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Optimizing performance and cost

Practise Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Optimizing performance and cost practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.

54 questions16 easy20 medium18 hard

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What this domain covers

What to know about Optimizing performance and cost

QoS questions usually test traffic classification (DSCP/CoS), queuing strategies, policing vs shaping and where each mechanism is applied.

DSCP and CoS marking and trust boundaries.

Queuing mechanisms: FIFO, WFQ, CBWFQ, LLQ.

Policing (drops excess) vs shaping (delays excess).

Where QoS is applied: ingress, egress, LAN, WAN.

Watch out for

Common Optimizing performance and cost exam traps

  • Policing drops traffic; shaping buffers it — they solve different problems.
  • DSCP EF (46) is for voice; AF classes are for data tiers.
  • QoS must be configured end-to-end to be effective.
  • CoS values are Layer 2; DSCP is Layer 3.

Question index

All Optimizing performance and cost questions (54)

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1

A company runs a nightly batch data processing job on Compute Engine instances. The job runs for approximately 2 hours each night and is fault-tolerant (can resume from checkpoint). The team wants to minimize costs. Which TWO strategies should they implement? (Choose two.)

Medium
2

A DevOps engineer is reviewing GCP costs and notices high network egress charges. Which two actions can help reduce network egress costs? (Choose two.)

Medium
3

Order the steps to respond to a Google Cloud security incident involving a compromised service account key.

Medium
4

A data processing company runs nightly batch jobs that can tolerate interruptions. They want to minimize compute costs. Which compute option should they use?

Easy
5

A large enterprise manages costs across multiple GCP projects using a shared billing account. They want to apply a 10% discount on all committed use discounts (CUDs) to specific departments based on resource labels. How should they allocate the CUD savings?

Hard
6

A team wants to receive a notification when their monthly spending exceeds 80% of the budget. Which GCP feature should they configure?

Easy
7

Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer configured a budget alert with Pub/Sub notifications. However, the team is not receiving alerts. The Pub/Sub subscription is set up correctly and messages can be published manually. What is the most likely reason the budget alerts are not being sent?

Hard
8

Match each SRE term to its description.

Medium
9

Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer needs to view the cost report for a project. Which role should be granted at the organization level to allow viewing billing data for all projects in the organization?

Easy
10

A DevOps engineer notices that the budget alerts for a project are not triggering even though spending exceeds thresholds. The budget is configured at the billing account level, filtering for that project only. The project is linked to the correct billing account. What is the most likely cause?

Hard
11

A company runs a large-scale data processing workload on Dataflow. The pipeline processes streaming data from Pub/Sub and writes results to BigQuery. The current monthly Dataflow cost is $50,000, and the company wants to reduce it. They have already optimized the pipeline code and reduced data shuffling. They notice that the Dataflow workers are running at 100% CPU for most of the time, but the job's autoscaling is set to 'throughput-based' and currently uses 20 workers. The job's latency SLAs are tight. They consider switching to 'flexible resource scheduling' (FlexRS) to reduce costs. What should they evaluate before enabling FlexRS?

Hard
12

A company is using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with multiple node pools. They notice that their monthly costs are higher than expected. Upon review, they find that several preemptible VMs are being recreated frequently, leading to sustained usage costs. What is the most cost-effective solution to reduce costs?

Medium
13

An e-commerce company uses Cloud SQL for MySQL to support their online store. The database has a 500GB dataset. They notice that monthly costs have increased significantly. On reviewing the billing export to BigQuery, they see that the highest cost is from 'Cloud SQL - Storage' and 'Cloud SQL - Backups'. They currently have automated backups enabled with a retention of 7 days. They also take manual backups before every deployment, which are stored for 30 days. They want to reduce backup storage costs without compromising disaster recovery. What should they do?

Hard
14

Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer noticed that the nightly batch processing costs are higher than expected. After running the above command, what is the most likely cause?

Medium
15

A DevOps team is analyzing Google Cloud costs and notices that spending on BigQuery has increased significantly. They want to reduce costs without impacting ongoing analytical workloads. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose two.)

