Scaling with Google Cloud operations

A company runs a web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that experiences sudden traffic spikes. The operations team notices that the application's response time increases significantly during these spikes despite having Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) configured. They want to ensure consistent performance. What should they do?

A company runs a customer-facing web application with a published SLA of 99.95% monthly availability. In the past month, the application experienced two outages: a 12-minute outage and a 7-minute outage. Did the company meet its SLA?

A company's cloud team is asked to demonstrate that their infrastructure changes are repeatable and auditable. They use Terraform configuration files committed to a Git repository to define all cloud resources. Which operational practice does this exemplify?

A company's engineering organization wants to share operational knowledge across teams using a 'golden path' — a recommended, pre-configured set of tools, services, and templates that makes the easy path also the correct path. Which Google Cloud concept supports this practice?

An organization has multiple projects and wants to aggregate logs from all projects into a single bucket for long-term retention and compliance. What should they do?

A startup is building a read-heavy mobile backend. They want a database that can scale out reads without downtime. Which database service should they choose?

A company's SRE team is debating whether to automate a frequently performed manual operational task. The automation would take 4 weeks of engineering time to build. The manual task takes 30 minutes per occurrence and happens approximately 20 times per month. Using the SRE concept of 'toil,' how should the team approach this decision?

Drag and drop the steps to set up a Cloud SQL for MySQL instance with a private IP address into the correct order.

An operations team has been asked to estimate the annual cost impact of a proposed new cloud architecture. The architecture would replace 50 on-demand n2-standard-4 VMs (running 24/7) with an autoscaling group that averages 10 VMs under normal load but scales to 50 during peak hours (approximately 8 hours per day). Which analytical approach best estimates the cost impact?

A team deploys microservices on GKE with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA). They want to scale based on custom metrics from third-party monitoring. What must they do first?

Refer to the exhibit. The autoscaler is configured to maintain a target CPU utilization of 0.6. Currently the group has 10 instances, but the autoscaler is not scaling up even though CPU utilization is above 0.8. What is the most likely reason?

A cloud operations team wants to ensure that all cloud resources created in their Google Cloud organization comply with company naming standards and required cost allocation labels. Which Google Cloud capability can automatically enforce these standards on resource creation?

A company runs batch processing jobs using preemptible VMs to reduce costs. They need to ensure these jobs can scale out significantly during peak hours. Which Compute Engine pricing model should they combine with autoscaling to optimize cost for these workloads?

An SRE team analyzes that their service had 47 minutes of downtime in the past 30 days. Their SLO is 99.9% monthly availability. How should the team characterize their performance relative to the SLO?

A cloud team performs a quarterly review of its Compute Engine instances and discovers 15 VMs that have had zero CPU utilization for over 90 days. What is the recommended operational response to these idle resources?

A company uses Cloud Functions (2nd gen) to process events from Pub/Sub. During traffic spikes, function instances scale but latency increases. They want to maximize throughput per instance. What should they configure?

Google Cloud runs its own infrastructure operations using the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) model, which Google invented. What is the core principle that distinguishes SRE from traditional IT operations?

A large enterprise runs a critical application on Google Cloud consisting of Compute Engine instances behind a TCP load balancer. The application experiences intermittent slow response times that last for about 10 minutes before returning to normal. This pattern has been occurring every few days at random times. The operations team has configured Cloud Monitoring alerts for CPU and memory, but no alerts have fired. They have also reviewed the load balancer logs and see no errors, but the latency spikes. The application logs show no errors during these periods. The team suspects a resource bottleneck but cannot find it. Further investigation reveals that the application makes synchronous calls to an external authentication service for each request. What is the most likely cause and corrective action?

A company uses Cloud Functions and notices that some functions are taking longer than expected. They want to identify which functions have the highest latency. What should they use?

Which Google Cloud service provides a centralized view of an application's performance metrics, logs, and traces — enabling teams to monitor system health, set up alerts, and diagnose issues from a single platform?

A SRE team wants to alert when their service is consuming error budget faster than expected, rather than alerting only when the SLO threshold is crossed. Which Cloud Monitoring alerting strategy supports this approach?

Which THREE of the following are best practices for managing operations in Google Cloud? (Choose THREE.)

A company runs a mission-critical application that must be available 24/7. They want to ensure that if a Google Cloud region becomes unavailable (e.g., due to a natural disaster), the application automatically continues to serve users from another region. Which architecture pattern achieves this?

