Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer Questions and Answers
The core business of your company is to rent out construction equipment at a large scale. All the equipment that is being rented out has been equipped with multiple sensors that send event information every few seconds. These signals can vary from engine status, distance traveled, fuel level, and more. Customers are billed based on the consumption monitored by these sensors. You expect high throughput – up to thousands of events per hour per device – and need to retrieve consistent databased on the time of the event. Storing and retrieving individual signals should be atomic. What should you do?
Your company wants to migrate your data from an on-premises relational database to Google Cloud. Your current database can no longer scale with respect to the growth of your users and you expect the number of users to rapidly grow. You need to choose a relational database that allows you to globally scale while minimizing your management and administration efforts. You also want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
You built an application on your development laptop that uses Google Cloud services. Your application uses Application Default Credentials for authentication and works fine on your development laptop. You want to migrate this application to a Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) and set up authentication using Google- recommended practices and minimal changes. What should you do?
A team of data scientists infrequently needs to use a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster that you manage. They require GPUs for some long-running, non-restartable jobs. You want to minimize cost. What should you do?
You are monitoring an application and receive user feedback that a specific error is spiking. You notice that the error is caused by a Service Account having insufficient permissions. You are able to solve the problem but want to be notified if the problem recurs. What should you do?
You have a developer laptop with the Cloud SDK installed on Ubuntu. The Cloud SDK was installed from the Google Cloud Ubuntu package repository. You want to test your application locally on your laptop with Cloud Datastore. What should you do?
Your company has workloads running on Compute Engine and on-premises. The Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is connected to your WAN over a Virtual Private Network (VPN). You need to deploy a new Compute Engine instance and ensure that no public Internet traffic can be routed to it. What should you do?
You are building an application that processes data files uploaded from thousands of suppliers. Your primary goals for the application are data security and the expiration of aged data. You need to design the application to:
•Restrict access so that suppliers can access only their own data.
•Give suppliers write access to data only for 30 minutes.
•Delete data that is over 45 days old.
You have a very short development cycle, and you need to make sure that the application requires minimal maintenance. Which two strategies should you use? (Choose two.)
You have two subnets (subnet-a and subnet-b) in the default VPC. Your database servers are running in subnet-a. Your application servers and web servers are running in subnet-b. You want to configure a firewall rule that only allows database traffic from the application servers to the database servers. What should you do?
You have developed an application that consists of multiple microservices, with each microservice packaged in its own Docker container image. You want to deploy the entire application on Google Kubernetes Engine so that each microservice can be scaled individually. What should you do?
You are planning to move your company's website and a specific asynchronous background job to Google Cloud Your website contains only static HTML content The background job is started through an HTTP endpoint and generates monthly invoices for your customers. Your website needs to be available in multiple geographic locations and requires autoscaling. You want to have no costs when your workloads are not In use and follow recommended practices. What should you do?
Your company uses Cloud Storage to store application backup files for disaster recovery purposes. You want to follow Google’s recommended practices. Which storage option should you use?
You are deploying an application to Cloud Run. Your application requires the use of an API that runs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). You need to ensure that your Cloud Run service can privately reach the API on GKE, and you want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
You have just created a new project which will be used to deploy a globally distributed application. You will use Cloud Spanner for data storage. You want to create a Cloud Spanner instance. You want to perform the first step in preparation of creating the instance. What should you do?
You deployed a new application inside your Google Kubernetes Engine cluster using the YAML file specified below.

You check the status of the deployed pods and notice that one of them is still in PENDING status:

You want to find out why the pod is stuck in pending status. What should you do?
Your company's security vulnerability management policy wonts 3 member of the security team to have visibility into vulnerabilities and other OS metadata for a specific Compute Engine instance This Compute Engine instance hosts a critical application in your Goggle Cloud project. You need to implement your company's security vulnerability management policy. What should you dc?
You have a Dockerfile that you need to deploy on Kubernetes Engine. What should you do?
You recently received a new Google Cloud project with an attached billing account where you will work. You need to create instances, set firewalls, and store data in Cloud Storage. You want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
You are deploying a large multi-tiered application with more than 1,000 IP addresses in a Google Cloud project that needs to be securely isolated. The application includes the:
web tier with frontend servers for public traffic
application tier with servers running core application logic that only need access from the web tier and
database tier with database servers that only need access from the application tierYou want to minimize cost, complexity, and administrative overhead in the network architecture. What should you do?
database tier with database servers that only need access from the application tierYou want to minimize cost, complexity, and administrative overhead in the network architecture. What should you do?
