Monday, August 25, 2025

GCP Professional Cloud Engineer certification Practice Questions



Instead, I can provide a comprehensive list of 50 top-tier practice questions covering key domains of the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Engineer certification. This will give you a solid foundation for your study, including a mix of scenario-based, conceptual, and command-line questions, complete with explanations.


Google Cloud Professional Cloud Engineer Practice Questions

  1. A company wants to migrate an on-premises application that runs on a single server. They need to ensure high availability and have zero downtime during planned maintenance. Which Compute Engine feature is most relevant?

    • A. Preemptible VMs

    • B. Committed Use Discounts

    • C. Live Migration

    • D. Sustained Use Discounts

    • Answer: C. Live Migration is a unique GCE feature that allows Google to perform host maintenance without interrupting or rebooting the running VM instance.

  2. You need to deploy a scalable web application that can handle sudden traffic spikes. You want to automate the scaling and healing of the instances. Which Compute Engine feature should you use?

    • A. Managed Instance Groups (MIGs)

    • B. Instance Templates

    • C. Custom Machine Types

    • D. Sole-tenant Nodes

    • Answer: A. MIGs are designed to manage a group of identical instances, and they provide autoscaling and autohealing capabilities to handle traffic spikes and instance failures.

  3. A development team needs to store large, unstructured files (e.g., images and videos) that will be accessed by a Compute Engine application. They require a cost-effective, highly scalable solution. Which Google Cloud storage service is the best fit?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Cloud Storage

    • C. Cloud Filestore

    • D. Bigtable

    • Answer: B. Cloud Storage is a highly scalable, globally available object storage service that is ideal for storing unstructured data like images and videos.

  4. Your company has a legacy monolithic application running on-premises. They want to move it to Google Cloud without re-architecting it. Which service should they use?

    • A. App Engine Standard

    • B. Cloud Functions

    • C. Compute Engine

    • D. Cloud Run

    • Answer: C. Compute Engine provides the most flexibility and control, allowing you to lift-and-shift a legacy application to a VM, which is the closest equivalent to a physical server.

  5. You need to process a massive dataset of historical sales records. The job can be run at any time and does not require a real-time response. Which data processing service is the most cost-effective and appropriate for this batch workload?

    • A. Cloud Functions

    • B. Cloud Dataflow

    • C. Pub/Sub

    • D. Cloud Spanner

    • Answer: B. Cloud Dataflow is a powerful, unified service for both batch and stream processing. For large, non-real-time jobs, it's a great choice, especially with its autoscaling capabilities.

  6. A web application needs to send messages from one service to another asynchronously. The messages should be delivered reliably, and the receiving service should be decoupled from the sending service. Which service should you use?

    • A. Cloud Storage

    • B. Pub/Sub

    • C. BigQuery

    • D. Cloud Functions

    • Answer: B. Pub/Sub is a real-time messaging service that provides a scalable and durable way for services to communicate asynchronously.

  7. A team is building a serverless web API that needs to respond to HTTP requests. The code is written in Python and is stateless. They want to pay only for the requests they serve. Which service is the best fit?

    • A. Compute Engine

    • B. App Engine Standard

    • C. Cloud Functions

    • D. Kubernetes Engine

    • Answer: C. Cloud Functions is a fully managed, serverless execution environment that is ideal for event-driven, stateless functions like a web API, and you are billed per invocation.

  8. Your company has a large relational database that requires high availability and needs to scale horizontally. Which Google Cloud service is the best option?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Bigtable

    • C. Cloud Spanner

    • D. Firestore

    • Answer: C. Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, highly available, and horizontally scalable relational database service, unique in its ability to provide both.

  9. A developer needs to configure a firewall rule to allow SSH access to a specific VM instance. The instance has the tag web-server. Which command is correct?

    • A. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:22 --target-tags=web-server

    • B. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:80 --source-tags=web-server

    • C. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:22 --source-tags=web-server

    • D. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:80 --target-tags=web-server

    • Answer: A. The command should specify the correct port for SSH (22) and use --target-tags to apply the rule to instances with the web-server tag.

  10. You have an application running on GKE that needs to connect to an external API. The API key must be managed securely. Which service should you use to store the API key?

    • A. Cloud Storage

    • B. Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

    • C. Secret Manager

    • D. BigQuery

    • Answer: C. Secret Manager is a dedicated service for storing, managing, and accessing sensitive data like API keys, passwords, and certificates.

  11. A company wants to host a static website. They need a cost-effective, scalable, and highly available solution. Which combination of services is the best choice?

    • A. Compute Engine and Cloud SQL

    • B. Cloud Storage and Cloud CDN

    • C. App Engine and Cloud Spanner

    • D. Kubernetes Engine and Memorystore

    • Answer: B. Hosting a static website on Cloud Storage is very cost-effective and scalable. Integrating it with Cloud CDN provides low-latency access to users worldwide.

  12. A data scientist needs to run a machine learning training job that is fault-tolerant and can be completed in under 24 hours. The budget is very limited. Which Compute Engine feature is best for this use case?