An e-commerce platform uses Compute Engine instances in a managed instance group behind a Cloud Load Balancer. During a flash sale, the load balancer reports increased error rates. The operations team suspects the instances are overwhelmed. Which two steps should they take to troubleshoot the issue? (Choose TWO.)

A cloud team wants to understand their current Google Cloud resource inventory — specifically, which VMs are running in each region, their machine types, and whether they have public IP addresses. Which approach most efficiently provides this across all projects?

A company runs a web application on Compute Engine. During seasonal sales, traffic spikes unpredictably. The operations team wants to ensure the application scales automatically without manual intervention while minimizing cost. Which solution should they implement?

A company's application traffic is served by a Google Cloud global HTTP load balancer. They want to understand how request traffic distributes across backend instances in different regions. Which metric best represents this distribution?

A company exports all their Google Cloud logs to Cloud Storage for long-term retention required by their compliance policy (7-year log retention). Which Cloud Logging feature enables routing logs to Cloud Storage?

What is the difference between a Service Level Indicator (SLI), a Service Level Objective (SLO), and a Service Level Agreement (SLA)?

A company has multiple teams deploying to Google Cloud and wants to allocate cloud costs by team. Each team should see only their own costs and be accountable for their spending. Which Google Cloud feature enables this cost allocation and visibility?

A company has deployed a critical application on Google Cloud and wants to understand what happens to their workloads during a Google Cloud data center maintenance event (e.g., host system upgrades). What Google Compute Engine feature handles this automatically for most VMs?

A DevOps team wants to implement a release process where a new application version is first deployed to 5% of production traffic, monitored for errors, then gradually increased to 100% if metrics remain healthy. Which deployment strategy does this describe?

A company's cloud costs have increased by 40% over the past quarter. The operations team wants to identify and address the root causes. Which cost optimization strategies should they investigate first?

A gaming company runs a real-time multiplayer game server on Google Kubernetes Engine. They want to optimize costs while ensuring low latency for players across different regions. Which three strategies should they implement? (Choose THREE.)

A reliability engineering team wants to proactively identify weaknesses in their distributed system by deliberately injecting failures — killing random instances, introducing network latency, and cutting off database connections — to observe how the system responds. What is this practice called?

Refer to the exhibit. A team deployed this Cloud Run service. During a load test, the service receives high traffic, but the number of container instances never exceeds 10. What is the most likely cause?

An SRE team is practicing 'chaos engineering' by simulating a zone-level failure in their staging environment. They find that their application does not automatically recover — traffic is not redirected and the service remains down. What architectural component is most likely missing?

A financial services company is migrating its on-premises monitoring system to Google Cloud. They need to collect metrics, logs, and traces from multiple projects and provide a unified view for their operations team. Security requires that logs containing sensitive data be stored with additional encryption and access controls. Which combination of services should they use?

A developer needs to debug a production issue by analyzing logs from multiple microservices. Which Google Cloud service should they use to filter and search logs in real time?

A company's cloud cost has grown significantly. A FinOps analysis reveals the largest waste category is idle Cloud SQL instances — 12 database instances that were provisioned for projects that have since ended, but were never deleted. What process failure most directly caused this waste?

A retail company runs its order-processing application on Compute Engine instances in a single zone. During a regional maintenance event, the zone becomes unavailable for several hours, and the application goes down. The operations team wants to improve resilience so that a single zone failure does not cause an outage, while keeping changes minimal. What should they do?

A company is migrating to Google Cloud and wants to reduce operational overhead for managing their infrastructure. Which Google Cloud service allows them to define infrastructure as code and automate provisioning?

A company has a Google Cloud environment with 50 projects and 200 engineers. The security team wants to ensure that a new security policy — requiring all Cloud Storage buckets to have uniform bucket-level access enabled — applies to all existing and future buckets across all projects. Which approach scales to the entire organization?

A company uses committed use discounts (CUDs) for its production workload baseline. An engineer proposes also using sustained use discounts (SUDs) for the same VMs. Why is this incorrect?

An operations team is performing a post-incident review after a production outage. The team lead insists that the review must follow a 'blameless postmortem' approach. What does this mean, and why is it important for organizational learning?

A company uses Cloud Monitoring to collect metrics from their applications running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They want to create custom dashboards and set up alerting policies. Which THREE capabilities are available in Cloud Monitoring? (Choose THREE.)

A digital media company hosts video content globally. They want to reduce origin server load and deliver content faster to viewers worldwide. Their current architecture routes all viewer requests directly to the origin servers in `us-central1`, causing high latency for viewers in Asia and Europe. Which Google Cloud networking capability addresses this?