Your company is running a critical workload on a single Compute Engine VM instance. Your company's disaster recovery policies require you to backup the entire instance's disk data every day. The backups must be retained for 7 days. You must configure a backup solution that complies with your company's security policies and requires minimal setup and configuration. What should you do?
You are planning to migrate the following on-premises data management solutions to Google Cloud:
• One MySQL cluster for your main database
• Apache Kafka for your event streaming platform
• One Cloud SOL for PostgreSOL database for your analytical and reporting needs
You want to implement Google-recommended solutions for the migration. You need to ensure that the new solutions provide global scalability and require minimal operational and infrastructure management. What should you do?
Your company publishes large files on an Apache web server that runs on a Compute Engine instance. The Apache web server is not the only application running in the project. You want to receive an email when the egress network costs for the server exceed 100 dollars for the current month as measured by Google Cloud Platform (GCP). What should you do?
An employee was terminated, but their access to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was not removed until 2 weeks later. You need to find out this employee accessed any sensitive customer information after their termination. What should you do?
You have a web application deployed as a managed instance group. You have a new version of the application to gradually deploy. Your web application is currently receiving live web traffic. You want to ensure that the available capacity does not decrease during the deployment. What should you do?
You want to select and configure a solution for storing and archiving data on Google Cloud Platform. You need to support compliance objectives for data from one geographic location. This data is archived after 30 days and needs to be accessed annually. What should you do?
Your company has a single sign-on (SSO) identity provider that supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) integration with service providers. Your company has users in Cloud Identity. You would like users to authenticate using your company’s SSO provider. What should you do?
You are running multiple microservices in a Kubernetes Engine cluster. One microservice is rendering images. The microservice responsible for the image rendering requires a large amount of CPU time compared to the memory it requires. The other microservices are workloads that are optimized for n1-standard machine types. You need to optimize your cluster so that all workloads are using resources as efficiently as possible. What should you do?
You have a Compute Engine instance hosting a production application. You want to receive an email if the instance consumes more than 90% of its CPU resources for more than 15 minutes. You want to use Google services. What should you do?
Your web application is hosted on Cloud Run and needs to query a Cloud SQL database. Every morning during a traffic spike, you notice API quota errors in Cloud SQL logs. The project has already reached the maximum API quota. You want to make a configuration change to mitigate the issue. What should you do?
You just installed the Google Cloud CLI on your new corporate laptop. You need to list the existing instances of your company on Google Cloud. What must you do before you run the gcloud compute instances list command?
Choose 2 answers
Your company would like to store invoices and other financial documents in Google Cloud. You need to identify a Google-managed solution to store this information for your company. You must ensure that the documents are kept for a duration of three years. Your company's analysts need frequent access to invoices from the past six months. After six months, invoices should be archived for audit purposes only. You want to minimize costs and follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
Your company uses BigQuery to store and analyze data. Upon submitting your query in BigQuery, the query fails with a quotaExceeded error. You need to diagnose the issue causing the error. What should you do?
Choose 2 answers
You are running multiple VPC-native Google Kubernetes Engine clusters in the same subnet. The IPs available for the nodes are exhausted, and you want to ensure that the clusters can grow in nodes when needed. What should you do?
You have an instance group that you want to load balance. You want the load balancer to terminate the client SSL session. The instance group is used to serve a public web application over HTTPS. You want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
You recently discovered that your developers are using many service account keys during their development process. While you work on a long term improvement, you need to quickly implement a process to enforce short-lived service account credentials in your company. You have the following requirements:
• All service accounts that require a key should be created in a centralized project called pj-sa.
• Service account keys should only be valid for one day.
You need a Google-recommended solution that minimizes cost. What should you do?
Your web application is hosted on Cloud Run and needs to query a Cloud SOL database. Every morning during a traffic spike, you notice API quota errors in Cloud SOL logs. The project has already reached the maximum API quota. You want to make a configuration change to mitigate the issue. What should you do?
