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Analyze and optimize technical and business processes
Practise Google Professional Cloud Architect Analyze and optimize technical and business processes practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.
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All Analyze and optimize technical and business processes questions (74)
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You are a cloud architect for an e-commerce company. Their application runs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with a Regional cluster. The application consists of a frontend service, a backend service, and a Redis cache. Traffic is routed via an external HTTP(S) Load Balancer to the frontend. Recently, customers have reported intermittent 502 Bad Gateway errors during peak hours. The frontend logs show 'upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. retried and limit reset' errors. The backend service is deployed with 3 replicas, each with resource requests of 1 CPU and 2 GB memory. The cluster autoscaler is enabled with a minimum of 3 nodes and a maximum of 10 nodes, using e2-standard-4 instances. The backend service's HPA is configured with CPU utilization target of 80%. During peak hours, CPU utilization on the backend pods reaches 90%, but the HPA does not scale up. The cluster has sufficient node capacity. What should you do to resolve the issue?
Medium2A team uses Cloud Build for CI/CD. The builds are taking longer than expected due to dependency downloads. What is the best practice to speed up builds?
Easy3A company runs a batch processing workload on Compute Engine. They need to minimize cost and ensure jobs complete within a 24-hour window. Which THREE strategies should they implement? (Choose 3.)
Hard4A company uses Cloud Armor to protect their HTTP load balancer. They need to block traffic from a specific set of IP addresses and also prevent SQL injection attacks. Which two configurations should they use? (Choose TWO.)
Hard5A company wants to reduce Google Cloud costs for a batch processing workload. They currently use n1-standard-4 VMs running 24/7. The workload runs for 2 hours each night. What is the most cost-effective recommendation?
Easy6A company has an on-premises data center connected to GCP via Dedicated Interconnect. They run latency-sensitive applications on GCE and use Cloud Storage for backups. The backup traffic is causing congestion on the Interconnect link. How should they optimize costs and performance?
Medium7Drag and drop the steps to implement a disaster recovery plan using Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions in the correct order.
Medium8A company uses Cloud CDN to accelerate content delivery for their global user base. They notice a low cache hit ratio, and they also need to deliver personalized content based on user geolocation. What should they do?
Hard9A team deployed the Terraform configuration shown in the exhibit. They observe that Cloud NAT is not translating traffic from the private subnet as expected. What is the most likely cause?
Hard10A developer is migrating a stateful application to GKE. The application requires persistent storage with high IOPS for a database. Which storage option is most suitable?
Easy11You are running a Cloud Run service that experiences occasional cold starts causing latency spikes. You want to minimize cold starts cost-effectively. What should you do?
Medium12A company commits to using Compute Engine for 3 years and wants the maximum discount. Which purchasing option should they use?
Easy13Refer to the exhibit. A team wants to grant the ability to run queries (but not modify) on BigQuery datasets to a new set of users who have email addresses in the 'example.com' domain. What is the simplest way to achieve this?
Easy14Match each GCP database service to its type.
Medium15A team deployed a new version of a service on Cloud Run. After deployment, users report 502 errors. The logs show "Error: Server Error" with no stack trace. What is the first step the team should take to diagnose the issue?
Medium16A developer is deploying a containerized application to Cloud Run. The deployment fails with the error above. What is the most likely cause?
Hard17A company is using Cloud Bigtable for time-series data from IoT devices. They are experiencing high latency for queries that scan a large range of rows. Which THREE actions can improve query performance? (Choose three.)
Hard18Which TWO actions can reduce costs for a Cloud SQL for MySQL instance? (Choose two.)
Easy19A company is running a web application on Compute Engine instances that average 20% CPU utilization. They want to reduce costs without impacting performance. What is the most effective action?
Easy20A Cloud Spanner instance is experiencing high latency for point reads. The instance has 5 nodes and the read throughput is moderate. The table has a primary key with monotonically increasing values. What is the most likely cause and optimization?
Hard21A company wants to optimize their network costs for inter-region traffic using Cloud VPN. What is the most cost-effective configuration?
Easy22A company runs a customer-facing web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in us-central1. The application uses a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database for user data. Recently, they noticed that during peak hours, the application response times increase significantly, and some requests time out. The team has already scaled the GKE nodepool to the maximum size, but the issue persists. Database CPU utilization is at 80%, and connections are near the max limit. The application uses connection pooling via PgBouncer running as a sidecar. The team suspects the database is the bottleneck. They need to improve performance with minimal cost impact. What should they do?
Easy23A company stores large amounts of data in Cloud Storage and wants to reduce costs. Which two actions should they take? (Choose two.)
Medium24A company uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL for their transactional database. They need a disaster recovery solution that provides cross-region failover with a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 1 minute. Which solution meets these requirements?
Medium25Which THREE steps can reduce processing costs in a Dataflow streaming pipeline? (Choose three.)
