Courseiva

PCD · topic practice

Building and testing applications practice questions

Practise Google Professional Cloud Developer Building and testing applications practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.

Courseiva uses original exam-style practice questions designed for learning and revision. The goal is to understand the concepts, recognise exam patterns, and improve through explanations — not memorise copied exam dumps.

Reviewed byJohnson Ajibi· MSc IT Security
20 questionsDomain: Building and testing applications

What the exam tests

What to know about Building and testing applications

Building and testing applications questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.

How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.

Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.

How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.

How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.

Watch out for

Common Building and testing applications exam traps

  • Answering from memory before reading the full scenario.
  • Missing a constraint such as cost, availability, security, scope or command context.
  • Choosing a broad answer when the question asks for the most specific fix.
  • Ignoring why the wrong options are tempting.

Practice set

Building and testing applications questions

20 questions · select your answer, then reveal the explanation

A team is developing a microservice that processes messages from Pub/Sub. The service is deployed on Cloud Run and uses Cloud Firestore to store processed data. During load testing, the service frequently fails with 'DeadlineExceeded' errors from Firestore. What is the most likely cause and best practice to fix it?

Your team has developed a containerized application that processes streaming data from Pub/Sub. The application is deployed on Cloud Run. Under normal load, it processes messages within seconds. However, during spikes, processing time increases and some messages are not acknowledged before the Cloud Run request timeout of 60 minutes. You need to ensure that all messages are processed reliably without losing data. You have the following options: A) Increase the Cloud Run request timeout to 120 minutes. B) Use Cloud Run jobs instead of services to handle the processing asynchronously. C) Set up a second subscription to Pub/Sub with a different push endpoint to parallelize processing. D) Use a Cloud Tasks queue to decouple the Pub/Sub push and process messages with retries. Which option should you choose?

You are a Cloud Developer working for an e-commerce company. The company uses Cloud Build to build and deploy a Python application to App Engine standard environment. The application uses Cloud SQL for its database. The team recently updated the application code and added a new dependency. The build succeeds, but the deployment fails with 'Error Response: [9] Application startup error!' You check the logs and see 'ImportError: No module named requests'. The team uses a requirements.txt file. However, the requirements.txt file has been configured correctly in the past. The team also uses a custom runtime config in app.yaml with a 'entrypoint' field. They did not change any configuration files. What is the most likely cause of this error?

A company is developing a microservices application on Google Cloud. Each service is deployed as a Docker container on Cloud Run. The development team wants to ensure that inter-service communication is encrypted and authenticated. What is the best approach?

A developer is designing a CI/CD pipeline for a Node.js application hosted on Cloud Run using Cloud Build. The pipeline should run unit tests, build the container, push to Artifact Registry, and deploy to Cloud Run. The developer wants to minimize build time by caching dependencies. What is the recommended approach?

A developer needs to test a Cloud Function locally before deploying. Which tool should they use?

A team is building a mobile backend on Google Cloud using Cloud Endpoints with Firebase Authentication. They want to protect their API from abuse by implementing rate limiting per user. What approach should they take?

A company is migrating a monolithic Java application to microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The application uses a shared MySQL database. The team wants to adopt a testing strategy that validates service interactions without deploying to a full cluster. Which testing approach is most appropriate?

Which TWO statements about building container images for Google Cloud Run are correct? (Choose TWO.)

Which THREE steps are required to set up a CI/CD pipeline for Cloud Run using Cloud Build and GitHub? (Choose THREE.)

A developer needs to build a CI/CD pipeline that automatically tests and deploys a Node.js application to Cloud Run whenever a pull request is merged to the main branch. Which Google Cloud service should be used to trigger the pipeline?

A company deploys a Java application on Compute Engine with a preemptible VM instance group managed by an instance template. The application writes critical state to local SSD. After a preemption event, the new instance starts fresh and loses state. What is the best practice to ensure state persistence?

During a code review, a developer notices that the application's Cloud Storage client library is using the default credentials of the Compute Engine instance. What is a more secure alternative for a production environment?

A team is migrating a monolithic .NET application to Cloud Run. The application uses .NET Framework 4.8 and depends on Windows-specific libraries. What is the recommended approach to containerize and deploy this application?

Which TWO practices should be followed when integrating Cloud Endpoints with a Cloud Run service to enforce API authentication and rate limiting?

Which THREE steps are required to set up end-to-end testing for a Cloud Run service that uses Firestore and Pub/Sub?

Refer to the exhibit. A developer deployed a Cloud Run service as shown. Authenticated requests from another service in the same project using a service account receive 403 Forbidden. What is the most likely cause?

Network Topology
gcloud builds submittag gcr.io/my-project/my-image .gcloud run deploy my-serviceimage gcr.io/my-project/my-imageregion us-central1no-allow-unauthenticatedRefer to the exhibit.Then:

Refer to the exhibit. A developer is configuring Cloud Build to build a Docker image from a Cloud Source Repository. The build fails with a permission error. What is the most likely reason?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

{
  "bindings": [
    {
      "role": "roles/cloudbuild.builds.builder",
      "members": [
        "serviceAccount:build-sa@my-project.iam.gserviceaccount.com"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

A developer is building a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application. The pipeline should build a container image, run unit tests, and deploy to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) only if all tests pass. Which Google Cloud service is best suited for orchestrating this pipeline?

A team uses Cloud Source Repositories for version control and Cloud Build for CI. The build configuration file (cloudbuild.yaml) includes a step that runs unit tests. The team wants to ensure that the build fails if any test fails. What should the developer do?

Free account

Track your progress over time

Create a free account to save your results and see which topics improve across sessions.

Focused Building and testing applications sessions

Start a Building and testing applications only practice session

Every question in these sessions is drawn from the Building and testing applications domain — nothing else.

Related practice questions

Related PCD topic practice pages

Move into related areas when this topic feels solid.

Frequently asked questions

What does the PCD exam test about Building and testing applications?
Building and testing applications questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.
How should I use these practice questions?
Select your answer before revealing the explanation. Then read why each option is right or wrong — this active recall approach builds retention far faster than re-reading notes.
Can I practise just Building and testing applications questions in a focused session?
Yes — the session launcher on this page draws every question from the Building and testing applications domain. Use a 10-question session first to gauge your baseline, then move to 20 or 30 once the weak spots are clear.
Where can I practise other PCD topics?
Use the topic links above to move to related areas, or go back to the PCD question bank to see all topics.
Are these real exam questions or dumps?
These are original practice questions written to test the same concepts the PCD exam covers. They are not copied from any real exam or dump site.