You created a Google Cloud Platform project with an App Engine application inside the project. You initially configured the application to be served from the us-central region. Now you want the application to be served from the asia-northeast1 region. What should you do?
You need to grant access for three users so that they can view and edit table data on a Cloud Spanner instance. What should you do?
You have deployed multiple Linux instances on Compute Engine. You plan on adding more instances in the coming weeks. You want to be able to access all of these instances through your SSH client over me Internet without having to configure specific access on the existing and new instances. You do not want the Compute Engine instances to have a public IP. What should you do?
Your organization uses G Suite for communication and collaboration. All users in your organization have a G Suite account. You want to grant some G Suite users access to your Cloud Platform project. What should you do?
Your company's accounting department needs to run an overnight batch workload every day. You must implement a solution that minimizes the cost to run this workload and automatically retries the batch if an execution fails. What should you do?
You need to create a copy of a custom Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) to facilitate an expected increase in application traffic due to a business acquisition. What should you do?
You are performing a monthly security check of your Google Cloud environment and want to know who has access to view data stored in your Google Cloud
Project. What should you do?
You want to run a single caching HTTP reverse proxy on GCP for a latency-sensitive website. This specific reverse proxy consumes almost no CPU. You want to have a 30-GB in-memory cache, and need an additional 2 GB of memory for the rest of the processes. You want to minimize cost. How should you run this reverse proxy?
Your organization has strict requirements to control access to Google Cloud projects. You need to enable your Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to approve requests from the Google Cloud support team when an SRE opens a support case. You want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
You have been asked to create robust Virtual Private Network (VPN) connectivity between a new Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and a remote site. Key requirements include dynamic routing, a shared address space of 10.19.0.1/22, and no overprovisioning of tunnels during a failover event. You want to follow Google-recommended practices to set up a high availability Cloud VPN. What should you do?
An application generates daily reports in a Compute Engine virtual machine (VM). The VM is in the project corp-iot-insights. Your team operates only in the project corp-aggregate-reports and needs a copy of the daily exports in the bucket corp-aggregate-reports-storage. You want to configure access so that the daily reports from the VM are available in the bucket corp-aggregate-reports-storage and use as few steps as possible while following Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
You need to assign a Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) role to an external auditor. The auditor needs to have permissions to review your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Audit Logs and also to review your Data Access logs. What should you do?
You are building a multi-player gaming application that will store game information in a database. As the popularity of the application increases, you are concerned about delivering consistent performance. You need to ensure an optimal gaming performance for global users, without increasing the management complexity. What should you do?
(You need to migrate multiple PostgreSQL databases from your on-premises data center to Google Cloud. You want to significantly improve the performance of your databases while minimizing changes to your data schema and application code. You expect to exceed 150 TB of data per geographical region. You want to follow Google-recommended practices and minimize your operational costs. What should you do?)
You received a JSON file that contained a private key of a Service Account in order to get access to several resources in a Google Cloud project. You downloaded and installed the Cloud SDK and want to use this private key for authentication and authorization when performing gcloud commands. What should you do?
(You have an application running inside a Compute Engine instance. You want to provide the application with secure access to a BigQuery dataset. You must ensure that credentials are only valid for a short period of time, and your application will only have access to the intended BigQuery dataset. You want to follow Google-recommended practices and minimize your operational costs. What should you do?)
You created a Kubernetes deployment by running kubectl run nginx image=nginx labels=app=prod. Your Kubernetes cluster is also used by a number of other deployments. How can you find the identifier of the pods for this nginx deployment?
You are managing a Data Warehouse on BigQuery. An external auditor will review your company's processes, and multiple external consultants will need view access to the data. You need to provide them with view access while following Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
You are building a pipeline to process time-series data. Which Google Cloud Platform services should you put in boxes 1,2,3, and 4?

You need to immediately change the storage class of an existing Google Cloud bucket. You need to reduce service cost for infrequently accessed files stored in that bucket and for all files that will be added to that bucket in the future. What should you do?
You have several hundred microservice applications running in a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster. Each microservice is a deployment with resource limits configured for each container in the deployment. You've observed that the resource limits for memory and CPU are not appropriately set for many of the microservices. You want to ensure that each microservice has right sized limits for memory and CPU. What should you do?
