Google PCA Designing for Security and Compliance Practice Question
An engineer needs to grant a service account the ability to create and manage VMs in a specific project, but only those VMs with a certain label. Which IAM feature should they use?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
IAM conditions
IAM conditions allow you to grant conditional access based on resource attributes such as labels, name, or creation time. Custom roles are a collection of permissions but do not enforce conditions. Service account impersonation is used to act as another service account. Primitive roles are broad and do not support conditions.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Primitive roles
Why it's wrong here
Primitive roles are broad and do not support conditions.
- ✗
Custom roles
Why it's wrong here
Custom roles define permissions but cannot restrict based on resource labels.
- ✗
Service account impersonation
Why it's wrong here
Impersonation allows a principal to act as a service account but does not provide conditional access.
- ✓
IAM conditions
Why this is correct
IAM conditions allow you to apply attribute-based access control, e.g., only VMs with a specific label.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Google Cloud Resource Hierarchy and Organization
Key term
Service account
A service account is a special type of account used by an application or a virtual machine, rather than a human user, to authenticate and interact with cloud services and APIs securely.
Key term
Labels
Labels are descriptive text or tags attached to IT resources to organize, identify, and manage them based on attributes like purpose, environment, or owner.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCA 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 PCA exam.