    • A. Sole-tenant Nodes

    • B. Preemptible VMs

    • C. Committed Use Discounts

    • D. Custom Machine Types

    • Answer: B. Preemptible VMs are ideal for short-duration, fault-tolerant workloads like ML training because they offer a significant cost reduction.

  13. What is the purpose of an IAM Service Account?

    • A. To provide a personal identity for a human user.

    • B. To provide an identity for a VM, application, or process to interact with GCP services.

    • C. To provide a role for a group of users.

    • D. To manage project quotas.

    • Answer: B. Service Accounts are a special type of Google account that an application or a VM can use to make authorized API calls.

  14. A company needs to analyze petabytes of customer data to identify trends. The analysis requires a serverless, highly scalable data warehouse. Which service should they use?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Bigtable

    • C. Cloud Datastore

    • D. BigQuery

    • Answer: D. BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse designed for analyzing massive datasets using SQL.

  15. What is the purpose of a VPC network in Google Cloud?

    • A. To connect on-premises networks to Google Cloud.

    • B. To provide a global, scalable network for your Google Cloud resources.

    • C. To manage user access to your projects.

    • D. To store your application's data.

    • Answer: B. A VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) network is a global, software-defined network that connects your GCP resources and provides network isolation.

  16. You have an application that receives a high volume of requests and must respond with low latency. The application data is semi-structured and will grow over time, but there's no need for a relational schema. Which database service is the best fit?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Bigtable

    • C. Firestore

    • D. Cloud Spanner

    • Answer: C. Firestore is a flexible, scalable NoSQL document database that is well-suited for web and mobile applications requiring low latency and flexible schemas.

  17. A developer needs to deploy a containerized application to Google Cloud. They want a fully managed service that handles the underlying infrastructure and scales automatically. Which service should they choose?

    • A. Compute Engine

    • B. Kubernetes Engine

    • C. Cloud Run

    • D. App Engine Flexible

    • Answer: C. Cloud Run is a fully managed, serverless platform for containerized applications. It automatically scales to zero and is a great choice for stateless microservices.

  18. A company has an on-premises Hadoop cluster. They want to migrate to a managed service on Google Cloud that can run their existing Spark and Hadoop jobs. Which service is the best fit?

    • A. BigQuery

    • B. Cloud Dataflow

    • C. Dataproc

    • D. Cloud Functions

    • Answer: C. Dataproc is a fully managed service for running Apache Spark, Hadoop, and other big data frameworks. It is ideal for lift-and-shift migrations of existing big data workloads.

  19. What is the purpose of a Cloud Router?

    • A. To manage internal traffic between VMs.

    • B. To connect your on-premises network to Google Cloud through a VPN or Interconnect.

    • C. To provide a static public IP address.

    • D. To manage DNS records.

    • Answer: B. Cloud Router is a fully distributed and managed Google Cloud service that provides BGP peering and routing for Hybrid Cloud connectivity.

  20. A project team needs to implement role-based access control (RBAC) to grant specific permissions to users and groups. Which service is used for this?

    • A. IAM

    • B. Cloud KMS

    • C. Resource Manager

    • D. Cloud Logging

    • Answer: A. IAM (Identity and Access Management) is the service that controls who has what access to which resources in your Google Cloud project.

  21. You want to store confidential documents in Cloud Storage. They must be encrypted at rest, and you want to manage the encryption keys yourself. Which feature should you use?

    • A. Google-managed encryption keys

    • B. Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)

    • C. Customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK)

    • D. Public-key cryptography

    • Answer: C. CSEK allows you to provide your own encryption keys to Google, which are then used to encrypt and decrypt your data.

  22. What is the gcloud compute instances describe command used for?

    • A. To create a new VM.

    • B. To delete a VM.

    • C. To display a list of all VMs.

    • D. To show details about a specific VM.

    • Answer: D. The describe command provides detailed information about a single resource.

  23. An application needs to store large amounts of time-series data from IoT devices. The data will be written at a high rate and read in real-time. The data schema is simple and a key-value structure is sufficient. Which service is a good fit?

    • A. Cloud Spanner

    • B. Bigtable

    • C. Cloud SQL

    • D. Cloud Datastore

    • Answer: B. Bigtable is a petabyte-scale, high-performance NoSQL database for large analytical and operational workloads, making it perfect for time-series data from IoT devices.

  24. A company needs to set up a CI/CD pipeline. They want to build and test their application code in a fully managed environment. Which service should they use?

    • A. Cloud Build

    • B. Cloud Source Repositories

    • C. Artifact Registry

    • D. Cloud Deployment Manager

    • Answer: A. Cloud Build is a serverless CI/CD service that executes your builds on Google Cloud infrastructure.

  25. You need to find out why a specific Compute Engine VM instance is not starting. Where should you look for error information?

    • A. Cloud Logging

    • B. Cloud Monitoring

    • C. Cloud Trace

    • D. Billing Dashboard

    • Answer: A. Cloud Logging aggregates logs from all your Google Cloud resources, including VM instance startup logs, which are crucial for debugging.

