Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam Dumps and Practice Test Questions Set 4 Q 61- 80

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Question 61

You need to deploy a stateless web application that must scale automatically based on HTTP request volume. Which Google Cloud service is best suited?

A) Compute Engine with managed instance groups
B) App Engine Standard Environment
C) Cloud Run
D) Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer C) Cloud Run

Explanation

A) Compute Engine with managed instance groups allows scaling based on metrics such as CPU utilization or load. While this provides high availability and horizontal scaling, it is VM-based and requires manual installation of runtimes and load balancers. For stateless containerized applications, managing VMs adds operational overhead and does not provide the serverless simplicity needed for automatic scaling based on HTTP request volume.

B) App Engine Standard Environment is a serverless platform that automatically scales and supports multiple runtimes. It is well-suited for applications with standard language environments but has limitations in flexibility, especially for custom container images or specific dependencies. Traffic splitting for zero-downtime updates is possible but less granular than container-native solutions like Cloud Run or GKE.

C) Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless container platform. It automatically scales based on HTTP request traffic, including scaling down to zero when no requests are received, minimizing cost. Cloud Run supports stateless applications and containerized workloads, allowing developers to focus solely on code without managing infrastructure. It provides easy deployment, integrates with Cloud IAM for security, and supports automatic HTTPS and traffic routing. This makes Cloud Run the ideal choice for stateless applications requiring automatic scaling and minimal operational overhead.

D) Kubernetes Engine (GKE) offers advanced orchestration, rolling updates, and scaling capabilities for containerized applications. While powerful, it introduces operational complexity for stateless applications that do not require complex inter-service orchestration or advanced features like service meshes. GKE is ideal for multi-container microservice architectures rather than simple stateless applications that need automatic scaling based purely on HTTP traffic.

The correct solution is Cloud Run because it provides serverless, fully managed, auto-scaling deployment for stateless containers. It balances simplicity, security, and scalability, allowing rapid deployment without infrastructure management while supporting cost efficiency through pay-per-use scaling.

Question 62

You need to implement a real-time IoT data processing pipeline that ingests data, performs transformations, and stores results for analytics. Which services should you use?

A) Cloud Functions and Cloud Storage
B) Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery
C) Cloud Run and Cloud SQL
D) Compute Engine and Cloud Bigtable

Answer B) Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery

Explanation

A) Cloud Functions with Cloud Storage is effective for event-driven workloads triggered by file uploads. While it is serverless and scalable for individual events, it does not efficiently handle high-throughput, real-time streaming from multiple IoT sources. Complex transformations, aggregations, and windowing logic are challenging to implement with Cloud Functions at scale.

B) Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery provide a robust, fully managed serverless pipeline for real-time analytics. Pub/Sub ensures reliable, scalable ingestion with at-least-once delivery. Dataflow allows complex stream processing, including filtering, aggregation, windowing, and enrichment. BigQuery serves as a high-performance analytical data warehouse for querying transformed data. This combination enables scalable, fault-tolerant, and near real-time analytics with minimal operational overhead. Cloud-native features like monitoring, logging, and IAM integration enhance observability and security. This architecture is ideal for enterprise IoT scenarios requiring reliable, real-time insights.

C) Cloud Run and Cloud SQL are suitable for containerized, stateless workloads with relational storage. Cloud Run scales automatically, but Cloud SQL is not optimized for high-throughput streaming analytics. Using this combination for IoT streams may result in latency, bottlenecks, and increased operational complexity.

D) Compute Engine and Cloud Bigtable offer flexibility and high-throughput storage, but Compute Engine requires manual orchestration for streaming, scaling, and transformation. Cloud Bigtable does not support analytical querying like BigQuery, limiting its suitability for end-to-end real-time analytics pipelines.

The correct architecture is Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery because it provides scalable ingestion, transformation, and storage with minimal operational overhead. It supports high-throughput, fault tolerance, and near real-time analytics, aligning with cloud-native best practices for IoT data processing.

Question 63

You need to provide temporary secure access to a Cloud Storage bucket for an external contractor to upload files. Which method is most secure?