Hard26A large enterprise is migrating its on-premises data warehouse to BigQuery. The current warehouse is 100 TB and uses complex ETL jobs that run on SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). The team wants to minimize migration effort and maintain the same SQL logic for transformations. They plan to use BigQuery's standard SQL. They also need to schedule transformations and load data from multiple on-premises sources. Which approach should they take?
Hard27A company runs a web application on Compute Engine instances. The application stores session state in files on local SSD. The company wants to reduce costs without sacrificing performance for a predictable traffic pattern. What should they do?
Easy28A financial institution stores sensitive customer data in Cloud Storage. They need to audit all data access and prevent unauthorized data exfiltration. They also require context-aware access controls based on user location and device. Which Google Cloud service should they configure?
Hard29A company runs a web application on App Engine Standard environment. The application experiences downtime during deployments due to traffic shifting. Which two strategies should they implement to improve reliability? (Choose two.)
Hard30Match each GCP migration term to its description.
Medium31Refer to the exhibit. A Cloud Function processes files uploaded to Cloud Storage. It usually completes within 2 minutes, but recently it has been timing out after 540 seconds. What is the most likely cause?
Hard32A company stores backup data in Cloud Storage. They observe high egress costs when clients download backups. Additionally, they must retain backups for 7 years for compliance. Which optimization should they implement first?
Medium33Refer to the exhibit. The output is from `gcloud compute instances describe instance-1 --format=json`. What can you conclude from this output?
Easy34A company uses Cloud Composer to manage Apache Airflow workflows. They want to optimize costs. Which practice is most effective?
Medium35A company migrated their on-premises database to Cloud SQL and now experiences high latency for read-heavy workloads. How can they optimize performance?
Medium36A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to Google Cloud. They want to adopt microservices and improve deployment frequency. Which THREE practices should they adopt? (Choose 3.)
Medium37A financial services company needs a disaster recovery plan for a critical application running on GKE. The application uses Cloud SQL for MySQL. The RPO is 5 minutes and RTO is 15 minutes. Which design meets these requirements cost-effectively?
Hard38A company runs batch processing jobs on a GKE cluster using preemptible node pools. The jobs are fault-tolerant and can be interrupted. However, the cluster is experiencing high costs due to underutilized nodes. The batch jobs run for 2-3 hours each. What is the most cost-effective optimization?
Hard39A company is deploying a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They want to optimize costs without sacrificing availability. They have varying traffic patterns. Which strategy should they recommend?
Medium40A company is migrating its on-premises Oracle database to Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. The database team wants to minimize downtime during migration. Which approach should they use?
Medium41A company uses Cloud Armor to protect their HTTP Load Balancer from DDoS attacks. Recently, they experienced a targeted attack that bypassed Cloud Armor's predefined rules. The attack involved a high rate of legitimate-looking requests from a small set of IPs that made the application unresponsive. The team needs to block the attack quickly without affecting legitimate users. What should they do?
Hard42A company runs a monolithic application on Compute Engine. They want to modernize by moving to microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to improve deployment frequency and resource utilization. However, they are concerned about the increased operational complexity. Which approach best balances modernization benefits with operational overhead?
Medium43Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer created this Terraform configuration to deploy a Compute Engine instance. After applying, they notice the instance is not accessible from the internet. What is the most likely cause?
Easy44A company uses BigQuery for analytics and has a large number of ad-hoc queries from different teams. Costs are rising unpredictably. They want to control costs while maintaining query performance. What should they do?
Medium45A company wants to optimize their cloud spending on Google Cloud. They have a mix of workloads including batch processing, real-time analytics, and web serving. Which TWO strategies should they implement to reduce costs without significant architectural changes? (Choose two.)
Hard46A company runs a batch job every night that processes large CSV files stored in Cloud Storage. The job runs on a single Compute Engine VM and takes 4 hours to complete. The team wants to reduce execution time without increasing cost substantially. The job is CPU-intensive and can be parallelized. What should they do?
Easy47A company is using Cloud NAT to allow instances in a private subnet to access the internet for updates. The security team wants to audit outbound connections. Which TWO steps should be taken to enable flow logs for Cloud NAT?
Medium48A financial services company uses Cloud SQL for MySQL for a critical application. They need zero downtime during maintenance and automatic failover across zones. They configured a Cloud SQL instance with high availability (HA). During a recent regional outage, the application experienced 10 minutes of downtime. What should they add to improve availability?
Hard49Your company runs a multi-tier web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The application consists of a frontend service, a backend API service, and a PostgreSQL database deployed using a StatefulSet with persistent volumes. The backend service exposes a gRPC endpoint. Recently, the team noticed that the backend service experiences intermittent high latency and occasional timeouts. The frontend service is stateless and scales well. The backend service is CPU-bound. The database is not the bottleneck. The cluster has three nodes of type n1-standard-4. The backend service is deployed with 10 replicas, each requesting 1 CPU and 2 Gi memory. Node utilization is around 70% CPU. The team suspects the network is the issue. However, after reviewing the GKE monitoring dashboard, they see that the network bytes sent/received per second for the backend pods is well below the node's network bandwidth limit. The latency spikes seem correlated with periods of high CPU throttling on the backend pods. The backend service's gRPC requests are small (under 1 KB), and the responses are also small. The team has already optimized the application code. What should the team do to reduce latency?