You are working with a Cloud SQL MySQL database at your company. You need to retain a month-end copy of the database for three years for audit purposes. What should you do?
Your auditor wants to view your organization's use of data in Google Cloud. The auditor is most interested in auditing who accessed data in Cloud Storage buckets. You need to help the auditor access the data they need. What should you do?
You have a large 5-TB AVRO file stored in a Cloud Storage bucket. Your analysts are proficient only in SQL and need access to the data stored in this file. You want to find a cost-effective way to complete their request as soon as possible. What should you do?
Your company is moving from an on-premises environment to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You have multiple development teams that use Cassandra environments as backend databases. They all need a development environment that is isolated from other Cassandra instances. You want to move to GCP quickly and with minimal support effort. What should you do?
(You manage a VPC network in Google Cloud with a subnet that is rapidly approaching its private IP address capacity. You expect the number of Compute Engine VM instances in the same region to double within a week. You need to implement a Google-recommended solution that minimizes operational costs and does not require downtime. What should you do?)
You are implementing a company-wide standard to control SSH access for your Google Cloud projects. You want to simplify SSH access management to your Compute Engine Instances while maintaining audit compliance and eliminating as many manual steps as possible. What should you do?
Your finance team wants to view the billing report for your projects. You want to make sure that the finance team does not get additional permissions to the project. What should you do?
You want to configure an SSH connection to a single Compute Engine instance for users in the dev1 group. This instance is the only resource in this particular Google Cloud Platform project that the dev1 users should be able to connect to. What should you do?
You have a Compute Engine instance hosting an application used between 9 AM and 6 PM on weekdays. You want to back up this instance daily for disaster recovery purposes. You want to keep the backups for 30 days. You want the Google-recommended solution with the least management overhead and the least number of services. What should you do?
A colleague handed over a Google Cloud Platform project for you to maintain. As part of a security checkup, you want to review who has been granted the Project Owner role. What should you do?
An external member of your team needs list access to compute images and disks in one of your projects. You want to follow Google-recommended practices when you grant the required permissions to this user. What should you do?
You are managing several Google Cloud Platform (GCP) projects and need access to all logs for the past 60 days. You want to be able to explore and quickly analyze the log contents. You want to follow Google- recommended practices to obtain the combined logs for all projects. What should you do?
You create a Deployment with 2 replicas in a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster that has a single preemptible node pool. After a few minutes, you use kubectl to examine the status of your Pod and observe that one of them is still in Pending status:

What is the most likely cause?
You need to enable traffic between multiple groups of Compute Engine instances that are currently running two different GCP projects. Each group of Compute Engine instances is running in its own VPC. What should you do?
You have designed a solution on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that uses multiple GCP products. Your company has asked you to estimate the costs of the solution. You need to provide estimates for the monthly total cost. What should you do?
The DevOps group in your organization needs full control of Compute Engine resources in your development project. However, they should not have permission to create or update any other resources in the project. You want to follow Google's recommendations for setting permissions for the DevOps group. What should you do?
You are designing an application that uses WebSockets and HTTP sessions that are not distributed across the web servers. You want to ensure the application runs properly on Google Cloud Platform. What should you do?
Your web application has been running successfully on Cloud Run for Anthos. You want to evaluate an updated version of the application with a specific percentage of your production users (canary deployment). What should you do?
You are building a backend service for an ecommerce platform that will persist transaction data from mobile and web clients. After the platform is launched, you expect a large volume of global transactions. Your business team wants to run SQL queries to analyze the data. You need to build a highly available and scalable data store for the platform. What should you do?
Your manager asks you to deploy a workload to a Kubernetes cluster. You are not sure of the workloads resource requirements or how the requirements might vary depending on usage patterns, external dependencies, or other factors. You need a solution that makes cost-effective recommendations regarding CPU and memory requirements, and allows the workload to function consistently in any situation. You want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?
You are using multiple configurations for gcloud. You want to review the configured Kubernetes Engine cluster of an inactive configuration using the fewest possible steps. What should you do?
You are creating a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster with a cluster autoscaler feature enabled. You need to make sure that each node of the cluster will run a monitoring pod that sends container metrics to a third-party monitoring solution. What should you do?
