Cloud Digital Leader Practice Question: Google Cloud products, services, and solutions

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✓

  Lift and Shift: Moving applications to the cloud without modification

  Why this is correct

  Lift and Shift, also known as rehosting, is a migration strategy that moves an application to Google Cloud as-is: the OS, binaries, configuration, and dependencies remain unchanged. The workload is simply copied onto Compute Engine VMs, enabling a fast migration with low risk because no code or architecture changes are required. However, it typically forgoes cloud-native advantages like auto-scaling, managed databases, and granular security, making it a deliberate trade-off for speed.

• ✓

  Replatform: Moving to the cloud with some optimization

  Why this is correct

  Replatforming, often called 'lift and shift and improve,' moves an application to the cloud with a modest amount of optimization while keeping the core architecture intact. For example, you might migrate a VM-hosted app to Google Kubernetes Engine or swap a self-managed database for Cloud SQL to reduce operational overhead. It yields some cloud benefits such as manageability and reliability without the cost and risk of a full rewrite, distinguishing it from both pure rehosting and full refactoring.

• ✓

  Refactor: Re-architecting applications to be cloud-native

  Why this is correct

  Refactor (or re-architecture) is the most transformative approach: it redesigns an application to embrace cloud-native principles such as microservices, serverless functions, managed data stores, and event-driven patterns. This requires significant engineering effort, testing, and often a cultural shift in team practices, but it maximizes scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency through features like horizontal autoscaling and pay-per-use execution. Unlike replatforming, which makes tactical changes, refactoring changes how the application is built and operated.

• ✓

  Migrate for Compute Engine: Tool for migrating VMs to GCP

  Why this is correct

  Migrate for Compute Engine, formerly known as Velostrata, is a Google Cloud tool that moves virtual machines from on-premises or other clouds to Compute Engine. It works by continuously replicating disk data at the block level, so the source VM keeps running until the cutover moment, minimizing downtime and allowing validation of the target VM before switching. It supports both one-time and ongoing migrations and can translate VMs into custom machine types or Managed Instance Groups.

• ✗

  Lift and Shift: Tool for migrating VMs to GCP

  Why it's wrong here

  This is a category error: Lift and Shift is a migration strategy (rehosting), not a tool or service. The tool that performs VM migration to Google Cloud with minimal downtime is Migrate for Compute Engine, which uses block-level replication. Confusing the two conflates the 'what' (the strategy) with the 'how' (the tool), which can lead to incorrect implementation choices in a migration plan.

• ✗

  Replatform: Re-architecting applications to be cloud-native

  Why it's wrong here

  Replatforming is a middle-ground tactic that transfers an application to the cloud with a few optimizations, such as moving from a VM to a container or from a traditional database to a managed service, while preserving the application's overall structure. Re-architecting an application to be cloud-native — breaking it into microservices, adopting serverless, or using fully managed backends — is a different and far more involved strategy called refactoring. So this pairing mislabels refactoring as replatforming.

Go deeper

Related to this question