Hard50Refer to the exhibit. This is an IAM policy for a BigQuery dataset. What does the policy allow?
Medium51A company is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application running on Compute Engine with a regional persistent disk. They want to minimize recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). Which TWO strategies should they implement? (Choose two.)
Medium52A company runs a streaming data pipeline using Dataflow to process real-time data and insert into BigQuery. Recently, workers are frequently failing with out-of-memory errors and the pipeline latency is increasing. What should they do to resolve the issue?
Hard53A startup runs a web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with 3 replicas serving user traffic. They use Cloud SQL for the database. Recently, the application experienced intermittent timeouts during peak hours. Monitoring shows high CPU usage on the GKE nodes and increased database connection pool exhaustion. The team is looking for a cost-effective solution that minimizes architectural changes. The application is stateless. What should they do?
Easy54Refer to the exhibit. A Cloud Run service is experiencing high latency and returns 502 errors when traffic spikes. What should the team adjust first?
Medium55A company is using BigQuery for analytics and wants to optimize query costs. They have many ad-hoc queries that scan large tables. What is the best practice?
Hard56A company is using Cloud CDN to accelerate content delivery. They notice increased costs from cache misses. What can they do?
Medium57A startup deploys a web application on Compute Engine instances behind an HTTP load balancer. They need to handle unpredictable spikes in traffic with minimal operational overhead. What is the simplest scaling approach?
Easy58A company wants to implement a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application on GKE. They require automated canary deployments with gradual traffic shifting and automatic rollback on metric failure. Which Google Cloud service is most suitable?
Medium59Refer to the exhibit. The log entry is from Cloud Logging for a VPC subnetwork. What is the most likely cause of this error?
Hard60A company has a multi-region deployment of App Engine and wants to optimize request routing for latency and cost. Which GCP service should they use?
Hard61A company is using Cloud Spanner to serve a global gaming application. They have a single instance in us-central1. Players in Asia experience high latency. The application reads and writes player profiles. The team wants to reduce latency for Asian players while keeping write latency low for global consistency. They need a solution that minimizes operational overhead and uses native Spanner capabilities. What should they do?
Medium62A startup deploys a microservices application on GKE. They need to ensure high availability of the services. Which two strategies should they implement? (Choose TWO.)
Easy63A company uses Cloud Build to automate their CI/CD pipeline. They want to optimize the build process for a Java application. Which three practices should they adopt? (Choose three.)
Easy64A data analytics team uses BigQuery to run large queries. They want to reduce query costs. Which three practices should they adopt? (Choose THREE.)
Medium65A company is using Cloud Storage for backups and wants to minimize costs. The backups are accessed infrequently and can tolerate retrieval delays. Which storage class is most appropriate?
Easy66A company runs a large-scale data processing pipeline using Dataflow with streaming data from Pub/Sub. They notice increasing costs due to high data shuffle operations. They want to optimize the pipeline performance and cost. Which approach should they take?
Hard67A company uses BigQuery for analytics. They have a large partitioned table that is queried frequently. The query performance has degraded over time. Which optimization should they try first?
Medium68Which TWO strategies should a company implement to optimize costs for a production GKE cluster? (Choose two.)
Medium69An e-commerce platform uses Cloud Spanner for order processing. Recently, latency spikes have occurred during flash sales. The team suspects hot spots due to monotonically increasing order IDs. Which table design change would best solve this?
Hard70A company is using BigQuery for data analytics. They want to optimize costs while maintaining query performance. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose 2.)
Easy71An organization runs a Kubernetes cluster on GKE with cluster autoscaling enabled. They notice that pods are frequently in 'Pending' state due to insufficient CPU, but the cluster autoscaler does not add nodes quickly enough. What is the most likely cause?
Hard72A development team uses Cloud Build for their CI/CD pipeline. They want to reduce build times. Which action is most effective?
Easy73A company is using Cloud Functions (2nd gen) for event-driven processing of uploaded images in Cloud Storage. Each image is resized to multiple sizes and stored back in different buckets. Recently, the number of uploads has increased 10x, and the team notices that some images are not being processed, and logs show function execution timeouts after 60 seconds. The function's timeout is set to 60 seconds. The code processes images sequentially. The team needs to reliably process all images with minimal code changes. What should they do?
Medium74A startup uses Cloud Functions with a Pub/Sub trigger to process incoming orders. They notice that the function sometimes fails to process messages, and those messages are lost. What is the most likely cause?
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