Medium
16

An organization wants to optimize BigQuery costs. Which three practices should they implement? (Choose three.)

Hard
17

A DevOps engineer is responsible for cost optimization of GKE clusters. They have identified that many nodes are underutilized. What is the best approach to reduce costs without impacting availability?

Medium
18

Refer to the exhibit. What does this recommendation suggest?

Easy
19

A DevOps engineer notices that the monthly compute cost is higher than expected for a Kubernetes Engine cluster. They want to identify which namespaces or workloads are contributing most to the cost. What should they do?

Easy
20

A company has multiple projects under an organization. They want to allocate costs to different departments based on project labels. They have applied labels to all resources, but the cost reports show 'Unlabeled' for many resources. What is the most likely cause?

Medium
21

A DevOps team wants to get a monthly report of GCP costs broken down by service and project. What is the simplest way to achieve this?

Easy
22

A company is using Google Cloud and wants to monitor and control costs. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose two.)

Medium
23

A company runs a production workload on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with cluster autoscaling enabled. The cluster has three node pools: one for general-purpose workloads (n1-standard-4), one for memory-intensive workloads (n2-highmem-8), and one for GPU-accelerated jobs (with 1 NVIDIA Tesla T4 per node). The workloads are a mix of stateless microservices and stateful databases. Over the past month, the monthly GKE cost has increased by 40% despite no significant change in application traffic or resource requests. The team has verified that vertical pod autoscaling and node auto-provisioning are enabled. They have also checked that there are no orphaned resources. They suspect that overspending is due to inefficient resource utilization or node selection. What should the team do to identify and reduce the unnecessary cost?

Hard
24

A company wants to set budgets and alerts for a GCP project. Which two steps are required to enable budget notifications via email? (Choose two.)

Easy
25

A company uses BigQuery on-demand pricing. They want to reduce costs without changing usage patterns. Which THREE strategies are effective? (Choose three.)

Hard
26

A company has multiple projects in an organization. They want to set a budget of $5000 per month on a specific project and receive notifications when spending reaches 50% and 90%. What should they do?

Medium
27

Arrange the steps to troubleshoot a high latency issue on a Google Cloud HTTP(S) Load Balancer.

Medium
28

Refer to the exhibit. The output shows a recommendation from the Cloud Cost Optimization recommender for an instance in us-central1-a. The instance is a production web server that consistently runs at 25% CPU utilization during peak hours. What should the DevOps engineer do to implement this recommendation with minimal risk?

Easy
29

A company uses Compute Engine with committed use discounts for 1-year. They need to reduce costs further. What should they do?

Medium
30

Which THREE actions can help optimize Cloud Storage costs? (Choose three.)

Medium
31

Refer to the exhibit. The company received an alert when the threshold was triggered. What does this alert indicate?

Hard
32

A company uses BigQuery on-demand pricing. To control costs, they want to prevent any single query from scanning more than 1 TB of data. How can they enforce this?

Easy
33

A startup wants to reduce their Google Cloud costs for a batch processing job that runs nightly for 3 hours. The job is fault-tolerant and can tolerate interruptions. What is the most cost-effective compute option?

Easy
34

A company is moving large amounts of data between regions. Which two actions can reduce network egress costs? (Choose two.)

Easy
35

Refer to the exhibit. A DevOps engineer wants to reduce compute costs immediately. Which action is most effective?

Medium
36

A company wants to receive notifications when their Google Cloud costs exceed $5000 in a month. They have set a budget alert at the billing account level. What is the minimum configuration required to ensure they get alerted?