Google Cloud's infrastructure is designed to be highly available across multiple failure domains. What are 'availability zones' in Google Cloud, and how do they differ from 'regions'?

A developer is troubleshooting a slow response from a Cloud Run service. Which Google Cloud service can they use to trace requests across microservices?

A cloud team receives an alert that a critical production service's error rate has spiked. Following incident response best practices, what is the correct first priority action?

A company runs an e-commerce platform on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using autoscaling. They have a baseline workload and occasional traffic spikes during promotions. They configured a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) for their web application pods and a Cluster Autoscaler for the node pool. The HPA targets 70% CPU utilization. During a recent sales event, traffic exceeded expectations. The operations team observed that the HPA increased the desired number of replicas to 50, but only 20 pods were running. The remaining 30 pods were in 'Pending' status. The Cluster Autoscaler logs show repeated messages: 'no capacity to scale up node pool'. The node pool is configured with a maximum of 10 nodes, each with 4 vCPUs, and currently all 10 nodes are running. The team checked the node pool's current utilization and found that nodes are near capacity. What should the team do to ensure the application scales correctly during future events?

A company wants to proactively identify underutilized Compute Engine VMs (high provisioned capacity but low actual usage) to reduce costs. Which Google Cloud tool provides recommendations for right-sizing VMs?

Match each Google Cloud security concept to its description.

Drag and drop the steps to recover a Compute Engine VM from a snapshot in the correct order.

A global gaming company uses Cloud Spanner for their leaderboard. They notice that write latency spikes during peak hours. The database is currently deployed in a single region. Which scaling strategy should they implement to reduce write latency globally?

Google Cloud's operations suite includes Cloud Monitoring for metrics. What is the difference between 'monitoring' and 'observability' in cloud operations?

A company wants to reduce its Google Cloud costs without reducing its workload capacity. The team identifies that several production VMs consistently use less than 30% of their allocated CPU and memory. What is the most straightforward cost optimization action?

You are monitoring Compute Engine instances with Cloud Monitoring. You notice that autoscaling is not triggering even though CPU utilization is above 80% for several minutes. The managed instance group has autoscaling based on CPU utilization with a target of 0.8. What is the most likely cause?

A company's application experiences a P1 (critical) production incident at 2 AM on a Sunday. The on-call engineer resolves the issue after 3 hours but isn't sure which team members to contact or what steps to follow during an incident. What operational practice and tooling would have helped manage this incident better?

A product team is discussing how to handle a planned 48-hour maintenance window for a critical customer-facing service. The SRE team argues the maintenance window is unnecessary with proper cloud architecture. Which cloud capability eliminates the need for planned downtime maintenance windows?

A company's cloud costs have grown faster than its business. The FinOps team is implementing cloud cost governance. Which practice most effectively ensures that individual teams are accountable for their cloud spending?

A company uses Google Cloud across 5 teams, 20 projects, and 3 regions. They want to enforce a standard that all resources include specific labels (e.g., `team`, `environment`, `cost-center`) for cost attribution and governance. What is the most scalable way to enforce this labeling standard?

Match each Google Cloud serverless compute option to its characteristic.

An operations team wants to receive an automated alert when their web application's HTTP error rate exceeds 5% for more than 5 minutes. Which Google Cloud product is used to configure this type of metric-based alert?

A company's SRE team sets an SLO of 99.5% monthly availability for a non-critical internal tool. A business stakeholder argues the target should be 99.99%. The SRE team pushes back. Which SRE argument best supports keeping the 99.5% target?

Which TWO statements correctly describe Cloud Run scaling behavior?

A company is evaluating whether to adopt a multi-cloud strategy (using two or more cloud providers for different workloads). An engineer lists the following arguments: (1) resilience against a single cloud provider outage, (2) negotiating leverage on pricing, (3) using best-of-breed services from each provider. A cloud architect cautions that multi-cloud also introduces significant challenges. What is the most significant operational challenge of a multi-cloud approach?

A cloud architect is reviewing logs from a production incident. She wants to search all log entries across multiple Google Cloud projects for error messages containing a specific string. Which Google Cloud product enables centralized log searching and analysis across an entire organization?

A company's web service has a Service Level Objective (SLO) of 99.9% monthly availability. In a 30-day month, how many minutes of downtime are allowed before the SLO is violated?

