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Fundamental Cloud Concepts

This domain covers the foundational vocabulary and mental models behind Google Cloud: what cloud computing is, its core service and deployment models, and how Google Cloud's global infrastructure, resource hierarchy, and shared responsibility model fit together. Questions are scenario-based, asking you to pick the correct model, service category, or responsibility owner for a given business or technical requirement.

60 questions19 easy32 medium9 hard

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What this domain covers

What to know about Fundamental Cloud Concepts

Be able to map a business scenario to the right service model, Google Cloud product, and responsibility owner. The single most important thing: know exactly where Google's responsibility ends and the customer's begins for security, data, and compliance.

Distinguishing IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS using Compute Engine, App Engine, and Google Workspace examples

Applying the shared responsibility model to compliance regimes like HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS

Choosing between Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, and Cloud Functions for workloads

Understanding Google Cloud regions, zones, and the organization-folder-project resource hierarchy

Watch out for

Common Fundamental Cloud Concepts exam traps

  • ▸Assuming Google handles all security obligations: customers always own data, access control, and application-level configuration regardless of service model.
  • ▸Confusing Cloud Run with Cloud Functions: Cloud Run runs containers with any runtime, while Cloud Functions runs event-driven single-purpose code.
  • ▸Treating serverless as always cheaper or simpler: cold starts, execution limits, and per-request pricing can make it wrong for steady high-throughput workloads.

Question index

All Fundamental Cloud Concepts questions (60)

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1

A data scientist wants to train a machine learning model using a managed service that supports custom TensorFlow code and provides GPU/TPU hardware acceleration. They prefer not to manage the underlying infrastructure. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Easy
2

An e-commerce platform uses Compute Engine to serve its website. During a flash sale, traffic spikes and some instances become unhealthy. The team wants to automatically replace unhealthy instances and maintain a minimum number of running instances. Which TWO features should they configure? (Choose 2)

Medium
3

A startup uses Google Workspace for email and collaboration. They want to add a custom domain to their Gmail accounts. Which service model does Google Workspace represent?

Medium
4

A developer wants a fully managed environment to deploy containerized applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. They need auto-scaling, load balancing, and a serverless experience. Which Google Cloud service should they choose?

Easy
5

A multinational corporation needs to deploy a global web application that serves users from multiple continents. They want to minimize latency for end users by serving content from the nearest location. Which combination of Google Cloud services should they use?

Medium
6

A company needs to run a legacy application that requires full control over the operating system, including custom kernel modules. They want to minimize management overhead for the underlying hardware. Which cloud service model should they use?

Medium
7

Which TWO of the following are NIST-defined characteristics of cloud computing?

Easy
8

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application has variable traffic and requires a relational database. They want to minimize operational overhead. Which TWO Google Cloud services should they choose? (Choose TWO.)

Medium
9

A company runs a critical application on Compute Engine that must always be available, even if an entire zone fails. The application stores state in a Cloud Spanner instance. The operations team wants to test disaster recovery procedures without affecting production. Which TWO actions should they take? (Select two.)

Hard
10

A data engineer needs to run a one-time complex data transformation job on a large dataset (10 TB) stored in Cloud Storage. The job will take approximately 8 hours and is not fault-tolerant. The engineer wants the cheapest possible compute option that can reliably complete the job. What should they use?

Medium
11

A global e-commerce company wants to serve its website from Google Cloud with low latency to users worldwide. The website consists of static content (images, CSS) and dynamic content served by a backend application. Which combination of services should they use?

Medium
12

A company wants to run a batch job that processes data every night. They need to provision a VM for this task but want to minimize costs. The job can tolerate interruptions and can be resumed. Which Compute Engine VM option should they use?

Medium
13

Which of the following is a key characteristic of cloud computing as defined by NIST that allows users to automatically provision computing resources without requiring human interaction with each service provider?

Easy
14

An organization needs to store confidential healthcare data in Google Cloud. Which compliance certification ensures that Google Cloud infrastructure meets the required security controls for protected health information (PHI)?

Easy
15

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?

Medium
16

A global e-commerce platform runs on Compute Engine instances in multiple regions. Users report high latency when accessing the website from South America. The company wants to improve performance by delivering static content (images, CSS, JS) from the nearest edge location. Which Google Cloud service should they implement?

Medium
17

Which statement best describes the shared responsibility model in Google Cloud?