A) Share personal credentials
B) Create a service account with long-lived keys
C) Use signed URLs
D) Grant Owner permissions

Answer C) Use signed URLs

Explanation

A) Sharing personal credentials is highly insecure. It exposes all project resources to the contractor and violates the principle of least privilege. Auditing and revocation are difficult, and accidental or malicious misuse can compromise security.

B) Creating a service account with long-lived keys provides programmatic access but is unsuitable for temporary access. Long-lived keys require secure storage, careful rotation, and sharing increases the risk of compromise. This approach does not align with best practices for secure, temporary access.

C) Signed URLs provide temporary, secure access to specific objects in a Cloud Storage bucket without requiring IAM accounts. They allow fine-grained permissions (read or write) and automatic expiration. This ensures that the contractor can perform uploads while access automatically expires, reducing risk. Signed URLs are auditable, secure, and scalable, aligning with least-privilege principles and cloud-native best practices.

D) Granting Owner permissions is excessive and insecure. Owners have full control over all project resources, which is unnecessary for temporary uploads. This violates security best practices and introduces significant operational risk.

The correct solution is signed URLs. They provide temporary, auditable, secure access without exposing credentials, ensuring operational safety and compliance. This is the recommended method for third-party access to Cloud Storage objects.

Question 64

You need to monitor Compute Engine instances for CPU, memory, and disk usage, and alert your operations team when thresholds are exceeded. Which service should you use?

A) Cloud Logging
B) Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies
C) Cloud Trace
D) Cloud Storage notifications

Answer B) Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies

Explanation

A) Cloud Logging captures logs for auditing and troubleshooting. While useful for historical analysis, it does not provide real-time system monitoring or automated alerts for CPU, memory, or disk usage. Using logging for alerting would require complex pipelines and latency, which is inefficient for operational monitoring.

B) Cloud Monitoring collects system metrics from Compute Engine instances and provides real-time dashboards. Alerting policies allow thresholds to be defined, and notifications can be sent via email, Slack, PagerDuty, or other channels. It supports trend analysis, proactive incident response, and operational visibility, ensuring high availability and performance of workloads. Cloud Monitoring integrates with logging, IAM, and other Google Cloud services for centralized observability and automated response.

C) Cloud Trace is designed for application-level latency monitoring and request tracing. It cannot monitor infrastructure-level metrics or provide threshold-based alerts for CPU, memory, or disk usage.

D) Cloud Storage notifications alert users to changes in storage objects and are unrelated to system metrics or monitoring Compute Engine instances.

The correct solution is Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies because it provides real-time metric collection, automated notifications, visualization, and operational insights, enabling proactive response and maintaining high availability and reliability.

 

Question 65

You need to design a disaster recovery plan for a critical application that must remain available during a regional outage. Which architecture is most appropriate?

A) Single-region deployment with automated backups
B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances
C) Single-region deployment with snapshots
D) Deploy all resources in a private VPC

Answer B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances

Explanation

A) Single-region deployment with automated backups allows data recovery but does not protect against region-wide outages. If the region fails, downtime is inevitable until resources are restored elsewhere. This does not meet near-zero downtime requirements.

B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances provides continuous availability across regions. Traffic is distributed using a global load balancer, and healthy instances in unaffected regions handle requests automatically. This architecture meets strict recovery objectives (RTO and RPO), minimizes downtime, and ensures operational continuity. Active-active deployments also enable load balancing, scalability, and fault tolerance, making it ideal for mission-critical applications requiring high availability.

C) Single-region deployment with snapshots allows recovery but requires manual restoration in another region. This approach introduces downtime and does not provide automated failover or high availability, making it unsuitable for critical workloads.

D) Deploying resources in a private VPC enhances security but does not provide cross-region redundancy. A regional failure would render all resources unavailable, violating disaster recovery objectives.

The correct solution is multi-region deployment with active-active instances. It provides redundancy, automated failover, and near-zero downtime, ensuring resilience, operational continuity, and high availability for critical applications while aligning with enterprise disaster recovery best practices.

Question 66

You need to deploy a multi-service web application that must scale automatically, support rolling updates, and allow secure service-to-service communication. Which Google Cloud service combination is most appropriate?

