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GCDL Practice Question: A company's cloud spending suddenly spikes by…
This GCDL practice question tests your understanding of a company's cloud spending suddenly spikes by…. 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 cloud spending suddenly spikes by 300% for one week before returning to normal. The cloud team investigates and finds a developer accidentally left a large cluster of VMs running over the weekend. Which cloud financial management practice most effectively prevents this type of unexpected cost spike?
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
Best answer
Setting Cloud Billing budget alerts that notify stakeholders when spending approaches defined thresholds, enabling early detection and response to abnormal spending patterns
Budget alerts are the direct preventive control. A budget alert at 150% of normal daily spending would have triggered early Saturday morning, prompting investigation. This gives the team time to act before a full weekend of over-spending accumulates. Budget alerts with escalating thresholds (50%, 80%, 100%, 150%) are a best practice.
B
Distractor review
Reviewing cloud bills at the end of each month to identify cost anomalies and address them retroactively
Monthly retrospective review would identify the spike after the money was already spent. Detection must be real-time (budget alerts) to prevent or limit the damage, not monthly after the fact.
C
Distractor review
Using Reserved Instances for all VM workloads to reduce per-hour costs, making accidental long-running VMs less expensive
Committing to reserved capacity for all VMs (including accidentally running ones) would reduce the per-hour rate but not prevent or detect the accidental over-spending. Budget alerts address detection; reserved pricing only addresses cost per unit.
D
Distractor review
Requiring all cloud resource creation to go through a central IT approval process to prevent accidental VM creation
Central approval processes prevent agility and are not practical for developer environments. The goal is to detect unexpected spending early, not prevent all resource creation.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
Key takeaway
NAT direction and interface roles matter as much as the IP address mapping. Inside/outside designation controls which traffic is translated.
Related practice questions
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More questions from this exam
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Question 1
A traditional retailer currently maintains its own data centers, purchasing servers every 3–5 years and paying for facilities, power, and staff regardless of demand. When it migrates its workloads to the public cloud, which change in cost model does it experience?
Question 2
An e-commerce company plans its infrastructure for peak shopping events (e.g., Black Friday) which drive 50× normal traffic. On-premises, they must maintain 50× capacity year-round. In the cloud, they provision 50× capacity only during peak periods. Which cloud characteristic enables this cost optimization?
Question 3
Which term describes the process by which organizations integrate digital technology into all areas of their business, fundamentally changing how they operate and deliver value to customers?
Question 4
When a company moves from maintaining its own data center to using Google Cloud, which operational responsibility does Google assume that the company previously managed?
Question 5
A hospital runs a patient records system that must remain on-premises due to strict regulatory data residency requirements. However, they also want to use cloud-based AI for diagnostic imaging analysis. Which cloud deployment model best describes their architecture?
Question 6
What is virtualization in the context of cloud computing, and why is it fundamental to how cloud providers deliver services?
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FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this GCDL question test?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Setting Cloud Billing budget alerts that notify stakeholders when spending approaches defined thresholds, enabling early detection and response to abnormal spending patterns — Budget alerts in Google Cloud notify stakeholders when spending approaches or exceeds defined thresholds. By setting budget alerts at 50%, 80%, and 100% of expected spending, the team would have received early warning that spending was trending abnormally — allowing them to investigate and stop the accidentally running VMs before accumulating a full weekend of costs. Quotas and billing exports to BigQuery for anomaly detection are complementary controls.
What should I do if I get this GCDL question wrong?
Review the four NAT address types (inside local, inside global, outside local, outside global), PAT port overload, and static vs dynamic NAT use cases. Then practise related GCDL NAT questions on configuration and troubleshooting.
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This GCDL 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 GCDL exam.