Associate Cloud Engineer Free Practice Questions — Page 2
Question 10
Your company has many legacy third-party applications that rely on a shared NFS server for file sharing between these workloads. You want to modernize the NFS server by using a Google Cloud managed service. You need to select the solution that requires the least amount of change to the application. What should you do?
A. Create a Compute Engine instance and configure an NFS server on the instance. Point all NFS mounts to the Compute Engine instance.
B. Deploy a Filestore instance. Replace all NFS mounts with a Filestore mount.
C. Configure Firestore. Configure all applications to use Firestore instead of the NFS server.
D. Create a Cloud Storage bucket. Configure all applications to use Cloud Storage client libraries instead of the NFS server.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: B
Explanation: Google Cloud Filestore is a fully managed NFS file server that supports standard NFS mounts. Using Filestore allows existing applications to continue using NFS with minimal or no code changes, meeting the requirement to modernize the server with the least application impact. Other options require managing your own NFS or refactoring applications to different storage APIs.
Question 11
Your company has a rapidly growing social media platform and a user base primarily located in North America. Due to increasing demand, your current on-premises PostgreSQL database, hosted in your United States headquarters data center, no longer meets your needs. You need to identify a cloud-based database solution that offers automatic scaling, multi-region support for future expansion, and maintains low latency. What should you do?
A. Use BigQuery.
B. Use Spanner.
C. Use Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL.
D. Use Bigtable.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: B
Explanation: Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, horizontally scalable relational database that provides automatic scaling, strong consistency, and native multi-region support with low latency. It fits a rapidly growing social media platform with current North American users and future global expansion. BigQuery is an analytics data warehouse, Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL has limited scaling and regional scope, and Bigtable is non-relational and not ideal for transactional workloads.
Question 12
You have an application that is currently processing transactions by using a group of managed VM instances. You need to migrate the application so that it is serverless and scalable. You want to implement an asynchronous transaction processing system, while minimizing management overhead. What should you do?
A. Install Kafka on VM instances to acknowledge incoming transactions. Use Cloud Run to process transactions.
B. Use Pub/Sub to acknowledge incoming transactions. Use VM instances to process transactions.
C. Use Pub/Sub to acknowledge incoming transactions. Use Cloud Run to process transactions.
D. Install Kafka on VM instances to acknowledge incoming transactions. Use VM instances to process transactions.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: C
Explanation: The goal is a serverless, scalable, asynchronous processing system with minimal management overhead. Pub/Sub provides a fully managed, serverless message ingestion and acknowledgment mechanism, ideal for asynchronous transactions. Cloud Run is also serverless and automatically scales to process messages without managing servers. Options involving VM instances or self-managed Kafka increase operational overhead and are not fully serverless.
Question 13
You are deploying an application to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that needs to call an external third-party API. You need to provide the external API vendor with a list of IP addresses for their firewall to allow traffic from your application. You want to follow Google-recommended practices and avoid any risk of interrupting traffic to the API due to IP address changes. What should you do?
A. Configure your GKE cluster with one node, and set the node to have a static external IP address. Ensure that the GKE cluster autoscaler is off. Send the external IP address of the node to the vendor to be added to the allowlist.
B. Configure your GKE cluster with private nodes. Configure a Cloud NAT instance with static IP addresses. Provide these IP addresses to the vendor to be added to the allowlist.
C. Configure your GKE cluster with private nodes. Configure a Cloud NAT instance with dynamic IP addresses. Provide these IP addresses to the vendor to be added to the allowlist.
D. Configure your GKE cluster with public nodes. Write a Cloud Function that pulls the public IP addresses of each node in the cluster, Trigger the function to run every day with Cloud Scheduler. Send the list to the vendor by email every day.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: B
Explanation: Google-recommended practice is to keep GKE nodes private and control outbound traffic through Cloud NAT. Using Cloud NAT with static external IP addresses provides a stable, managed egress IP range that will not change, avoiding traffic interruption and eliminating the need to manage node IPs. Other options are brittle, not scalable, or risk IP changes.
Question 14
You recently discovered an issue with your rolling update in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). You now need to roll back a rolling update. What should you do?
A. Delete the deployment.
B. Use the kubectl rollout restart command to revert the deployment.
C. Use the kubectl rollout undo command.
D. Manually scale down the new Pods and scale up the old Pods.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: C
Explanation: In Kubernetes (including GKE), rolling updates are managed by Deployments, which keep a revision history. The correct and supported way to roll back a faulty rolling update is to use `kubectl rollout undo deployment <name>`, which reverts the Deployment to a previous revision. Deleting the deployment loses history, `rollout restart` only restarts pods without reverting, and manual scaling is error‑prone and unnecessary.