A) Compute Engine with load balancer
B) App Engine Standard Environment
C) Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with Istio
D) Cloud Run

Answer C) Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with Istio

Explanation

A) Compute Engine with a load balancer allows deployment of VM instances to serve traffic and can scale horizontally using managed instance groups. While effective for basic scaling, Compute Engine lacks native container orchestration, rolling updates, or microservice communication management. Teams must manually configure networking, load balancing, and inter-service security policies. For multi-service applications requiring secure communication and automated scaling, this approach introduces significant operational overhead and complexity.

B) App Engine Standard Environment is a fully managed platform that provides automatic scaling and supports multiple runtimes. While it simplifies deployment for single services, it is less flexible for multi-service applications requiring fine-grained inter-service communication, traffic splitting, or custom container dependencies. Managing multiple microservices in App Engine requires careful architecture and may not fully leverage modern container orchestration features such as rolling updates and service meshes.

C) Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a fully managed container orchestration platform that supports automatic scaling, rolling updates, and self-healing. Integrating Istio, a service mesh, enables secure service-to-service communication, traffic routing, observability, retries, and circuit breaking. Together, GKE and Istio allow teams to deploy multi-service applications with advanced networking, fault tolerance, and fine-grained policy enforcement. This combination reduces operational complexity while providing security, scalability, and reliability for cloud-native applications.

D) Cloud Run is a serverless container platform that automatically scales stateless containers based on HTTP traffic. While ideal for microservices, it lacks advanced orchestration, service mesh integration, and rolling update strategies for multiple interdependent services. Cloud Run is better suited for single stateless services rather than complex multi-service architectures requiring secure inter-service communication.

The correct solution is Kubernetes Engine with Istio because it provides complete orchestration, secure communication, automatic scaling, and rolling updates. This combination is ideal for enterprise-grade multi-service applications, enabling operational efficiency, resilience, and advanced cloud-native deployment patterns.

 

Question 67

You need to migrate an on-premises PostgreSQL database to Cloud SQL with minimal downtime. Which approach is most appropriate?

A) Export database to SQL dump and import
B) Use Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication
C) Manual schema creation and data copy
D) Cloud Storage Transfer Service

Answer B) Use Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication

Explanation

A) Exporting the database to a SQL dump and importing it into Cloud SQL is simple for small datasets or testing, but it introduces significant downtime. Any updates made to the source database after the export will not be captured, making this unsuitable for production workloads that require minimal downtime. Large databases increase downtime further due to lengthy export and import times.

B) Database Migration Service (DMS) is a fully managed solution that supports continuous replication from on-premises PostgreSQL to Cloud SQL. It automates schema migration, initial data seeding, and ongoing replication to ensure the target database remains synchronized with the source. This enables production systems to continue operating with minimal disruption, reduces operational complexity, and ensures data consistency. DMS provides monitoring, logging, and error handling for a reliable migration process.

C) Manual schema creation and data copy is time-consuming, error-prone, and operationally complex. Maintaining data consistency requires custom scripts and continuous monitoring. This approach is impractical for minimal downtime migration and poses a high risk of data inconsistency or loss.

D) Cloud Storage Transfer Service is designed for bulk file transfers between storage systems. It does not manage relational database migration, schema creation, or continuous replication, making it unsuitable for this use case.

The correct solution is Database Migration Service because it enables minimal downtime migration with continuous replication, automated schema migration, monitoring, and operational efficiency. It is ideal for enterprise PostgreSQL workloads requiring reliability and high availability during migration.

Question 68

You need to allow multiple teams secure access to a Cloud Storage bucket, where some require read-only, some require read-write, and some require temporary access. Which approach is most appropriate?

A) Share bucket credentials directly
B) Use IAM roles and signed URLs
C) Enable public access
D) Use Cloud Storage Transfer Service

Answer B) Use IAM roles and signed URLs

Explanation

A) Sharing bucket credentials directly is insecure. Anyone with credentials gains access to all bucket contents, violating least-privilege principles and increasing risk. Auditing, revocation, and management are difficult, making it unsuitable for multi-team collaboration.

B) IAM roles combined with signed URLs provide secure, flexible access control. IAM roles allow read-only or read-write permissions to specific users or groups, while signed URLs enable temporary access without creating IAM accounts. This approach ensures least-privilege access, auditability, and scalability for multiple teams. Temporary access can automatically expire, reducing security risk and maintaining operational efficiency. This is the recommended method for secure collaboration on Cloud Storage.