A company's application experiences traffic spikes every weekday morning when employees log in at 9 AM. The team wants their infrastructure to automatically handle these spikes without manual intervention and without over-provisioning resources all day. Which Google Cloud capability addresses this?

Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer notices that the alert fires even when there is only a single 5-second spike of errors that lasts for one minute. What is the most likely cause?

An SRE team has a monthly error budget of 43 minutes (99.9% SLO). In the first week of the month, a deployment causes a 50-minute outage. What should the SRE team do for the remainder of the month, and why?

A company runs a web application on Compute Engine instances behind a managed instance group with autoscaling based on CPU utilization. After a marketing campaign, traffic spikes and the autoscaler adds instances quickly, but the application becomes slow. What is the most likely cause?

A large online retailer operates a microservices-based e-commerce platform on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) across multiple zones. The application consists of several stateless services that handle customer traffic, inventory, and order processing. Recently, the company migrated its relational database to Cloud Spanner to achieve global scalability and strong consistency. After the migration, during peak shopping periods (e.g., Black Friday), the application experiences significant performance degradation. The operations team monitors CPU utilization of the pods and finds it consistently below 60% even under heavy load. However, Cloud Spanner metrics show high query latency and increased number of transactions waiting for lock conflicts. The team suspects that the bottleneck is now the database, not the compute. The application is designed to scale horizontally by adding more pod replicas. The team wants to ensure that scaling decisions are based on the actual performance bottleneck. What should they do?

A company has a stateful application running on Compute Engine. They want to scale horizontally while preserving state. Which configuration should they use?

A company wants to optimize Cloud Storage costs for a bucket containing 100 TB of access logs. The logs from the last 7 days are frequently analyzed; logs from 8–90 days are occasionally reviewed; logs older than 90 days are archived for compliance but rarely accessed. What is the most cost-effective storage class configuration?

A company's cloud environment has grown rapidly and the team is struggling to understand what cloud resources exist across dozens of projects. Which Google Cloud product provides a unified inventory of all cloud assets across an organization's projects and folders?

A company's application is composed of 15 microservices. When a performance issue occurs, the team struggles to determine which service is causing latency since request traces span multiple services. Which Google Cloud service helps identify which specific service in a microservices chain is causing slowdowns?

A company uses Google Cloud and wants to understand their monthly cloud spend before the invoice arrives, track spending trends, and identify the top cost drivers across all services. Which built-in Google Cloud tool provides this visibility?

A platform engineering team is designing a self-service cloud environment for development teams. They want developers to be able to provision approved cloud resources quickly without waiting for central IT approval for every request, while still ensuring compliance with security and cost policies. Which architectural approach best balances developer agility with governance?

A company wants to automatically scale their Compute Engine managed instance group based on the number of requests per second. Which metric should they use?

A cloud operations engineer notices that the managed instance group 'my-mig' has been scaling up frequently, but the application performance is still degraded. The CPU utilization metric shows high values. What is most likely the issue?

Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer wants to create a chart showing the rate of items sold per second over time. What is a limitation of this metric for that purpose?

A company's cloud operations team is implementing a tagging strategy for cost allocation. They want to ensure that the 'cost-center' label is present on every Compute Engine VM and Cloud Storage bucket created in their Google Cloud organization. Currently, some resources are created without this label. Which combination of controls best enforces and remediates this requirement?

After a major production outage, the engineering team conducts a review of what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it in the future. This document is shared with all engineering teams. What is this practice called, and why does Google's SRE culture emphasize it?

A company wants to implement SLOs for their API service. They need to measure the proportion of successful requests over a 30-day window. Which metric should they use?

An operations team tracks the following metrics for their customer portal: request latency p99, error rate, and requests per second. In Site Reliability Engineering terminology, what are these metrics called, and what do they collectively define?

A company's production database is running on a Compute Engine VM with a 500 GB Persistent Disk. The operations team wants to create a backup they can restore from in case of data corruption or accidental deletion. Which Google Cloud capability provides point-in-time backup for Persistent Disks?

A startup's engineering team wants to monitor the CPU utilization of its Compute Engine instances and receive an alert when utilization exceeds 80% for 5 minutes. They want a fully managed Google Cloud solution that requires minimal setup and integrates with their existing dashboards. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

A company wants to set up automated checks that continuously verify their website's homepage, login page, and API endpoints are accessible from multiple global locations. If any endpoint becomes unreachable for more than 2 minutes, the on-call engineer should be alerted. Which Cloud Monitoring feature provides this?