Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts Practice Question
A development team is building a microservices-based application and wants to use a service mesh to secure and observe inter-service communication. They are using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Which Google Cloud service should they integrate with GKE to provide service mesh capabilities?
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
✓
Cloud Service Mesh (Anthos Service Mesh)
Anthos Service Mesh (ASM) is a fully managed service mesh that provides traffic management, security (mTLS), and observability for microservices running on GKE and other environments.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Apigee
Why it's wrong here
Apigee is a full-lifecycle API management platform designed for external-facing APIs. It provides capabilities like OAuth security, rate limiting, developer portals, and analytics, but it does not address east-west service-to-service traffic routing, mTLS, or telemetry within a Kubernetes cluster. Using Apigee for internal microservices communication would add excessive latency and governance overhead intended for external consumers, not for the dynamic service discovery and fine-grained traffic control required inside a GKE environment.
- ✗
Cloud Traffic Director
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Traffic Director is a managed traffic control plane that configures Envoy sidecar proxies for L7 routing, load balancing, and failover. While it can be used to build a service mesh, it is not a full-featured mesh itself because it lacks integrated policy, security, and telemetry capabilities out of the box. For GKE, Anthos Service Mesh is the recommended solution because it provides a complete, managed offering with Istio, including mTLS, observability, and multi-cluster support, whereas Traffic Director requires you to assemble and manage these components yourself.
- ✓
Cloud Service Mesh (Anthos Service Mesh)
Why this is correct
Cloud Service Mesh (Anthos Service Mesh) is the recommended service mesh for GKE, built on Istio and offered as a fully managed service with a Google-managed control plane. It provides end-to-end mTLS, fine-grained traffic management, policy enforcement, and telemetry via Cloud Monitoring and Logging. This makes it the ideal choice for microservices communication, as it directly addresses service-to-service security, reliability, and observability within the cluster without requiring you to manage the control plane infrastructure.
- ✗
Cloud Endpoints
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Endpoints is an API management service that deploys the Extensible Service Proxy (ESP) as a gateway in front of your APIs, primarily for public-facing north-south traffic. It offers features like API key validation, authentication, quota monitoring, and request transformation, but it does not handle internal service discovery, mutual TLS, or traffic steering among microservices. While an API gateway can complement a service mesh, Cloud Endpoints alone cannot replace the east-west communication capabilities that a service mesh like ASM provides for a microservices architecture on GKE.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a managed Kubernetes service on Google Cloud that lets you deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications without having to operate the underlying cluster control plane.
Key term
Service
A service is a software component or system that performs a specific function and is available to be used by other programs or users over a network.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL 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 GCDL exam.