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ACE Practice Question: A company's application currently runs on a…
This ACE practice question tests your understanding of a company's application currently runs on a…. 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 company's application currently runs on a single Compute Engine VM with a persistent disk. The application serves read-heavy traffic and the single VM is becoming a bottleneck. The application is stateless. Which change provides the most immediate horizontal scalability improvement?
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
Upgrade the existing VM to a larger machine type (vertical scaling).
Vertical scaling has a ceiling and requires downtime. Horizontal scaling with MIGs is more resilient and scalable.
B
Best answer
Create a Managed Instance Group from the VM and configure autoscaling with a load balancer.
A MIG with autoscaling adds VM instances on demand. A load balancer distributes incoming requests across all instances, providing true horizontal scalability.
C
Distractor review
Enable live migration on the existing VM so it can move between hosts.
Live migration moves a VM between physical hosts for maintenance purposes — it has no effect on scalability or traffic distribution.
D
Distractor review
Add more persistent disks to the existing VM to handle more I/O.
Additional persistent disks improve I/O throughput, not compute or network capacity. The bottleneck is the single VM's CPU/memory, not disk I/O.
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
Related ACE practice-question pages
Use these pages to review the topic behind this question. This is how one missed question becomes focused revision.
More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
What is the correct order of the Google Cloud resource hierarchy from highest to lowest level?
Question 2
A compliance archive stores legal documents accessed at most once per quarter. Which Cloud Storage class minimizes storage cost while meeting that access pattern?
Question 3
Which gcloud command creates a Compute Engine VM named 'web-01' using the e2-medium machine type in zone us-central1-a?
Question 4
A team wants to receive an email alert when the average CPU utilization of VMs in a managed instance group exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes. What should they create in Cloud Monitoring?
Question 5
A junior developer needs read-only access to all GCP resources in a project. Which IAM role grants the minimum permissions required?
Question 6
A startup creates its first Google Cloud project. Before deploying any paid resources, what must be linked to the project?
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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: Create a Managed Instance Group from the VM and configure autoscaling with a load balancer. — Converting from a single VM to a Managed Instance Group (MIG) with autoscaling allows horizontal scaling: new VM instances are added automatically when load increases. A load balancer distributes traffic across all instances. The persistent disk is replaced by a shared external storage solution (Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, etc.) since each VM in a MIG gets its own boot disk — but for stateless applications, this is straightforward. MIGs are the fundamental GCP horizontal scaling mechanism for VM-based workloads.
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.