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Fundamental Cloud Concepts

Practise Google Cloud Digital Leader Fundamental Cloud Concepts practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.

65 questions18 easy35 medium12 hard

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What this domain covers

What to know about Fundamental Cloud Concepts

Cloud concepts questions usually test the service model (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) and deployment model (public/private/hybrid/community) appropriate for a given scenario.

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS responsibilities and examples.

Public, private, hybrid and community cloud deployment models.

On-premises vs cloud trade-offs: cost, control, scalability.

How cloud connectivity options (VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute) work.

Watch out for

Common Fundamental Cloud Concepts exam traps

  • IaaS gives you infrastructure control; SaaS gives you only the application.
  • Hybrid cloud combines on-premises and public cloud — not two public clouds.
  • Cloud does not automatically mean cheaper or more secure.
  • Management responsibility shifts with each service model (IaaSPaaSSaaS).

Question index

All Fundamental Cloud Concepts questions (65)

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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

An organization needs to allow a third-party auditor to review their Google Cloud resource configurations for compliance (read-only access). The auditor should not be able to modify resources or view data. Which THREE IAM roles or techniques should they use?

Hard
8

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

Easy
9

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
10

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
11

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
12

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
13

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
14

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
15

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
16

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
17

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
18

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

Easy
19

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
20

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
21

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
22

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
23

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
24

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
25

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
26

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
27

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

Easy
28

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

Easy
29

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
30

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
31

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
32

A data engineer needs to process a large dataset stored in Cloud Storage using Apache Spark. They want to minimize cluster management overhead. Which TWO Google Cloud services can be used together to achieve this? (Choose 2.)

Medium
33

A company wants to deploy a multi-tier web application on Google Cloud that requires high availability across zones. The application consists of a stateless web frontend and a stateful database backend. Which TWO actions should the company take to meet the high availability requirement? (Select two.)

Medium
34

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
35

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
36

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
37

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
38

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. They want to break it into microservices without managing underlying servers or container orchestration. Which TWO Google Cloud services allow them to deploy containerized applications serverlessly?

Medium
39

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
40

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
41

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
42

A company has deployed a web application on Compute Engine in us-central1-a. Users in Europe report high latency. The company wants to reduce latency by serving traffic from a location closer to European users. However, they currently use a zonal managed instance group. What is the MOST cost-effective and operationally simple approach to reduce latency for European users?

Medium
43

A financial services firm must store customer transaction logs for 7 years to comply with regulatory requirements. The data must be immutable after writing, and access should be restricted to authorized auditors only. Which storage solution and configuration should they use?

Hard
44

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

Easy
45

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
46

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
47

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
48

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
49

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
50

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
51

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

Medium
52

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
53

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
54

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
55

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
56

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
57

A company wants to minimize its carbon footprint in the cloud. They are evaluating Google Cloud sustainability features. Which THREE practices help reduce environmental impact?

Hard
58

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
59

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
60

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
61

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
62

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
63

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
64

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
65

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?
Cloud concepts questions usually test the service model (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) and deployment model (public/private/hybrid/community) appropriate for a given scenario.
How many questions are in this domain?
This page lists all 65 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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