C) Enabling public access exposes bucket contents to everyone, compromising security. It does not provide granular access control, auditing, or temporary access and is inappropriate for enterprise use cases.

D) Cloud Storage Transfer Service is used for bulk transfers between storage systems. It does not provide user-level access control, temporary access, or permission granularity, making it unsuitable for collaboration scenarios.

The correct approach is IAM roles with signed URLs because it provides fine-grained, secure, and temporary access, supporting least-privilege principles, operational efficiency, and auditability across multiple teams.

Question 69

You need to monitor Compute Engine instances for CPU, memory, and disk usage and alert your operations team when thresholds are exceeded. Which service is most appropriate?

A) Cloud Logging
B) Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies
C) Cloud Trace
D) Cloud Storage notifications

Answer B) Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies

Explanation

A) Cloud Logging collects logs from Compute Engine and other services for troubleshooting and auditing. It does not provide real-time monitoring of system-level metrics or automated threshold-based alerts. Using logs for monitoring requires complex pipelines and delays alerting.

B) Cloud Monitoring collects system metrics from Compute Engine instances, including CPU, memory, and disk usage. Alerting policies allow thresholds to be defined, with notifications sent to email, Slack, PagerDuty, or other channels. Dashboards provide visualization and trend analysis, enabling proactive incident response. Cloud Monitoring ensures operations teams can maintain high availability, detect anomalies, and manage capacity effectively. It integrates with other services for centralized observability and automated alerts.

C) Cloud Trace is designed for distributed application latency monitoring. It cannot monitor system-level metrics or trigger infrastructure alerts for CPU, memory, or disk usage.

D) Cloud Storage notifications alert users about object creation, deletion, or updates in storage. They do not monitor Compute Engine system metrics and cannot trigger alerts based on thresholds.

The correct solution is Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies because it provides real-time monitoring, automated notifications, dashboards, and operational insights, enabling proactive response and high availability of Compute Engine workloads.

Question 70

You need to implement a disaster recovery plan for a mission-critical application that must remain available during a regional outage. Which architecture is most appropriate?

A) Single-region deployment with automated backups
B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances
C) Single-region deployment with snapshots
D) Deploy all resources in a private VPC

Answer B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances

Explanation

A) Single-region deployment with automated backups protects against accidental deletion or corruption but does not address region-wide outages. If the region fails, downtime occurs until resources are restored in another region, which violates near-zero downtime requirements.

B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances provides continuous availability across multiple regions. Traffic is distributed using a global load balancer, and healthy instances in unaffected regions automatically handle requests during a regional outage. This architecture ensures minimal downtime, meets recovery objectives (RTO and RPO), and supports operational continuity. Active-active deployments also allow load balancing, scaling, and fault tolerance, making it ideal for mission-critical applications requiring high availability and resilience.

C) Single-region deployment with snapshots allows recovery but requires manual restoration in a different region, introducing downtime and lacking automated failover. Snapshots alone do not ensure high availability.

D) Deploying all resources in a private VPC improves security but does not provide redundancy across regions. Regional failure would render all resources unavailable, making this approach insufficient for disaster recovery.

The correct solution is multi-region deployment with active-active instances. It ensures redundancy, automated failover, near-zero downtime, and operational continuity, aligning with cloud-native disaster recovery best practices for mission-critical applications.

Question 71

You need to deploy a containerized application that must scale automatically and allow zero-downtime updates. Which Google Cloud service is best suited?

A) Compute Engine with managed instance groups
B) App Engine Standard Environment
C) Cloud Run
D) Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Answer D) Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Explanation

A) Compute Engine with managed instance groups allows horizontal scaling based on metrics like CPU or load. While scalable, VM-based deployments require manual management of the container runtime, networking, and orchestration. Rolling updates and zero-downtime deployments are not automated, requiring custom scripts and operational overhead. This approach is suitable for traditional workloads but less efficient for containerized applications needing automated orchestration.

B) App Engine Standard Environment provides serverless scaling and simplified deployment but has limitations. It supports predefined runtimes and is less flexible for complex multi-container applications. Rolling updates are possible but may require traffic splitting, which lacks granular control compared to container orchestration platforms like GKE.

