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GCDL Practice Question: A company's cloud costs have increased by 40%…
This GCDL practice question tests your understanding of a company's cloud costs have increased by 40%…. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
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?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Distractor review
Migrate all workloads to Spot VMs immediately to reduce costs by 90%.
Spot VMs are preemptible — unsuitable for production workloads requiring reliability. A wholesale migration to Spot VMs would cause frequent outages.
B
Distractor review
Switch cloud providers to whoever has the lowest advertised list price.
Switching providers is expensive (migration costs, retraining, re-architecting). Optimizing current GCP usage typically yields 20-40% savings without migration overhead.
C
Best answer
Identify idle and underutilized resources (oversized VMs, unused disks, unattached IPs), apply lifecycle policies to storage, and commit to CUDs for stable workloads.
These are the highest-impact, quickest-to-implement cost optimizations. Active Assist identifies rightsizing opportunities; lifecycle policies automate storage cost management; CUDs reduce baseline compute costs.
D
Distractor review
Immediately upgrade all infrastructure to the latest generation hardware for better efficiency.
Upgrading to newer hardware may improve performance but doesn't directly reduce costs — newer generations may cost the same or more. Identifying idle resources and right-sizing is the first step.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
Key takeaway
NAT direction and interface roles matter as much as the IP address mapping. Inside/outside designation controls which traffic is translated.
Related practice questions
Related GCDL practice-question pages
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More questions from this exam
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Question 1
A traditional retailer currently maintains its own data centers, purchasing servers every 3–5 years and paying for facilities, power, and staff regardless of demand. When it migrates its workloads to the public cloud, which change in cost model does it experience?
Question 2
An e-commerce company plans its infrastructure for peak shopping events (e.g., Black Friday) which drive 50× normal traffic. On-premises, they must maintain 50× capacity year-round. In the cloud, they provision 50× capacity only during peak periods. Which cloud characteristic enables this cost optimization?
Question 3
Which term describes the process by which organizations integrate digital technology into all areas of their business, fundamentally changing how they operate and deliver value to customers?
Question 4
When a company moves from maintaining its own data center to using Google Cloud, which operational responsibility does Google assume that the company previously managed?
Question 5
A hospital runs a patient records system that must remain on-premises due to strict regulatory data residency requirements. However, they also want to use cloud-based AI for diagnostic imaging analysis. Which cloud deployment model best describes their architecture?
Question 6
What is virtualization in the context of cloud computing, and why is it fundamental to how cloud providers deliver services?
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FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this GCDL question test?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Identify idle and underutilized resources (oversized VMs, unused disks, unattached IPs), apply lifecycle policies to storage, and commit to CUDs for stable workloads. — The most common cloud cost drivers that can be quickly addressed: 1) Idle/underutilized resources (VMs running 24/7 at <10% CPU), 2) Unattached persistent disks and unused static IPs, 3) Over-provisioned machine types (right-sizing), 4) Missing lifecycle policies on Cloud Storage (old data in expensive storage classes), 5) Missing Committed Use Discounts for stable baseline workloads. Active Assist rightsizing recommendations surface these automatically in the Google Cloud console.
What should I do if I get this GCDL question wrong?
Review the four NAT address types (inside local, inside global, outside local, outside global), PAT port overload, and static vs dynamic NAT use cases. Then practise related GCDL NAT questions on configuration and troubleshooting.
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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.