Professional Cloud Architect Free Practice Questions — Page 16
Question 147
Your team will start developing a new application using microservices architecture on Kubernetes Engine. As part of the development lifecycle, any code change that has been pushed to the remote develop branch on your GitHub repository should be built and tested automatically. When the build and test are successful, the relevant microservice will be deployed automatically in the development environment. You want to ensure that all code deployed in the development environment follows this process. What should you do?
A. Have each developer install a pre-commit hook on their workstation that tests the code and builds the container when committing on the development branch. After a successful commit, have the developer deploy the newly built container image on the development cluster.
B. Install a post-commit hook on the remote git repository that tests the code and builds the container when code is pushed to the development branch. After a successful commit, have the developer deploy the newly built container image on the development cluster.
C. Create a Cloud Build trigger based on the development branch that tests the code, builds the container, and stores it in Container Registry. Create a deployment pipeline that watches for new images and deploys the new image on the development cluster. Ensure only the deployment tool has access to deploy new versions.
D. Create a Cloud Build trigger based on the development branch to build a new container image and store it in Container Registry. Rely on Vulnerability Scanning to ensure the code tests succeed. As the final step of the Cloud Build process, deploy the new container image on the development cluster. Ensure only Cloud Build has access to deploy new versions.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: C
Explanation: A proper CI/CD pipeline should automatically trigger on pushes to the development branch, run tests, build the container image, store it in the registry, and then deploy only after successful validation. Restricting deployment permissions to the deployment tool ensures that all code reaching the development environment has gone through the required pipeline. Options A and B rely on developers for deployment and do not enforce the process. Option D incorrectly treats vulnerability scanning as a substitute for running the required build and test steps.
Question 148
You are moving an application that uses MySQL from on-premises to Google Cloud. The application will run on Compute Engine and will use Cloud SQL. You want to cut over to the Compute Engine deployment of the application with minimal downtime and no data loss to your customers. You want to migrate the application with minimal modification. You also need to determine the cutover strategy. What should you do?
A. 1. Set up Cloud VPN to provide private network connectivity between the Compute Engine application and the on-premises MySQL server. 2. Stop the on-premises application. 3. Create a mysqldump of the on-premises MySQL server. 4. Upload the dump to a Cloud Storage bucket. 5. Import the dump into Cloud SQL. 6. Modify the source code of the application to write queries to both databases and read from its local database. 7. Start the Compute Engine application. 8. Stop the on-premises application.
B. 1. Set up Cloud SQL proxy and MySQL proxy. 2. Create a mysqldump of the on-premises MySQL server. 3. Upload the dump to a Cloud Storage bucket. 4. Import the dump into Cloud SQL. 5. Stop the on-premises application. 6. Start the Compute Engine application.
C. 1. Set up Cloud VPN to provide private network connectivity between the Compute Engine application and the on-premises MySQL server. 2. Stop the on-premises application. 3. Start the Compute Engine application, configured to read and write to the on-premises MySQL server. 4. Create the replication configuration in Cloud SQL. 5. Configure the source database server to accept connections from the Cloud SQL replica. 6. Finalize the Cloud SQL replica configuration. 7. When replication has been completed, stop the Compute Engine application. 8. Promote the Cloud SQL replica to a standalone instance. 9. Restart the Compute Engine application, configured to read and write to the Cloud SQL standalone instance.
D. 1. Stop the on-premises application. 2. Create a mysqldump of the on-premises MySQL server. 3. Upload the dump to a Cloud Storage bucket. 4. Import the dump into Cloud SQL. 5. Start the application on Compute Engine.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: C
Explanation: Option C uses external replication to migrate from the on-premises MySQL primary to Cloud SQL while the application is already running on Compute Engine against the original database. After replication catches up, Cloud SQL is promoted and the application is switched over with only a brief restart, achieving minimal downtime, no data loss, and minimal application changes. The mysqldump-based options require a longer outage during export/import, and option A also requires intrusive dual-write application changes.
Question 149
Your company is running its application workloads on Compute Engine. The applications have been deployed in production, acceptance, and development environments. The production environment is business-critical and is used 24/7, while the acceptance and development environments are only critical during office hours. Your CFO has asked you to optimize these environments to achieve cost savings during idle times. What should you do?
