Google ACE Setting Up a Cloud Solution Environment Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

• ✓

  Cloud Shell has 5 GB of persistent home directory storage.

  Why this is correct

  Cloud Shell provides a temporary, ephemeral VM, but your home directory is backed by a persistent 5 GB disk in Google-managed storage. That 5 GB is the permanent part of the environment — it survives session restarts, VM recycling, and timeouts. This means any files you save under $HOME, including SSH keys, configuration files, and scripts, remain available across all future Cloud Shell sessions, while the compute instance itself is recreated as needed.

• ✗

  Cloud Shell requires installation of gcloud and kubectl manually.

  Why it's wrong here

  gcloud and kubectl are not something you need to install manually — they come pre-installed in every Cloud Shell session. When you launch Cloud Shell, gcloud, kubectl, and a suite of other Google Cloud SDK tools are already in the PATH and ready to use. The entire point of Cloud Shell is to give you a zero-setup command-line environment, so manual installation of these core tools is unnecessary and also redundant, because the underlying container image includes them by default.

• ✗

  Cloud Shell only supports the gcloud CLI, not kubectl.

  Why it's wrong here

  Cloud Shell does not only support gcloud; kubectl is also pre-installed and fully functional, along with tools like bq, gsutil, and the MySQL client. The environment is designed to manage Kubernetes clusters directly from the shell, so you can run kubectl commands against GKE clusters. Therefore, saying that kubectl is not supported is factually wrong — it is one of the core utilities included in the Cloud Shell image.

• ✗

  Cloud Shell provides a persistent VM that can run for hours.

  Why it's wrong here

  The Cloud Shell VM is not a persistent machine that can run for hours. It is an ephemeral, short-lived instance that is automatically recycled after 20 minutes of inactivity, and sessions also have a maximum duration of 12 hours by default. This means you cannot rely on Cloud Shell to keep a long-running process alive or act as a permanent server. The only persistent element of Cloud Shell is the 5 GB home directory, not the underlying VM.

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