C) Cloud Run is fully managed and scales automatically based on HTTP requests. It is ideal for stateless containers but does not provide advanced orchestration for multi-service applications. Zero-downtime deployment strategies for interdependent services are limited compared to Kubernetes.

D) Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a fully managed Kubernetes platform that provides automatic scaling, rolling updates, self-healing, and advanced orchestration for multi-container applications. It integrates with load balancers, monitoring, IAM, and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring zero-downtime updates and high availability. GKE supports complex deployment strategies and interdependent services, making it the ideal choice for containerized applications requiring automated scaling and zero-downtime updates.

The correct solution is GKE because it provides advanced orchestration, rolling updates, automated scaling, and operational flexibility, aligning with enterprise best practices for containerized workloads.

Question 72

You need to implement a real-time streaming analytics pipeline for IoT sensor data. Which combination of services is most appropriate?

A) Cloud Functions and Cloud Storage
B) Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery
C) Cloud Run and Cloud SQL
D) Compute Engine and Cloud Bigtable

Answer B) Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery

Explanation

A) Cloud Functions with Cloud Storage is suitable for event-driven tasks triggered by file uploads. While serverless, it does not efficiently handle high-throughput real-time streaming from multiple IoT sources. Complex transformations, aggregations, and windowing are difficult to implement, making it less suitable for production-scale analytics.

B) Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery provide a fully managed, serverless pipeline for real-time analytics. Pub/Sub handles reliable, scalable ingestion with at-least-once delivery. Dataflow supports complex stream processing, including filtering, aggregation, windowing, and enrichment. BigQuery provides fast analytical querying for transformed data. This architecture ensures near real-time processing, scalability, fault tolerance, and operational simplicity, making it ideal for enterprise IoT analytics. Integration with monitoring, logging, and IAM ensures observability, security, and compliance.

C) Cloud Run and Cloud SQL are suitable for stateless workloads and relational storage. While Cloud Run scales automatically, Cloud SQL is not optimized for high-throughput real-time streaming analytics. This combination may create latency, bottlenecks, and operational complexity.

D) Compute Engine and Cloud Bigtable provide flexibility and high throughput, but Compute Engine requires manual orchestration, scaling, and transformation. Cloud Bigtable is optimized for NoSQL workloads and lacks analytical querying capabilities like BigQuery, limiting suitability for real-time analytics pipelines.

The correct architecture is Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery because it provides scalable ingestion, transformation, and analytics with minimal operational overhead. This combination aligns with cloud-native best practices for real-time data processing.

Question 73

You need to provide temporary secure access to a Cloud Storage bucket for a contractor to upload files. Which method is most secure?

A) Share personal credentials
B) Create a service account with long-lived keys
C) Use signed URLs
D) Grant Owner permissions

Answer C) Use signed URLs

Explanation

A) Sharing personal credentials is insecure and violates least-privilege principles. It exposes all project resources to the contractor, making auditing, revocation, and risk management difficult.

B) Creating a service account with long-lived keys provides programmatic access but is unsuitable for temporary access. Long-lived keys require secure storage and careful rotation. Sharing keys increases the risk of compromise and does not align with cloud-native security best practices.

C) Signed URLs allow temporary, restricted access to specific objects in a Cloud Storage bucket without creating IAM accounts. Permissions (read or write) and expiration times can be defined, ensuring the contractor can perform uploads while access automatically expires. This approach supports auditing, least-privilege access, and operational efficiency. Signed URLs are secure, scalable, and ideal for temporary third-party access.

D) Granting Owner permissions is excessive and highly insecure. Owners have full control over all project resources, which is unnecessary for temporary file uploads and increases operational risk.

The correct solution is signed URLs, as they provide secure, temporary, auditable access without exposing credentials, aligning with cloud-native best practices for secure collaboration.

Question 74

You need to monitor Compute Engine instances for CPU, memory, and disk usage and alert your operations team when thresholds are exceeded. Which service is most appropriate?

