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. 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 runs a data processing pipeline on Cloud Dataproc. The pipeline reads data from Cloud Storage, processes it with Spark, and writes results to BigQuery. Recently, the pipeline has been failing with errors indicating insufficient disk space on the worker nodes. The cluster is configured with standard worker nodes with 100 GB of standard persistent disk. The data size being processed has grown from 50 GB to 150 GB. What is the most cost-effective way to resolve the disk space issue?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Enable automatic disk resizing for the cluster.
Option C is correct because Cloud Dataproc's automatic disk resizing feature dynamically increases the size of persistent disks on worker nodes when disk usage exceeds a threshold (default 90%). This resolves the insufficient disk space issue without manual intervention or additional cost for unused capacity, making it the most cost-effective solution for handling the increased data volume from 50 GB to 150 GB.
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.
✗
Increase the size of the persistent disks on the worker nodes to 200 GB.
Why it's wrong here
Manual disk resize works but is less cost-effective than automatic scaling.
✗
Use local SSDs instead of persistent disks for temporary storage.
Why it's wrong here
Local SSDs are more expensive and not needed for capacity; they are for performance.
✓
Enable automatic disk resizing for the cluster.
Why this is correct
Automatic disk resizing adjusts disk size based on usage, managing cost efficiently.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Increase the number of worker nodes in the cluster.
Why it's wrong here
Adding nodes distributes the load but each node still has limited disk space.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Google Cloud often tests the misconception that adding more nodes (scaling out) is the default solution for storage issues, but the trap here is that the problem is disk space per node, not cluster capacity, making automatic disk resizing the most cost-effective and operationally efficient fix.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Automatic disk resizing in Cloud Dataproc works by monitoring the disk usage of each worker node via the Cloud Monitoring agent and triggering a resize operation when usage exceeds a configurable threshold (default 90%). The resize operation uses the Compute Engine API to increase the persistent disk size by a predefined increment (e.g., 100 GB) without requiring cluster restart, ensuring minimal disruption. This feature is particularly useful for bursty workloads where data size fluctuates, as it avoids over-provisioning and reduces costs compared to static disk sizing.
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 startup's cloud architect reviews their monthly bill and notices costs are higher than expected for a long-running batch job. Switching from on-demand instances to Reserved Instances — or using Spot/Preemptible VMs — can reduce compute costs by up to 72 %. Questions like this test whether you understand the tradeoffs between commitment, flexibility, and cost across cloud pricing models.
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: Enable automatic disk resizing for the cluster. — Option C is correct because Cloud Dataproc's automatic disk resizing feature dynamically increases the size of persistent disks on worker nodes when disk usage exceeds a threshold (default 90%). This resolves the insufficient disk space issue without manual intervention or additional cost for unused capacity, making it the most cost-effective solution for handling the increased data volume from 50 GB to 150 GB.
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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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.
Question Discussion
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