You have downloaded and installed the gcloud command line interface (CLI) and have authenticated with your Google Account. Most of your Compute Engine instances in your project run in the europe-west1-d zone. You want to avoid having to specify this zone with each CLI command when managing these instances. What should you do?
You have sensitive data stored in three Cloud Storage buckets and have enabled data access logging. You want to verify activities for a particular user for these buckets, using the fewest possible steps. You need to verify the addition of metadata labels and which files have been viewed from those buckets. What should you do?
Your coworker has helped you set up several configurations for gcloud. You've noticed that you're running commands against the wrong project. Being new to the company, you haven't yet memorized any of the projects. With the fewest steps possible, what's the fastest way to switch to the correct configuration?
You want to send and consume Cloud Pub/Sub messages from your App Engine application. The Cloud Pub/Sub API is currently disabled. You will use a service account to authenticate yourapplication to the API. You want to make sure your application can use Cloud Pub/Sub. What should you do?
You have a Linux VM that must connect to Cloud SQL. You created a service account with the appropriate access rights. You want to make sure that the VM uses this service account instead of the default Compute Engine service account. What should you do?
You have an application that runs on Compute Engine VM instances in a custom Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Your company's security policies only allow the use to internal IP addresses on VM instances and do not let VM instances connect to the internet. You need to ensure that the application can access a file hosted in a Cloud Storage bucket within your project. What should you do?
All development (dev) teams in your organization are located in the United States. Each dev team has its own Google Cloud project. You want to restrict access so that each dev team can only create cloud resources in the United States (US). What should you do?
You are deploying an application to a Compute Engine VM in a managed instance group. The application must be running at all times, but only a single instance of the VM should run per GCP project. How should you configure the instance group?
You have been asked to set up Object Lifecycle Management for objects stored in storage buckets. The objects are written once and accessed frequently for 30 days. After 30 days, the objects are not read again unless there is a special need. The object should be kept for three years, and you need to minimize cost. What should you do?
You recently deployed a new version of an application to App Engine and then discovered a bug in the release. You need to immediately revert to the prior version of the application. What should you do?
(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.)
You need to host an application on a Compute Engine instance in a project shared with other teams. You want to prevent the other teams from accidentally causing downtime on that application. Which feature should you use?
You have created a code snippet that should be triggered whenever a new file is uploaded to a Cloud Storage bucket. You want to deploy this code snippet. What should you do?
(You are deploying an application to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The application needs to make API calls to a private Cloud Storage bucket. You need to configure your application Pods to authenticate to the Cloud Storage API, but your organization policy prevents the usage of service account keys. You want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?)
You need to run an important query in BigQuery but expect it to return a lot of records. You want to find out how much it will cost to run the query. You are using on-demand pricing. What should you do?
Your team is using Linux instances on Google Cloud. You need to ensure that your team logs in to these instances in the most secure and cost efficient way. What should you do?
You want to permanently delete a Pub/Sub topic managed by Config Connector in your Google Cloud project. What should you do?
Your managed instance group raised an alert stating that new instance creation has failed to create new instances. You need to maintain the number of running instances specified by the template to be able to process expected application traffic. What should you do?
You have 32 GB of data in a single file that you need to upload to a Nearline Storage bucket. The WAN connection you are using is rated at 1 Gbps, and you are the only one on the connection. You want to use as much of the rated 1 Gbps as possible to transfer the file rapidly. How should you upload the file?
Your company wants to migrate their on-premises workloads to Google Cloud. The current on-premises workloads consist of:
• A Flask web application
• AbackendAPI
• A scheduled long-running background job for ETL and reporting.
You need to keep operational costs low You want to follow Google-recommended practices to migrate these workloads to serverless solutions on Google Cloud. What should you do?
You need to track and verity modifications to a set of Google Compute Engine instances in your Google Cloud project. In particular, you want to verify OS system patching events on your virtual machines (VMs). What should you do?
(You are managing the security configuration of your company's Google Cloud organization. The Operations team needs specific permissions on both a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster and a Cloud SQL instance. Two predefined Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles exist that contain a subset of the permissions needed by the team. You need to configure the necessary IAM permissions for this team while following Google-recommended practices. What should you do?)
Your customer wants you to create a secure website with autoscaling based on the compute instance CPU load. You want to enhance performance by storing static content in Cloud Storage. Which resources are needed to distribute the user traffic?