A) Cloud Logging
B) Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies
C) Cloud Trace
D) Cloud Storage notifications

Answer B) Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies

Explanation

A) Cloud Logging captures logs from Compute Engine and other services for troubleshooting. It does not provide real-time system metrics or automated threshold-based alerts. Using logging alone for monitoring would require complex pipelines and is inefficient for operational response.

B) Cloud Monitoring collects system metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk usage in real-time. Alerting policies can be defined, and notifications sent to email, Slack, or PagerDuty. Dashboards visualize trends, supporting proactive incident response, capacity planning, and high availability. Integration with IAM and logging enables centralized observability. Cloud Monitoring is the recommended solution for real-time monitoring and operational alerts on Compute Engine instances.

C) Cloud Trace is focused on latency and request tracing in distributed applications. It does not monitor infrastructure-level metrics or trigger automated alerts for CPU, memory, or disk thresholds.

D) Cloud Storage notifications alert users to object changes in storage and are unrelated to Compute Engine metrics, making them unsuitable for this use case.

The correct solution is Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies because it provides real-time monitoring, automated notifications, visualization, and operational insights, enabling proactive incident response and ensuring high availability.

Question 75

You need to design a disaster recovery plan for a mission-critical application that must remain available during a regional outage. Which architecture is most appropriate?

A) Single-region deployment with automated backups
B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances
C) Single-region deployment with snapshots
D) Deploy all resources in a private VPC

Answer B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances

Explanation

A) Single-region deployment with automated backups protects against accidental deletion but does not safeguard against region-wide outages. Downtime occurs if the region fails, violating near-zero downtime requirements.

B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances provides continuous availability across multiple regions. Traffic is distributed via a global load balancer, and healthy instances in unaffected regions handle requests automatically during regional failures. This architecture ensures minimal downtime, meets recovery objectives (RTO and RPO), and supports operational continuity. Active-active deployments also enable load balancing, scalability, and fault tolerance, making it ideal for mission-critical applications.

C) Single-region deployment with snapshots allows recovery but requires manual restoration in another region, introducing downtime. It does not provide automated failover or high availability.

D) Deploying resources in a private VPC improves security but does not provide cross-region redundancy. Regional failure would render resources unavailable, making this approach insufficient for disaster recovery objectives.

The correct solution is multi-region deployment with active-active instances because it ensures redundancy, automated failover, near-zero downtime, and operational continuity, aligning with cloud-native disaster recovery best practices for critical applications.

Question 76

You need to deploy a multi-service application using containers that must scale automatically, provide zero-downtime updates, and enable secure service-to-service communication. Which solution is most appropriate?

A) Compute Engine with managed instance groups
B) App Engine Standard Environment
C) Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with Istio
D) Cloud Run

Answer C) Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with Istio

Explanation

A) Compute Engine with managed instance groups provides horizontal scaling and high availability for virtual machines. While this approach can technically run containerized workloads, it lacks native orchestration. Each service would require manual deployment, network configuration, load balancing, and scaling policies. Rolling updates are not automated, and implementing zero-downtime deployments requires scripting or third-party orchestration tools. Security between services is also manual, relying on firewall rules or custom networking, making operational management complex and error-prone. This makes Compute Engine suboptimal for modern multi-service containerized applications that require automated orchestration and advanced service communication.

B) App Engine Standard Environment is a fully managed, serverless platform supporting multiple runtimes. It automatically scales and abstracts infrastructure management, which is excellent for simple web services. However, it is limited for multi-service applications, particularly those needing complex communication between services or custom container images. Rolling updates are possible via traffic splitting but lack the flexibility and granular control offered by container orchestration solutions. For enterprise-grade, multi-service deployments with strict uptime and secure service communication requirements, App Engine Standard is less suitable.

C) Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with Istio is the ideal solution. GKE provides fully managed Kubernetes orchestration, allowing multiple containerized services to run with automated scaling, rolling updates, and self-healing. Istio, a service mesh, adds secure service-to-service communication with features like mTLS encryption, fine-grained traffic routing, retries, circuit breaking, and observability. Together, GKE and Istio provide a robust, enterprise-grade platform for deploying multi-service applications with minimal operational overhead. This solution ensures zero-downtime updates, automatic horizontal scaling, and secure communication while supporting monitoring, logging, and CI/CD integration. Operational efficiency, reliability, and flexibility are maximized, making this combination the best practice for complex cloud-native architectures.

