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Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture practice questions

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Read each scenario carefully and choose your answer before revealing the explanation. Then check why your choice was right or wrong. Repeat until the reasoning feels automatic.

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Practise Google Professional Cloud Architect Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.

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20 questionsDomain: Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture

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What the exam tests

What to know about Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture

Cloud concepts questions usually test the service model (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) and deployment model (public/private/hybrid/community) appropriate for a given scenario.

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS responsibilities and examples.

Public, private, hybrid and community cloud deployment models.

On-premises vs cloud trade-offs: cost, control, scalability.

How cloud connectivity options (VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute) work.

Watch out for

Common Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture exam traps

▸IaaS gives you infrastructure control; SaaS gives you only the application.
▸Hybrid cloud combines on-premises and public cloud — not two public clouds.
▸Cloud does not automatically mean cheaper or more secure.
▸Management responsibility shifts with each service model (IaaS → PaaS → SaaS).

Practice set

Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture questions

20 questions · select your answer, then reveal the explanation

Question 1easymultiple choice

Read the full Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture explanation →

A company wants to migrate its on-premises monolithic application to Google Cloud with minimal changes. They plan to run it on a virtual machine with a predictable workload that runs 24/7 for a one-year commitment. Which compute option is MOST cost-effective?

Trap 1: Spot VMs

Spot VMs are similar to preemptible and can be terminated.

Trap 2: On-demand VMs

On-demand VMs are more expensive than committed use for long-running workloads.

Trap 3: Preemptible VMs

Preemptible VMs can be terminated at any time, unsuitable for 24/7 workload.

Study all Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture common traps →

A
Spot VMs
Why wrong: Spot VMs are similar to preemptible and can be terminated.
B
On-demand VMs
Why wrong: On-demand VMs are more expensive than committed use for long-running workloads.
C
Committed use discounts
Committed use discounts offer lower cost for a 1-year commitment on 24/7 workloads.
D
Preemptible VMs
Why wrong: Preemptible VMs can be terminated at any time, unsuitable for 24/7 workload.

Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture practice questions

What to know about Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture

Common Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture exam traps

Designing and Planning a Cloud Solution Architecture questions

A company wants to migrate its on-premises monolithic application to Google Cloud with minimal changes. They plan to run it on a virtual machine with a predictable workload that runs 24/7 for a one-year commitment. Which compute option is MOST cost-effective?

A company is building a microservices architecture on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and needs to ensure each microservice can only access specific Cloud Storage buckets. IAM permissions should be assigned at the pod level, not at the node level. What is the recommended approach?

A company wants to run a stateful application on Google Kubernetes Engine that requires persistent storage with high read/write performance from multiple pods simultaneously. Which storage option should they use?

A company needs to store archival data that is accessed less than once a year and must be retained for 10 years for compliance. The data retrieval time is not critical. Which Cloud Storage class is MOST cost-effective?

A company deploys a web application on Compute Engine behind a global HTTP(S) Load Balancer. Users report intermittent 502 errors. Investigation shows backend instances are healthy. What is the MOST likely cause?

A company is migrating its on-premises data center to Google Cloud. They need a dedicated, low-latency, high-bandwidth connection between their on-premises network and VPC. They anticipate consistent traffic above 10 Gbps. Which connectivity option should they choose?

A company wants to run a containerized application that scales down to zero when not in use and only incurs costs when requests are being processed. They do not want to manage infrastructure. Which compute service should they use?

A company needs to run a batch job that processes data stored in Cloud Storage. The job runs once per day and takes about 2 hours on 8 vCPUs. Cost is the primary concern, and the job can be interrupted. Which compute option is MOST cost-effective?

A company uses Cloud SQL for MySQL and wants to achieve a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 5 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 minute for a regional disaster. Which configuration should they use?

A company is designing a microservices architecture on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They need to expose a set of internal microservices to other services within the same VPC, but not to the internet. Which GKE service type should they use?

A company wants to implement an event-driven architecture where uploads to a Cloud Storage bucket trigger processing in a serverless function. The function must process each object within a few seconds and handle bursts of thousands of uploads. Which service should they use?

A company wants to run a stateful workload on GKE that requires persistent storage with low latency and high IOPS. They need to use the fastest available storage and are willing to lose data if the pod is rescheduled. Which THREE options should they consider? (Choose 3.)

A company wants to run containerized applications on Google Cloud with minimal operational overhead. They prefer to use a serverless container platform. Which TWO compute options should they consider? (Choose 2.)

A startup wants to run a containerized web application that scales to zero when not in use and charges only for request processing time. Which compute service is most appropriate?

A financial services company must run a PostgreSQL database with strong consistency across three regions. They need to support high write throughput and require automatic failover with zero data loss. Which database service should they choose?

An organization wants to establish a dedicated, low-latency connection between their on-premises data center and GCP with a guaranteed SLA of 99.99% uptime. They anticipate high bandwidth usage but want to avoid per-GB egress charges. Which connectivity option should they choose?

A media company runs a stateless web application on Compute Engine behind an HTTP(S) load balancer. They want to automatically replace unhealthy VMs and maintain a fixed number of running instances across two zones. What should they use?

A company needs to store archival data that is accessed less than once a year, with retrieval times of up to 12 hours acceptable. The data must be kept for 10 years for compliance. What is the most cost-effective Cloud Storage solution?

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