Easy
37

You are a DevOps engineer at a large e-commerce company that runs its production workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in the us-central1 region. The cluster has 500 nodes, each with 8 vCPUs and 32 GB of memory, and uses preemptible VMs for cost savings. Over the past month, the monthly GKE cost has increased by 30% unexpectedly. Upon reviewing the billing reports, you notice a significant spike in Compute Engine costs, specifically for 'Sustained Use Discount' line items, but the total cost is higher than expected. You also observe that the cluster's node utilization is inconsistent, with some nodes running at 90% CPU and memory while others are below 20%. Your team has been deploying stateless microservices and using Cluster Autoscaler with default settings. The application traffic is variable but predictable, with peaks on weekends. You need to reduce the GKE costs without impacting performance. What should you do?

Hard
38

A company runs a web application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with multiple services. They want to reduce costs without impacting performance. Which THREE actions should they take? (Choose three.)

Hard
39

A company wants to optimize costs for their Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters. Which three best practices should they implement? (Choose three.)

Medium
40

A company uses BigQuery for analytics with many queries scanning terabytes daily. They need to reduce query costs without reducing usage. What is the most effective strategy?

Hard
41

A company has purchased Compute Engine committed use discounts (CUD) for 1 year for vCPU and memory. After 3 months, they need to upgrade some VMs to a larger machine type. What happens to the CUD coverage?

Hard
42

A company uses Cloud Storage to store archival data. They want to minimize storage costs while maintaining availability. Which storage class should they use?

Easy
43

A company uses BigQuery for analytics. They notice high costs due to queries scanning large amounts of data. They want to reduce costs without sacrificing performance for urgent queries. Which approach is most cost-effective?

Hard
44

What is the primary benefit of using preemptible VMs?

Easy
45

Match each cost optimization practice to its description.

Medium
46

A company runs a critical application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with 3 nodes (e2-standard-4). To reduce costs, the team is considering right-sizing the nodes. The application is latency-sensitive and experiences periodic traffic spikes. What is the most cost-effective approach that maintains performance during spikes?

Hard
47

A company uses BigQuery flat-rate pricing with 1000 slots. During peak hours, queries are queued, but during off-peak, many slots are idle. What is the most cost-effective way to handle the idle slots?

Medium
48

A company uses Cloud Storage with standard storage class for all data. They want to automatically move data that has been accessed more than 30 days ago to a lower-cost storage class, and after 90 days to archive. What should they configure?

Hard
49

A company is using BigQuery for analytics and wants to control costs. They have many queries that scan large amounts of data. Which approach is most effective in reducing query costs?

Medium
50

A startup runs a batch data processing job every night. The job processes large datasets and takes about 6 hours to complete. The job is designed to handle interruptions gracefully by saving checkpoint files to Cloud Storage every few minutes. The startup wants to minimize compute costs. The current setup uses a managed instance group with 10 n1-standard-4 VMs running for the entire 6-hour window. They are considering using preemptible VMs. However, they are concerned about cost stability and potential preemption. What should they do?

Easy
51

A company uses Cloud CDN to deliver content globally. They notice increasing egress costs. Which change will most effectively reduce egress costs?

Hard
52

A mid-size company has multiple Google Cloud projects for different departments. The finance team wants to set up budget alerts to track spending across all projects. They have enabled billing export to BigQuery. The budget should trigger alerts when total cumulative spending exceeds 80% and 100% of the monthly budget of $10,000. The budget must be applied across all projects in the organization. They created a budget at the billing account level with amount $10,000, set alert thresholds at 80% and 100%, and added email recipients. However, after two weeks, spending in one project alone has exceeded $8,000 but no alert was triggered. What is the most likely cause?

Medium
53

A team uses Cloud SQL for MySQL. They have read-heavy traffic and want to reduce costs. Which strategy is most effective?

Hard
54

Which GCP tool provides recommendations for rightsizing Compute Engine VMs?

Easy

Frequently asked questions

What does the Optimizing performance and cost domain cover on the PCDOE exam?
QoS questions usually test traffic classification (DSCP/CoS), queuing strategies, policing vs shaping and where each mechanism is applied.
How many questions are in this domain?
This page lists all 54 Optimizing performance and cost questions in the PCDOE question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
What is the best way to practise this domain?
Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
Can I practise only Optimizing performance and cost questions?
Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.
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