Google ACE Practice Question: Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution
This ACE practice question tests your understanding of ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution. This is a configuration task: choose the command set that satisfies every stated requirement. Small differences — like 'secret' vs 'password' or 'transport input ssh' vs 'all' — change whether the answer is correct. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A small business is deploying a web application on Compute Engine and wants to ensure high availability. They have set up two instances in different zones behind a TCP load balancer. What should they also configure to detect and route traffic away from unhealthy instances?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Configure a health check on the load balancer.
A health check is required for the TCPload balancer to monitor the backend instances. It periodically probes the instances on a specified port and path, marking them as unhealthy if they fail to respond. The load balancer then stops routing new traffic to unhealthy instances, ensuring high availability by directing traffic only to healthy backends.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✓
Configure a health check on the load balancer.
Why this is correct
Health checks allow the load balancer to stop sending traffic to unhealthy instances.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Set a firewall rule to allow traffic only on port 80.
Global HTTP(S) load balancer is for HTTP traffic, not TCP, and also requires health checks.
✗
Create a snapshot schedule for the persistent disks.
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots are for backups, not health detection.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often confuse health checks with firewall rules or backup strategies, thinking that allowing traffic or creating snapshots ensures availability, but only health checks provide the active monitoring needed to detect and route around failures.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Under the hood, the TCPload balancer uses a health check probe that sends a SYN packet to the instance's IP and port; if the instance responds with a SYN-ACK within the configured timeout (default 5 seconds), it is considered healthy. The load balancer maintains a health state table and updates it based on consecutive probe failures (default 2 failures to mark unhealthy). In a real-world scenario, if an instance experiences a kernel panic or application crash but the VM is still running, the health check will detect the lack of response and remove it from the backend pool, preventing traffic loss.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this ACE question in full detail.
Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution — This question tests Ensuring successful operation of a cloud solution — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Configure a health check on the load balancer. — A health check is required for the TCP load balancer to monitor the backend instances. It periodically probes the instances on a specified port and path, marking them as unhealthy if they fail to respond. The load balancer then stops routing new traffic to unhealthy instances, ensuring high availability by directing traffic only to healthy backends.
What should I do if I get this ACE question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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