A. Create a shell script that uses the gcloud command to change the machine type of the development and acceptance instances to a smaller machine type outside of office hours. Schedule the shell script on one of the production instances to automate the task.
B. Use Cloud Scheduler to trigger a Cloud Function that will stop the development and acceptance environments after office hours and start them just before office hours.
C. Deploy the development and acceptance applications on a managed instance group and enable autoscaling.
D. Use regular Compute Engine instances for the production environment, and use preemptible VMs for the acceptance and development environments.
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Correct Answer: B
Explanation: Stopping non-production Compute Engine instances outside office hours provides the greatest cost savings because compute charges stop while VMs are stopped (persistent disks remain billed). Automating start/stop with Cloud Scheduler triggering a Cloud Function matches the described requirement. Changing machine types still incurs compute costs, autoscaling a managed instance group is workload-driven rather than office-hours-driven and doesn't necessarily eliminate instances, and preemptible/Spot VMs are not appropriate for environments that must be reliably available during office hours.
Question 150
You need to migrate Hadoop jobs for your company's Data Science team without modifying the underlying infrastructure. You want to minimize costs and infrastructure management effort. What should you do?
A. Create a Dataproc cluster using standard worker instances.
B. Create a Dataproc cluster using preemptible worker instances.
C. Manually deploy a Hadoop cluster on Compute Engine using standard instances.
D. Manually deploy a Hadoop cluster on Compute Engine using preemptible instances.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: B
Explanation: Use Google Cloud Dataproc rather than manually managing Hadoop on Compute Engine to minimize infrastructure management. Since the requirement also explicitly includes minimizing costs, using preemptible worker instances (secondary workers in Dataproc) is the best fit for fault-tolerant Hadoop batch workloads, providing significant cost savings while retaining managed infrastructure.
Question 151
Your company has just acquired another company, and you have been asked to integrate their existing Google Cloud environment into your company's data center. Upon investigation, you discover that some of the RFC 1918 IP ranges being used in the new company's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) overlap with your data center IP space. What should you do to enable connectivity and make sure that there are no routing conflicts when connectivity is established?
A. Create a Cloud VPN connection from the new VPC to the data center, create a Cloud Router, and apply new IP addresses so there is no overlapping IP space.
B. Create a Cloud VPN connection from the new VPC to the data center, and create a Cloud NAT instance to perform NAT on the overlapping IP space.
C. Create a Cloud VPN connection from the new VPC to the data center, create a Cloud Router, and apply a custom route advertisement to block the overlapping IP space.
D. Create a Cloud VPN connection from the new VPC to the data center, and apply a firewall rule that blocks the overlapping IP space.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: A
Explanation: The correct design is to eliminate overlapping RFC1918 address space by readdressing the overlapping network and connecting it with Cloud VPN and Cloud Router. Cloud NAT is not used to translate traffic over Cloud VPN in this scenario, and blocking route advertisements or using firewall rules does not resolve the underlying overlap or provide full connectivity.
Sources:
https://www.pass4success.com/google/discussions/exam-professional-cloud-architect-topic-13-question-13-discussion
Question 152
Your company provides a recommendation engine for retail customers. You are providing retail customers with an API where they can submit a user ID and the
API returns a list of recommendations for that user. You are responsible for the API lifecycle and want to ensure stability for your customers in case the API makes backward-incompatible changes. You want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
A. Create a distribution list of all customers to inform them of an upcoming backward-incompatible change at least one month before replacing the old API with the new API.
B. Create an automated process to generate API documentation, and update the public API documentation as part of the CI/CD process when deploying an update to the API.
C. Use a versioning strategy for the APIs that increases the version number on every backward-incompatible change.
D. Use a versioning strategy for the APIs that adds the suffix ג€DEPRECATEDג€ to the current API version number on every backward-incompatible change. Use the current version number for the new API.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: C
Explanation: Google API design guidance recommends versioning APIs with a major version and incrementing the version whenever a backward-incompatible (breaking) change is introduced. This preserves stability for existing clients, who can continue using the older version while migrating to the new one. Simply notifying customers or updating documentation does not provide compatibility guarantees, and renaming the old API with a 'DEPRECATED' suffix is not the recommended versioning strategy.