Easy
18

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?

Hard
19

A retail company wants to reduce latency for customers in Europe and Asia by hosting their application closer to users. They also need high availability in case of a regional outage. Which TWO actions should they take?

Easy
20

A startup wants to deploy a containerized web application without managing servers or clusters. They need automatic scaling, a managed runtime, and pay only for resources used. Which Google Cloud service should they choose?

Medium
21

A DevOps engineer notices that a Cloud Function is timing out after 9 minutes. The function performs a long-running data transformation. They need to increase the timeout. What is the maximum timeout they can set for a Cloud Function (1st gen)?

Hard
22

An e-commerce company is experiencing traffic spikes during flash sales. They need their application to automatically scale up and down based on CPU utilization, without manual intervention. Their application runs on a managed platform. Which feature should they enable?

Medium
23

What is a key benefit of using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering like App Engine compared to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) like Compute Engine?

Easy
24

A data analytics team processes large datasets using Apache Spark. They want a fully managed service that allows them to run Spark jobs without provisioning clusters. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

Medium
25

A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application. They need to ensure that if an entire Google Cloud region becomes unavailable, the application can still serve traffic from another region with minimal data loss. Which TWO strategies should they implement? (Choose 2.)

Medium
26

Which of the following is a characteristic of the cloud according to the NIST definition?

Easy
27

According to the shared responsibility model, which of the following is the customer responsible for?

Easy
28

A company is migrating its on-premises data warehouse to Google Cloud. The data warehouse contains structured relational data (sales transactions, customer records) and is queried using standard SQL. The company wants to separate compute and storage costs and automatically scale compute resources up and down based on query load. Which Google Cloud service is most appropriate?

Medium
29

A company wants to use Google Cloud for a workload that requires compliance with PCI DSS. Which of the following is a Google responsibility under the shared model?

Medium
30

A global gaming company needs to serve low-latency content to players worldwide. They want to cache static assets (images, videos) at edge locations closest to users. Which Google Cloud product should they use?

Hard
31

A small marketing agency currently runs its customer relationship management (CRM) application on a physical server in its office closet. The server is five years old, and the agency's IT consultant has warned that a disk failure could take the CRM offline for days. The agency wants to move the CRM to Google Cloud so that it can scale capacity up or down as campaign volumes change, without buying new hardware. Which cloud computing benefit does this scenario primarily illustrate?

Easy
32

An organization wants to reduce latency for users in Europe. They plan to deploy their application in a Google Cloud region located in Europe. Which region should they choose?

Easy
33

A security administrator needs to grant a developer the minimum permissions to create and delete Cloud Storage buckets in a specific project, but NOT allow them to modify the contents of those buckets (e.g., upload or delete objects). Which IAM role should they assign?

Medium
34

A company is using Cloud SQL for MySQL and notices that read queries are becoming slow as the application scales. They want to offload read traffic from the primary instance to improve performance. Which Cloud SQL feature should they enable?

Hard
35

A company wants to ensure that their customer data stored in BigQuery is encrypted at rest using customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK). Which Google Cloud service should they use to manage these keys?

Easy
36

A developer needs to deploy a containerized microservice that scales to zero when not in use and automatically scales up on incoming traffic. The microservice uses a custom container image that listens on port 8080. Which Google Cloud compute service is BEST suited for this requirement?

Medium
37

An organization wants to use Google Cloud to analyze large-scale genomic data. The data is stored in Cloud Storage in a compressed format. They need to run a custom Python pipeline that preprocesses the data and then uses a GPU-intensive algorithm for alignment. The preprocessing is CPU-bound and takes 30 minutes per sample, while the alignment takes 1 hour per sample on a GPU. They have thousands of samples. Which compute approach is MOST cost-effective?

Medium
38

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. The application currently runs on a single physical server with a custom Linux distribution. The team wants to minimize changes to the application while gaining the benefits of cloud infrastructure. Which migration strategy should they use?

Medium
39

Which Google Cloud tool allows customers to measure the gross carbon emissions associated with their Google Cloud usage?

Easy
40

A financial services company is required to keep all data within a specific geographic region for regulatory compliance. They plan to deploy a globally distributed application using Cloud Spanner. How should they configure Cloud Spanner to meet this compliance requirement?

