Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts Practice Question
An engineer is deploying a global application that requires low latency for users in North America, Europe, and Asia. They plan to use Compute Engine instances in multiple regions. Which Google Cloud resource is essential to distribute traffic and provide a single anycast IP address?
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
✓
Global external HTTP(S) load balancer
Global external HTTP(S) load balancer provides a single anycast IP and distributes traffic across regions, enabling low-latency access worldwide.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Global external HTTP(S) load balancer
Why this is correct
The Global external HTTP(S) load balancer is correct because it provides a single global anycast IP address, leveraging Google's global network and advanced routing to direct each request to the closest region with available capacity. It supports HTTP(S) traffic, can be integrated with Cloud CDN, and routes to backend services across multiple regions, making it ideal for a global application requiring low latency and one entry point.
- ✗
Cloud CDN
Why it's wrong here
Cloud CDN accelerates content delivery by caching static and dynamic responses at edge locations, but it is not a load balancer and does not expose a single anycast IP for routing traffic to compute instances. It requires an external load balancer as its origin, so it cannot independently satisfy the requirement of a global anycast IP for inbound traffic.
- ✗
Traffic Director
Why it's wrong here
Traffic Director is a managed service for service mesh traffic management that provides global load balancing and routing policies for proxied workloads, but it does not offer a single anycast IP to external clients. Instead, it configures sidecar proxies and manages traffic within a mesh, so it cannot serve as the front-end load balancer for global user access.
- ✗
Cloud NAT
Why it's wrong here
Cloud NAT is a regional managed service that enables outbound internet connectivity for private instances on a VPC network. It translates private source IPs to a regional external IP for egress traffic, but it does not provide inbound load balancing or a global anycast IP. Therefore, it cannot present a single global entry point for client requests.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Cloud Digital Transformation
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
Google Cloud
Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides infrastructure, platform, and software solutions over the internet.
About these practice questions
One of 829 original GCDL practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.