Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution
You need to resize a Compute Engine instance from n1-standard-4 to n1-highmem-8. The instance has a local SSD attached. What must you do before changing the machine type?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Stop the instance, change the machine type, then start the instance
To change the machine type, the instance must be stopped. Local SSDs preserve data only if the instance is not stopped or terminated; however, when you stop the instance, local SSD data is lost. The correct procedure is to stop the instance, change the machine type, and then start it. Data on local SSDs will be lost.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Stop the instance, change the machine type, then start the instance
Why this is correct
To change the machine type of a Compute Engine instance, you must first stop it, which brings it to the TERMINATED state. While stopped, the persistent disks and instance settings remain intact, but any data on local SSDs is permanently lost because local SSDs are ephemeral storage tied to the host server. After updating the machine type, you start the instance; this process is the only supported way to resize an instance's vCPU and memory.
- ✗
Take a snapshot of the local SSD
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots in Compute Engine are only available for persistent disks, not for local SSDs. Local SSDs are physically attached to the host that runs the VM and provide extremely high IOPS, but their data is lost if the instance stops or is migrated, so they cannot be snapshotted or backed up via a standard snapshot. Attempting to snapshot a local SSD would fail because the snapshot operation is not designed to capture the ephemeral storage of a running instance.
- ✗
Change the machine type without stopping
Why it's wrong here
The Compute Engine API only accepts a machine type change when the instance is stopped; sending a setMachineType request for a running instance returns an error because the instance must be in the TERMINATED state. This restriction exists because the vCPUs and memory are allocated from the underlying host, and changing them requires reallocating to a different physical host. Therefore, you cannot change the machine type without first stopping the instance.
- ✗
Detach the local SSD
Why it's wrong here
Local SSDs cannot be detached or reattached to another instance; they are provisioned as part of the instance's resource configuration and are completely tied to the instance's lifecycle. When you delete or stop the instance, local SSDs are deleted, and any data on them is gone. There is no detach operation for local SSDs, as they are not block-attached like persistent disks and exist only on the local host.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Google Compute Engine
Key term
Compute Engine
Compute Engine is Google Cloud's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google's infrastructure.
Key term
Machine type
A machine type defines the virtual hardware resources (vCPU, memory, and sometimes GPU) assigned to a virtual machine instance in a cloud computing environment.
About these practice questions
This ACE question is part of Courseiva's 769-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This ACE practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the ACE exam.