D) Cloud Run is a fully managed, serverless container platform that scales automatically based on HTTP requests. It is ideal for stateless microservices and rapid deployment, but it lacks advanced orchestration for interdependent multi-service applications. Rolling updates for a network of services and secure service-to-service communication are not natively supported at the same level as GKE with Istio. Cloud Run is better suited for individual stateless services or microservices with limited inter-service dependencies.

The correct solution is GKE with Istio because it provides automated orchestration, secure service-to-service communication, rolling updates, and enterprise-level operational capabilities. This architecture minimizes manual management, enhances security, and ensures resilience for complex multi-service containerized applications. It supports enterprise best practices such as declarative configuration, monitoring, automated scaling, and high availability. By leveraging GKE with Istio, organizations can deploy microservices reliably while maintaining operational efficiency, reducing risk of downtime, and improving security through robust service mesh capabilities.

Question 77

You need to migrate a production PostgreSQL database to Cloud SQL with minimal downtime and ensure continuous replication during the migration process. Which approach should you choose?

A) Export the database to SQL dump and import it
B) Use Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication
C) Manual schema creation and data copy
D) Cloud Storage Transfer Service

Answer B) Use Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication

Explanation

A) Exporting a PostgreSQL database to a SQL dump and importing it into Cloud SQL is a simple approach for small datasets or testing environments. However, it introduces significant downtime because the source database must stop updates during export to maintain data consistency. For production workloads, this downtime can be unacceptable. Additionally, large databases may require hours or days to export and import, increasing the risk of operational disruption. Any transactions made during the export will not be captured, leading to potential data loss or inconsistencies.

B) Database Migration Service (DMS) is the recommended solution for production-grade PostgreSQL migrations requiring minimal downtime. DMS supports continuous replication, allowing the source database to remain operational while data is migrated. It automates schema migration, initial data seeding, and real-time replication of ongoing changes. This ensures the target Cloud SQL instance stays synchronized with the source, eliminating downtime and maintaining data consistency. DMS also provides monitoring, error handling, logging, and detailed operational insights, which improve reliability and transparency throughout the migration process. Continuous replication ensures that transactions on the source database are captured in near real time, reducing risk and enabling a seamless cutover with minimal disruption to end users.

C) Manual schema creation and data copy involves creating schemas manually on Cloud SQL and writing scripts to migrate data. This approach is time-consuming, error-prone, and operationally complex. Maintaining consistency between the source and target databases requires ongoing monitoring and intervention, which is impractical for minimal downtime migrations. This method is high-risk and inefficient compared to automated solutions like DMS.

D) Cloud Storage Transfer Service is designed for transferring files and objects between storage locations. It does not handle relational database migration, schema creation, or continuous replication. Using it for database migration would not meet enterprise requirements for minimal downtime, consistency, or reliability.

The correct solution is Database Migration Service because it ensures minimal downtime, continuous replication, automated schema migration, monitoring, and operational efficiency. This service is designed specifically for migrating relational databases to Cloud SQL while maintaining production operations, making it ideal for enterprise PostgreSQL migrations. DMS reduces operational risk, supports data integrity, and enables a smooth transition to managed cloud infrastructure, ensuring business continuity and compliance with organizational requirements.

Question 78

You need to provide temporary secure access for a third-party contractor to upload files to a Cloud Storage bucket. Which method is most secure and operationally efficient?

A) Share your personal credentials
B) Create a service account with a long-lived key
C) Use signed URLs
D) Grant Owner permissions

Answer C) Use signed URLs

Explanation

A) Sharing personal credentials is highly insecure and violates the principle of least privilege. It exposes all project resources to the contractor, increasing the risk of accidental or malicious misuse. Managing and revoking access is difficult, and auditing is complicated. This approach is inappropriate for enterprise use cases and does not provide operational efficiency or security.

B) Creating a service account with a long-lived key provides programmatic access but is not suitable for temporary access. Long-lived keys must be securely stored, rotated, and managed carefully. Sharing them increases the risk of compromise and violates security best practices. Manual key management introduces unnecessary operational overhead and risk.

