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ACE Practice Question: A cost-conscious team notices their GKE cluster's…

This ACE practice question tests your understanding of a cost-conscious team notices their gke cluster's…. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. 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 cost-conscious team notices their GKE cluster's node pools have consistently high memory utilization (>90%) while CPU remains at 30%. Pods are occasionally OOMKilled. What should they do to balance resource efficiency and stability?

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A cost-conscious team notices their GKE cluster's node pools have consistently high memory utilization (>90%) while CPU remains at 30%. Pods are occasionally OOMKilled. What should they do to balance resource efficiency and stability?

Answer choices

Why each option matters

Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.

A

Distractor review

Enable vertical pod autoscaling (VPA) set to Recreate mode as the only change

VPA can adjust resource requests, but Recreate mode restarts Pods to apply changes — not ideal for production. VPA is complementary to, not a replacement for, right-sizing the node type.

B

Distractor review

Increase CPU limits for all Pods to use the available CPU capacity

The bottleneck is memory, not CPU — increasing CPU limits doesn't help OOMKills caused by insufficient RAM.

C

Distractor review

Reduce the number of replica Pods to lower memory consumption

Reducing replicas reduces availability — it's not the right solution for a sizing problem. The cluster needs more memory capacity, not fewer workloads.

D

Best answer

Switch node pool machine type to a memory-optimized series (e.g., m2-ultramem) and ensure Pod memory requests are accurate

Memory-optimized machine types provide more RAM per vCPU, directly addressing the memory bottleneck. Accurate Pod requests let the scheduler pack Pods efficiently and let the autoscaler add the right type of capacity.

Common exam trap

Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword

Many certification questions include familiar terms but test a specific constraint. Read the exact wording before choosing an answer that is generally true but wrong for this case.

Technical deep dive

How to think about this question

This question should be treated as a scenario, not a definition check. Identify the problem, the constraint and the best action. Then compare each option against those facts.

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.
  • Use explanations to understand the rule behind the answer.

TExam Day Tips

  • Underline the problem statement mentally.
  • 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.

Related practice questions

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FAQ

Questions learners often ask

What does this ACE question test?

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Switch node pool machine type to a memory-optimized series (e.g., m2-ultramem) and ensure Pod memory requests are accurate — When memory is the bottleneck, the team should adjust Pod memory requests/limits and consider switching to memory-optimized machine types. Accurate resource requests also improve cluster autoscaler decisions. Simply adding more nodes helps but wastes CPU resources if memory-optimized types aren't used.

What should I do if I get this ACE question wrong?

Identify which ACE exam domain this question belongs to, then review the specific concept being tested. Practise related questions in that domain and focus on understanding why each wrong answer is tempting — not just why the correct answer is right.

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This ACE 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 ACE exam.