost-effective?
Easy31A company has a VPC with custom mode and needs to connect to an on-premises network via HA VPN. They have two on-premises VPN devices, each with a static public IP address. What is the correct way to configure the HA VPN gateway on Google Cloud?
Medium32A financial services company is designing its Google Cloud landing zone. Auditors require that all resources be created in approved regions only, that no external IP addresses be assignable to Compute Engine instances, and that any new project automatically inherit these restrictions. The security team wants to enforce this centrally without relying on application teams to configure each project correctly. What should the company implement?
Hard33A company is planning to deploy a batch processing workload on Google Cloud. The workload runs for several hours each night, can tolerate interruptions, and must be cost-optimized. The operations team wants to minimize management effort and ensure the workload automatically restarts if a VM is preempted. Which TWO actions should the company take? (Choose two.)
Medium34A company is migrating a PostgreSQL database to Cloud SQL. They need high availability with automatic failover and a read replica for reporting queries that must not impact the primary. Which Cloud SQL configuration should they choose?
Hard35An organization has a VPC with instances in two subnets: subnet-a (10.0.1.0/24) and subnet-b (10.0.2.0/24). They want to allow HTTP traffic from any instance in subnet-a to any instance in subnet-b. What firewall rule should be created?
Medium36A startup is planning its first Google Cloud deployment for a stateless containerized API. The team has no Kubernetes experience and wants to minimize operational overhead while paying only for resources used during requests. The API must scale automatically, including down to zero when there is no traffic. Which Google Cloud service should they choose?
Easy37A company is deploying a web application on Compute Engine and wants to distribute traffic across multiple instances in different zones for high availability. They also need to terminate SSL/TLS at the load balancer. Which TWO services should they use together?
Easy38A startup wants to run a small, event-driven application that processes files uploaded to Cloud Storage. The function should be triggered by object finalize events and should have a maximum execution time of 10 minutes. Which compute option is most cost-effective and easy to manage?
Easy39A team is building a mobile app backend that requires real-time data synchronization across devices and offline support. The data model is simple and document-based. Which database service should they use?
Easy40An organization needs to deploy a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine. Each microservice has different resource requirements, and the team wants to optimize costs by using a mix of spot (preemptible) and regular nodes. They also need to ensure that critical services run on regular nodes. Which GKE feature allows this separation?
Hard41An organization wants to run a stateless HTTP-based containerized application that scales to zero when not in use and charges only for request processing time. They do not want to manage any underlying infrastructure. Which compute option should they choose?
Easy42A company plans to deploy a containerized application on GKE Autopilot. They want to ensure high availability by running multiple replicas across different zones. They also need to expose the application via a load balancer with SSL termination. Which THREE resources should they create?
Medium43An organization needs to run a batch analytics job on BigQuery every night that processes terabytes of data. The job is critical and must complete within a specific time window. To optimize costs, they are considering using flat-rate pricing but want to minimize commitment risk. Which THREE factors should they evaluate?
Hard44A company wants to store event logs from multiple applications in a centralized location for future analysis. The logs are written frequently (thousands per second) and need to be retained for 90 days. The data is write-once, read-rarely. Which storage class and lifecycle rule combination is most cost-effective?
Easy45A company wants to migrate an on-premises PostgreSQL database to Google Cloud. They need a managed database service with high availability and automatic failover. The application uses many stored procedures and extensions specific to PostgreSQL. Which service should they choose?
Hard46A developer wants to deploy a new application on Google Cloud. The application consists of a frontend service that serves web traffic and a backend service that processes images. Both services need to be containerized. Which two compute options are serverless and support container deployment? (Choose 2)
Easy47A company wants to migrate an on-premises PostgreSQL database to Google Cloud. They require automated backups, point-in-time recovery, and a 99.95% availability SLA. Which service should they choose?
Medium48A data analyst needs to run complex analytical queries on a large dataset (10 TB) stored in Cloud Storage. They want to use a serverless query engine that charges based on the amount of data processed. Which Google Cloud service should they use?
Easy49A team is using BigQuery for analytics. They have a constant query workload and want to reduce costs by switching from on-demand pricing to a flat-rate reservation. They have purchased a BigQuery flat-rate reservation. What additional step is required to use the reservation?
Hard50An engineer needs to deploy a containerized web application that receives HTTP requests and should scale to zero when not in use. The application is stateless and has a lightweight container image. Which Google Cloud compute service should be used?
Easy51An engineer is tasked with creating a new VPC network for a production environment. The company requires the VPC to support multiple regions and allow custom IP address ranges for each subnet. Which VPC network mode should the engineer use?
Easy52A company runs a batch job every night that processes data from a Cloud Storage bucket and writes results to BigQuery. The job runs on a Compute Engine VM. To minimize costs, what is the best practice for the VM?
Medium53A company needs to connect their on-premises data center to Google Cloud via a dedicated, high-bandwidth connection with low latency. They anticipate consistent high traffic. Which connectivity option should they use?
Medium54A company wants to use Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to estimate the monthly cost of running a Compute Engine instance for a web server. They plan to use a n2-standard-4 machine with a 100 GB SSD persistent disk and commit to a 1-year term. Which discount type should they include in the estimate?
Hard55An organisation requires a managed relational database for an online transaction processing (OLTP) application with strong consistency, automated backups, and a 99.95% SLA. The database size is expected to be under 10 TB. Which service meets these requirements at the lowest cost?
Medium56A company needs to store and serve user-generated content such as images and videos. The data must be accessible globally with low latency. Which Google Cloud storage service should they use?
Medium57A company needs to deploy a web application on Google Cloud that requires high availability across multiple regions. Select TWO services that can help achieve this.
Medium58A team is setting up a new project and wants to estimate the monthly cost of running a Compute Engine VM with 4 vCPUs, 16 GB memory, and a 100 GB persistent disk, using the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator. The VM will run for 12 hours every day for a month. Which discount type will automatically apply to reduce the cost based on usage?
Medium59A developer needs to create a Cloud Storage bucket that stores data for only 30 days and then automatically deletes it. Which feature should be used to achieve this?
Easy60A company runs a global web application with a Cloud SQL (MySQL) database in the us-east1 region. To improve read performance for users in Europe, they want to offload read traffic to a replica in europe-west1. The replica must be kept in sync with the primary within seconds. Which Cloud SQL configuration should be used?
Hard61A company wants to run a stateless HTTP web application that experiences highly variable traffic, including periods of zero traffic. The application is packaged as a Docker container. The team wants to minimize operational overhead and pay only for resources consumed during request processing. Which Google Cloud compute service is the best fit?
MediumOther domains
All ACE exam domains
Frequently asked questions
- What does the Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution domain cover on the ACE exam?
- Be able to map a scenario's cost, availability, and traffic constraints to the right GCP service and configuration. The single most important thing: justify each choice against the stated constraint, especially HA VPN for 99.99% and scale-to-zero compute for spiky or idle workloads.
- How many questions are in this domain?
- This page lists all 61 Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution questions in the ACE question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
- What is the best way to practise this domain?
- Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
- Can I practise only Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution questions?
- Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.