Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring Successful Operation of a Cloud Solution

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

• ✗

  gcloud container node-pools update default-pool --autoscaling enabled

  Why it's wrong here

  This command is syntactically invalid because `gcloud container node-pools update` does not accept a boolean flag named `--autoscaling`; the correct flag is `--enable-autoscaling`. The extra word `enabled` would be parsed as a positional argument or an unexpected value, causing the command to fail with a usage error. Even if the flag existed, you must also supply `--min-nodes` and `--max-nodes` for autoscaling to be configured.

• ✓

  gcloud container node-pools update default-pool --enable-autoscaling --min-nodes 1 --max-nodes 10

  Why this is correct

  This is the correct gcloud command to enable cluster autoscaler on a specific node pool. The `--enable-autoscaling` switch turns on autoscaling for the `default-pool`, and the `--min-nodes 1` and `--max-nodes 10` flags define the minimum and maximum size of the node pool. With this configuration, GKE's cluster autoscaler will automatically add or remove nodes within that range based on pending pod resource requests, which directly relieves the low-resource condition on the cluster's nodes.

• ✗

  kubectl autoscale node-pool default-pool --min 1 --max 10

  Why it's wrong here

  kubectl is a Kubernetes API client and cannot manage GCP infrastructure resources like node pools. The `kubectl autoscale` command is intended for creating HorizontalPodAutoscaler objects for Kubernetes workloads such as Deployments, and it does not recognize `node-pool` as a resource kind. Node pool autoscaling is a GCP-level operation that must be performed with `gcloud` commands, the GCP Console, or the Cloud API—not with kubectl.

• ✗

  gcloud container clusters update my-cluster --enable-autoscaling --min-nodes 1 --max-nodes 10

  Why it's wrong here

  This command is invalid because `gcloud container clusters update` does not accept the flags `--enable-autoscaling`, `--min-nodes`, or `--max-nodes`; those flags are only valid with `gcloud container node-pools update`. Cluster autoscaling in GKE is configured per node pool, not at the cluster level, so you must target the specific node pool within the cluster. Additionally, the example uses `my-cluster` rather than the actual cluster name, but even correcting that would not make the command work because the flags are simply not supported on cluster update operations.

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