Google ACE Practice Question: Order the steps to configure a Cloud Load…

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

• ✓

  Create instance group, then health check, then backend service, then URL map, then target proxy, then forwarding rule.

  Why this is correct

  This is the correct order because each component references the one before it. First, create the instance group that will serve traffic, and define the health check that the backend service will use to monitor those instances. Then create the backend service, which binds the instance group and health check together, followed by the URL map that routes host/path requests to that backend service. The target HTTP(S) proxy must be created after the URL map because it references that map, and the forwarding rule is last because it simply binds a public IP and port to the proxy.

• ✗

  Create backend service, then health check, then instance group, then URL map, then target proxy, then forwarding rule.

  Why it's wrong here

  This order is incorrect because the backend service cannot be created before the instance group and health check exist. In Google Cloud, a backend service specifies which instance group it routes to and which health check it uses for liveness; if those resources have not been created yet, the backend service creation will fail with a reference error. Therefore, the instance group and health check must come first, not the backend service.

• ✗

  Create health check, then instance group, then backend service, then target proxy, then URL map, then forwarding rule.

  Why it's wrong here

  This order fails because the target proxy is created before the URL map, even though the proxy directly references the URL map. In the Google Cloud load balancing architecture, the URL map determines how traffic is routed to backend services, and the target proxy cannot exist without a valid URL map to point to. Thus, the URL map must be created before the target proxy; swapping those two steps would cause the proxy creation to fail.

• ✗

  Create forwarding rule, then target proxy, then URL map, then backend service, then health check, then instance group.

  Why it's wrong here

  This order is completely reversed. The forwarding rule is the external entry point, but it depends on a target proxy to forward traffic; the target proxy depends on a URL map; the URL map depends on a backend service; and the backend service depends on an instance group and health check. Since each component must reference an existing downstream resource, you cannot create the forwarding rule first. Build from the backend (instance group, health check) toward the frontend (forwarding rule) to satisfy all dependency references.

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