Google ACE Configuring access and security Practice Question
This ACE practice question tests your understanding of configuring access and security. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. 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.
Your company recently migrated to GCP and you are the new cloud administrator. You need to ensure that only specific members of the DevOps team can perform administrative actions on Compute Engine instances, such as starting, stopping, and resetting instances, but not creating or deleting them. You also want to prevent them from modifying firewall rules or other network settings. The team consists of 10 members. You have already created a custom role with the necessary permissions and assigned it to a Google Group that contains all team members. However, you receive a report that a team member was able to accidentally delete a production instance. Upon investigation, you find that the team member had been granted the roles/compute.instanceAdmin role in addition to your custom role by another administrator. What should be the best course of action to prevent this from happening again while still allowing the team to perform their intended tasks?
Clue words in this question
Noticing these words before you look at the options changes how you read each choice.
Clue: "best"
Why it matters: Signals that multiple options may be partially correct. Choose the option that most directly solves the exact problem described, not the one that sounds most complete.
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Remove the compute.instanceAdmin role from the team member and audit all user assignments for role conflicts.
Option A is correct because the core issue is that the team member had an additional, more permissive role (roles/compute.instanceAdmin) that overrode the restrictions of your custom role. Removing that conflicting role from the specific user and auditing all assignments ensures that only the intended permissions are applied, preventing accidental deletions while preserving the team's ability to start, stop, and reset instances.
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.
✓
Remove the compute.instanceAdmin role from the team member and audit all user assignments for role conflicts.
Why this is correct
This removes the unintended permission and prevents similar issues by auditing.
Clue confirmation
The clue word "best" in the question point toward this answer.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Create an organization policy to block deletion of compute instances.
Why it's wrong here
This would prevent all deletions, including those that might be needed by other roles.
✗
Remove the custom role from the team member and keep only the compute.instanceAdmin role.
Why it's wrong here
This would give the team member deletion ability, which is not intended.
✗
Use IAM conditions on the custom role to enforce that instances can only be stopped during business hours.
Why it's wrong here
This does not address the deletion permission conflict; it only restricts timing.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Google Cloud often tests the misconception that you can simply 'block' a specific action (like deletion) via a policy or condition, rather than understanding that IAM permissions are additive and the only way to prevent an action is to remove the role that grants it.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
IAM roles in GCP are additive — when a user has multiple roles, they receive the union of all permissions. The roles/compute.instanceAdmin role includes the compute.instances.delete permission, which is not present in your custom role. Even if your custom role explicitly denies deletion, IAM does not support deny rules natively (except through Organization Policies or Deny policies in GCP's IAM Deny v2), so the only way to remove the delete permission is to revoke the role that grants it. Auditing all assignments via the IAM Policy Troubleshooter or using the gcloud projects get-iam-policy command helps identify similar conflicts across the team.
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
A company's IT admin needs to give a contractor read-only access to production logs without sharing account credentials. Using role-based access control (RBAC) and temporary scoped permissions — not a permanent shared password — is the correct pattern. Questions like this test whether you can apply least-privilege access across cloud identity services.
Related glossary terms
Concepts from this question explained
These glossary pages explain the core terms tested in this ACE question in full detail.
Configuring access and security — This question tests Configuring access and security — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Remove the compute.instanceAdmin role from the team member and audit all user assignments for role conflicts. — Option A is correct because the core issue is that the team member had an additional, more permissive role (roles/compute.instanceAdmin) that overrode the restrictions of your custom role. Removing that conflicting role from the specific user and auditing all assignments ensures that only the intended permissions are applied, preventing accidental deletions while preserving the team's ability to start, stop, and reset instances.
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.
Are there clue words in this question I should notice?
Yes — watch for: "best". Signals that multiple options may be partially correct. Choose the option that most directly solves the exact problem described, not the one that sounds most complete.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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