Question 153
Mountkirk Games wants you to secure the connectivity from the new gaming application platform to Google Cloud. You want to streamline the process and follow
Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
A. Configure Workload Identity and service accounts to be used by the application platform.
B. Use Kubernetes Secrets, which are obfuscated by default. Configure these Secrets to be used by the application platform.
C. Configure Kubernetes Secrets to store the secret, enable Application-Layer Secrets Encryption, and use Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS) to manage the encryption keys. Configure these Secrets to be used by the application platform.
D. Configure HashiCorp Vault on Compute Engine, and use customer managed encryption keys and Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS) to manage the encryption keys. Configure these Secrets to be used by the application platform.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: A
Explanation: Workload Identity is Google's recommended approach for GKE workloads to securely access Google Cloud services without managing long-lived service account keys. It maps Kubernetes service accounts to Google Cloud service accounts, simplifying authentication and improving security. The other options focus on storing application secrets rather than the recommended mechanism for workload authentication to Google Cloud, or introduce unnecessary complexity.
Question 154
You are developing your microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine. During testing, you want to validate the behavior of your application in case a specific microservice should suddenly crash. What should you do?
A. Add a taint to one of the nodes of the Kubernetes cluster. For the specific microservice, configure a pod anti-affinity label that has the name of the tainted node as a value.
B. Use Istio's fault injection on the particular microservice whose faulty behavior you want to simulate.
C. Destroy one of the nodes of the Kubernetes cluster to observe the behavior.
D. Configure Istio's traffic management features to steer the traffic away from a crashing microservice.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: B
Explanation: Istio fault injection is designed to simulate failures for a specific microservice in a controlled way, allowing you to validate resilience and failure handling without affecting unrelated services or infrastructure. Destroying a node tests node failure rather than a targeted microservice crash, taints/anti-affinity affect scheduling rather than simulating a crash, and traffic steering routes around failures instead of creating them.
Question 156
You are implementing the infrastructure for a web service on Google Cloud. The web service needs to receive and store the data from 500,000 requests per second. The data will be queried later in real time, based on exact matches of a known set of attributes. There will be periods where the web service will not receive any requests. The business wants to keep costs low. Which web service platform and database should you use for the application?
A. Cloud Run and BigQuery
B. Cloud Run and Cloud Bigtable
C. A Compute Engine autoscaling managed instance group and BigQuery
D. A Compute Engine autoscaling managed instance group and Cloud Bigtable
Show Answer
Correct Answer: B
Explanation: Cloud Bigtable is designed for extremely high write throughput and low-latency real-time lookups by known keys/attributes, making it the appropriate database. BigQuery is an analytics data warehouse, not the best fit for high-rate operational lookups. For the compute layer, Cloud Run automatically scales with traffic and can scale to zero when there are no requests, minimizing costs compared to maintaining Compute Engine instances.
Question 157
Your operations team has asked you to help diagnose a performance issue in a production application that runs on Compute Engine. The application is dropping requests that reach it when under heavy load. The process list for affected instances shows a single application process that is consuming all available CPU, and autoscaling has reached the upper limit of instances. There is no abnormal load on any other related systems, including the database. You want to allow production traffic to be served again as quickly as possible. Which action should you recommend?
A. Change the autoscaling metric to agent.googleapis.com/memory/percent_used.
B. Restart the affected instances on a staggered schedule.
C. SSH to each instance and restart the application process.
D. Increase the maximum number of instances in the autoscaling group.
Show Answer
Correct Answer: D
Explanation: The application is CPU-bound and the managed instance group's autoscaler has already reached its configured maximum size. Since the goal is to restore production capacity as quickly as possible, increasing the maximum number of instances allows the autoscaler to add more VMs and distribute incoming requests. Changing the autoscaling metric to memory does not address CPU saturation. Restarting instances or application processes may provide only temporary relief and does not increase serving capacity under sustained heavy load.
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