Medium
41

A startup needs to migrate an on-premises web application to the cloud with minimal operational overhead. The application runs on a custom runtime that is difficult to containerize. The team wants to focus only on code, not infrastructure management. Which Google Cloud service is MOST appropriate?

Easy
42

A company stores sensitive healthcare data in Google Cloud and must comply with HIPAA. They are using Cloud Storage and BigQuery. Which of the following is the customer responsible for under the shared responsibility model?

Hard
43

A regional accounting firm is moving its document management system to Google Cloud. The firm's partners are concerned about where client financial records will physically reside and want assurance that the data stays within their country. They also want to understand who is responsible for securing the underlying physical data center versus the application configuration. Which statement accurately describes the Google Cloud shared responsibility model in this context?

Medium
44

A company wants to run a batch job that processes large files (up to 100 TB each) using a custom Linux executable. The job runs once a month and takes about 12 hours. They want to minimise cost. Which compute option should they choose?

Medium
45

A company is deploying a microservices architecture on Google Cloud and wants to ensure secure communication between services. Which THREE measures should they implement? (Choose THREE.)

Medium
46

An e-commerce company experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. They need to ensure their web application automatically scales out during high demand and scales in when demand drops, paying only for resources used. Which cloud benefit best describes this?

Medium
47

An organization needs to comply with HIPAA for storing healthcare data in Google Cloud. Which of the following is a customer responsibility?

Medium
48

A multinational corporation must store and process data subject to GDPR. They need to ensure that personal data of EU residents remains within the EU. Which Google Cloud feature should they use?

Hard
49

A financial services company must store and process sensitive customer data that is subject to GDPR and PCI DSS. They need to ensure that data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and that encryption keys are managed by a hardware security module (HSM) that is FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified. Which Google Cloud service should they use for key management?

Hard
50

A healthcare organization must store patient health records (PHI) in the cloud and comply with HIPAA. They need to ensure data is encrypted at rest by default, maintain access logs, and restrict access to authorized personnel. Which THREE Google Cloud features or services should they use?

Medium
51

A financial institution is deploying a sensitive workload on Compute Engine and needs to meet PCI DSS compliance. The security team wants to ensure that the virtual machines run on dedicated, single-tenant hardware and that no other customer's VMs share the same host. Which Compute Engine feature should they enable?

Medium
52

A company with a global user base wants to deploy a web application on Google Cloud that is highly available and resilient to zone failures. The application runs on Compute Engine and uses a stateful backend (e.g., a database). Which THREE design elements should they implement?

Hard
53

A startup wants to run a containerized web application on Google Cloud without managing the underlying servers or Kubernetes clusters. They expect traffic to vary significantly, and they want to only pay for the resources consumed during request processing. Which Google Cloud compute option should they choose?

Easy
54

Which characteristic of cloud computing allows a user to provision virtual machines without needing to interact with Google Cloud support or create a ticket?

Easy
55

A startup is deploying a containerised web application on Google Cloud. They want to minimise operational overhead and only pay for the resources consumed when requests are being processed. The application should automatically scale to zero when idle. Which compute service should they choose?

Medium
56

Which cloud computing characteristic is defined by the NIST as the ability for a consumer to provision computing capabilities automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider?

Easy
57

A data analytics team needs to process streaming data from thousands of IoT devices in real time. They want to ingest the data, process it (e.g., windowed aggregations), and then load it into BigQuery for analysis. Which Google Cloud service should they use for the stream processing step?

Medium
58

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?

Easy
59

A financial services company must run a legacy Windows application that requires a specific version of IIS and custom Windows patches. The company wants to minimize operational overhead but needs full control over the OS. Which Google Cloud service is most appropriate?

Medium
60

A company wants to run a stateful application that requires persistent, high-performance block storage attached to a single Compute Engine instance. The application needs consistent low latency. Which storage solution should they use?

Medium

Frequently asked questions

What does the Fundamental Cloud Concepts domain cover on the GCDL exam?
Be able to map a business scenario to the right service model, Google Cloud product, and responsibility owner. The single most important thing: know exactly where Google's responsibility ends and the customer's begins for security, data, and compliance.
How many questions are in this domain?
This page lists all 60 Fundamental Cloud Concepts questions in the GCDL question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
What is the best way to practise this domain?
Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
Can I practise only Fundamental Cloud Concepts questions?
Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.
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