Question 15
You are migrating your on-premises workload to Google Cloud. Your company is implementing its Cloud Billing configuration and requires access to a granular breakdown of its Google Cloud costs. You need to ensure that the Cloud Billing datasets are available in BigQuery so you can conduct a detailed analysis of costs. What should you do?
A. Enable Cloud Billing data export to BigQuery when you create a Cloud Billing account.
B. Enable Cloud Billing on the project, and link a Cloud Billing account. Then view the billing data table in the BigQuery dataset.
C. Create a Cloud Billing account. Enable the BigQuery Data Transfer Service API to export pricing data.
D. Enable the BigQuery API, and ensure that the BigQuery User IAM role is selected. Change the BigQuery dataset to select a data location.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: A
Explanation: To get a granular breakdown of Google Cloud costs in BigQuery, you must enable Cloud Billing data export to BigQuery. This feature creates and continuously updates billing datasets in BigQuery for detailed cost analysis. Simply linking billing or enabling APIs without configuring the billing export will not generate the required datasets.
Question 16
Your company is modernizing its applications and refactoring them to containerized microservices. You need to deploy the infrastructure on Google Cloud so that teams can deploy their applications. The applications cannot be exposed publicly. You want to minimize management and operational overhead. What should you do?
A. Provision a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot cluster.
B. Provision a fleet of Compute Engine instances and install Kubernetes.
C. Provision a Standard regional Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster.
D. Provision a Standard zonal Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: A
Explanation: You need a managed Kubernetes platform with minimal operational overhead and no public exposure. GKE Autopilot fully manages nodes, scaling, and upgrades, significantly reducing management effort compared to Standard GKE or self-managed Kubernetes on Compute Engine, while still supporting private, internal-only workloads.
Question 17
You are managing a fleet of Compute Engine Linux instances in a Google Cloud project. Your company's engineering team requires SSH access to all instances to perform routine maintenance tasks. You need to manage the SSH access for the engineering team, and you want to minimize operational overhead when engineers join or leave the team. What should you do?
A. Create a single SSH key pair to be shared by all engineering team members. Add the public SSH key to project metadata.
B. Create an SSH key pair for each engineer on the team, and add the public SSH key to the metadata of the relevant instances.
C. Create a Google Group for all engineering team members, and grant them the Compute Viewer IAM role. Manage group membership when engineers join or leave the team.
D. Create a Google Group for all engineering team members, and set up OS Login for this group on the project. Manage group membership when engineers join or leave the team.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: D
Explanation: Using OS Login with a Google Group centralizes SSH access management through IAM. You add or remove engineers from the group when they join or leave, and access propagates automatically to all instances without managing individual SSH keys or instance metadata, minimizing operational overhead.
Question 18
Your digital media company stores a large number of video files on-premises. Each video file ranges from 100 MB to 100 GB. You are currently storing 150 TB of video data in your on-premises network, with no room for expansion. You need to migrate all infrequently accessed video files older than one year to Cloud Storage to ensure that on-premises storage remains available for new files. You must also minimize costs and control bandwidth usage. What should you do?
A. Use Storage Transfer Service to move the data from the selected on-premises file storage systems to a Cloud Storage bucket.
B. Use Transfer Appliance to request an appliance. Load the data locally, and ship the appliance back to Google for ingestion into Cloud Storage.
C. Set up a Cloud Interconnect connection between the on-premises network and Google Cloud. Establish a private endpoint for Filestore access. Transfer the data from the existing Network File System (NFS) to Filestore.
D. Create a Cloud Storage bucket. Establish an Identity and Access Management (IAM) role with write permissions to the bucket. Use the gsutil tool to directly copy files over the network to Cloud Storage.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: A
Explanation: Storage Transfer Service is designed for large-scale, ongoing migrations from on‑premises file systems to Cloud Storage. It supports filtering (for files older than one year), scheduling, retries, and—critically—bandwidth throttling to control network usage and costs. Transfer Appliance is better for one‑time bulk migrations when bandwidth is insufficient, but here the requirement is selective migration of infrequently accessed data with controlled bandwidth, making Storage Transfer Service the best fit.
Question 19
You need to create and manage service accounts for your workloads running on Google Cloud. You want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do? (Choose two.)
A. Create as few service accounts as possible.
B. Delete any unused service accounts immediately.
C. Create single-purpose service accounts.
D. Manage service accounts as resources.
E. Use random names for the service accounts.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: C, D
Explanation: Google IAM best practices recommend creating single-purpose service accounts so each workload has only the permissions it needs, and managing service accounts as first-class resources (with lifecycle management, auditing, and IAM policies). Options like creating as few as possible or deleting immediately are not recommended; instead, unused accounts should be identified and disabled before deletion.
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