Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts Practice Question
A startup wants to deploy a web application with minimal operational overhead. They want to focus only on writing code and not managing servers, containers, or runtimes. Which Google Cloud service is designed for this purpose?
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
✓
App Engine
App Engine is a fully managed PaaS that abstracts the underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to focus solely on code. Cloud Run requires container images, Compute Engine requires full OS management, and GKE requires cluster management.
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 Run
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Run is a managed compute platform that runs stateless containers and automatically scales them, but it requires you to first containerize your application by authoring a Dockerfile, building the image, and pushing it to Artifact Registry. You also need to understand concepts like container ports, resource limits, and revision traffic splitting. For a startup that wants truly minimal operations and no container workflow, this added overhead rules it out.
- ✗
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Why it's wrong here
Google Kubernetes Engine is a managed Kubernetes service that removes the burden of running the control plane, but it still demands deep operational knowledge of container orchestration. You must manage node pools, select machine types, configure scaling policies, and maintain workload YAML manifests, plus handle upgrades and cluster networking. This is far more operational complexity than a simple web app needs.
- ✓
App Engine
Why this is correct
App Engine is a fully managed platform-as-a-service that accepts your source code and runtime configuration directly, without requiring you to build or manage containers. It automatically provisions underlying compute resources, performs health checks, balances load across instances, and scales from zero to many based on traffic. Patches and infrastructure maintenance are handled by Google, making it the most operationally lightweight choice for deploying a web application.
- ✗
Compute Engine
Why it's wrong here
Compute Engine provides raw virtual machines as an infrastructure-as-a-service, giving you full control over the stack but requiring you to handle every operational task. You must choose an OS, harden and patch it, install the runtime, configure networking and firewalls, and set up manual or managed instance groups for scaling. This is the highest-effort option and contradicts the goal of minimal operations.
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Related to this question
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Cloud Run
Cloud Run is a fully managed compute platform from Google Cloud that lets you run containerized applications in a serverless environment, automatically scaling from zero to thousands of requests.
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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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.