C) Signed URLs provide secure, temporary access to specific objects in a Cloud Storage bucket without creating IAM accounts. Permissions (read or write) and expiration times can be defined, ensuring the contractor can perform necessary uploads while access automatically expires. Signed URLs are auditable, scalable, and reduce operational complexity. They align with best practices for least-privilege access and temporary third-party collaboration. Using signed URLs ensures security, operational efficiency, and compliance with enterprise policies while maintaining ease of use for contractors.

D) Granting Owner permissions is excessive and insecure. Owners have full control over all project resources, which is unnecessary for temporary uploads. This approach increases operational risk and violates security principles of least privilege.

The correct solution is signed URLs because they provide secure, temporary, auditable access, reduce operational overhead, and adhere to cloud-native security best practices. This method balances security, usability, and operational efficiency for third-party access scenarios.

Question 79

You need to monitor Compute Engine instances for CPU, memory, and disk usage, and alert your operations team when thresholds are exceeded. Which service is most appropriate?

A) Cloud Logging
B) Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies
C) Cloud Trace
D) Cloud Storage notifications

Answer B) Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies

Explanation

A) Cloud Logging captures logs from Compute Engine and other Google Cloud services for auditing and troubleshooting. While useful for historical analysis, it does not provide real-time monitoring of CPU, memory, or disk usage. Implementing alerts based solely on logs would require custom pipelines, increasing complexity and delay in operational response.

B) Cloud Monitoring provides real-time collection of system metrics, including CPU utilization, memory usage, and disk I/O. Alerting policies allow the creation of threshold-based alerts, with notifications sent via email, Slack, PagerDuty, or other channels. Dashboards provide visualization of trends and anomalies, supporting proactive incident response and capacity planning. Cloud Monitoring integrates with IAM, logging, and other Google Cloud services, enabling centralized observability and automation. This ensures operational teams can detect performance issues promptly, maintain high availability, and reduce operational risk. Cloud Monitoring is designed to deliver enterprise-grade reliability and insights for infrastructure monitoring.

C) Cloud Trace is designed for monitoring application-level latency and distributed request performance. While valuable for debugging and performance optimization, it does not monitor infrastructure metrics or trigger alerts for CPU, memory, or disk usage, making it unsuitable for this use case.

D) Cloud Storage notifications alert users to object changes within storage buckets. They are unrelated to Compute Engine system metrics and cannot be used for threshold-based operational alerts.

The correct solution is Cloud Monitoring with alerting policies because it provides real-time metrics, automated notifications, dashboards, and operational insights, enabling proactive response and high availability for Compute Engine instances. It minimizes downtime, improves observability, and aligns with enterprise monitoring best practices.

Question 80

You need to design a disaster recovery solution for a mission-critical application that must remain available during a regional outage. Which architecture is most appropriate?

A) Single-region deployment with automated backups
B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances
C) Single-region deployment with snapshots
D) Deploy all resources in a private VPC

Answer B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances

Explanation

A) Single-region deployment with automated backups protects against accidental data deletion or corruption but does not provide resilience against regional failures. If the entire region goes down, downtime occurs until resources are restored in another region. This does not meet near-zero recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for mission-critical applications.

B) Multi-region deployment with active-active instances ensures continuous availability across multiple regions. Traffic is distributed using a global load balancer, and healthy instances in unaffected regions handle requests automatically if one region fails. This architecture meets strict RTO and RPO requirements, minimizes downtime, and ensures operational continuity. Active-active deployments also provide load balancing, fault tolerance, and scalability, making them ideal for high-availability enterprise applications. It supports automated failover, ensuring resilience and business continuity in case of regional outages.

C) Single-region deployment with snapshots allows recovery but requires manual restoration in a different region. This introduces downtime and does not support automated failover. Snapshots alone cannot ensure high availability for critical workloads.

D) Deploying resources in a private VPC enhances security but does not provide cross-region redundancy. A regional failure would render all resources unavailable, making this approach insufficient for disaster recovery.

The correct solution is multi-region deployment with active-active instances. This ensures redundancy, automated failover, near-zero downtime, and operational continuity, aligning with enterprise disaster recovery best practices. It provides resilience, high availability, and operational efficiency for mission-critical applications while meeting recovery objectives.