  26. Which of the following is a cost-effective way to run a large number of interruptible, stateless background jobs in a managed environment?

    • A. App Engine Standard

    • B. Compute Engine with Preemptible VMs

    • C. Cloud Run with CPU always allocated

    • D. GKE with a static number of nodes

    • Answer: B. Preemptible VMs are the most cost-effective solution for this type of workload.

  27. A developer is building a global application that requires a managed relational database that is highly available across multiple regions. Which service is the best choice?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Cloud Spanner

    • C. Cloud Datastore

    • D. Memorystore

    • Answer: B. Cloud Spanner is the only relational database on GCP that offers multi-region horizontal scalability and high availability.

  28. You want to create a subnet in a specific region of your VPC network. Which gcloud command is used for this?

    • A. gcloud compute networks create

    • B. gcloud compute networks subnets create

    • C. gcloud compute regions subnets create

    • D. gcloud compute zones subnets create

    • Answer: B. The correct command is gcloud compute networks subnets create as subnets are created within a network.

  29. What is the primary function of a Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network)?

    • A. To manage database connections.

    • B. To cache and deliver web content from locations closer to users.

    • C. To run serverless functions.

    • D. To provide a global relational database.

    • Answer: B. A CDN reduces latency and improves performance by caching static content at edge locations.

  30. A company wants to collect and analyze application logs from multiple Compute Engine instances. Which service should they use?

    • A. Cloud Monitoring

    • B. Cloud Logging

    • C. Cloud Trace

    • D. BigQuery

    • Answer: B. Cloud Logging is a fully managed service for collecting, storing, and analyzing logs from your cloud and on-premises applications.

  31. What is the purpose of a service-level agreement (SLA) in Google Cloud?

    • A. To define the pricing for a service.

    • B. To guarantee a certain level of uptime and performance.

    • C. To define the security policy for a project.

    • D. To limit the number of resources you can use.

    • Answer: B. An SLA is a formal commitment from Google to provide a specific level of service availability and performance.

  32. A developer needs to deploy a containerized application to GKE and ensure that the container images are stored securely and privately. Which service should they use?

    • A. Cloud Storage

    • B. Artifact Registry

    • C. Cloud Build

    • D. Container Registry (deprecated)

    • Answer: B. Artifact Registry is the managed artifact repository on Google Cloud for storing container images and other package formats.

  33. A company needs to implement a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan for their Compute Engine instances. They need to be able to recover their instances in another region. Which feature is most relevant for this?

    • A. Live Migration

    • B. Preemptible VMs

    • C. Snapshots and Instance Templates

    • D. Sustained Use Discounts

    • Answer: C. Snapshots of persistent disks can be used to create new disks in another region, and instance templates can be used to quickly provision new VMs.

  34. What is the primary advantage of using a VPC network in auto mode?

    • A. It creates a single subnet in each region automatically.

    • B. It provides more control over IP address ranges.

    • C. It allows for custom firewall rules.

    • D. It supports on-premises connectivity.

    • Answer: A. A VPC in auto mode automatically creates a subnet in each new region as it becomes available, simplifying network management for many use cases.

  35. You are designing a solution for a web application that needs to cache data to reduce database load and improve performance. Which service is the best fit for this caching layer?

    • A. Cloud Storage

    • B. Cloud SQL

    • C. Memorystore

    • D. Bigtable

    • Answer: C. Memorystore is a fully managed in-memory data store service built on Redis and Memcached, ideal for low-latency caching.

  36. Which of the following is a key feature of Google Cloud's shared responsibility model?

    • A. Google is responsible for all security in the cloud.

    • B. The customer is responsible for all security in the cloud.

    • C. Google is responsible for the security of the cloud, and the customer is responsible for security in the cloud.

    • D. Neither Google nor the customer is responsible for security.

    • Answer: C. This model clearly delineates responsibilities, with Google handling the physical infrastructure and the customer managing their data, access control, and applications.

  37. A data pipeline needs to transform and load data from Cloud Storage into BigQuery. The data is a batch workload that is processed daily. Which service should you use?

    • A. Pub/Sub

    • B. Cloud Dataflow

    • C. Cloud Functions

    • D. Cloud Run

    • Answer: B. Dataflow is an excellent choice for this Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) workload because it is fully managed, scalable, and built for this type of data processing.

  38. What is a "Project" in Google Cloud?

    • A. The top-level container for all your resources and billing.

    • B. A single VM instance.

    • C. A geographic location for your resources.

    • D. A user's personal account.

    • Answer: A. A project is the fundamental organizational unit in Google Cloud, acting as a container for resources and services.

  39. You need to provide a new developer with read-only access to all resources in a specific project. Which IAM role is the most appropriate to grant?

    • A. roles/owner

    • B. roles/editor

    • C. roles/viewer

    • D. roles/compute.admin

    • Answer: C. The viewer role provides read-only access to all resources within a project.

  40. A company needs a database for a mobile application. The data will be in the form of documents and will need to sync in real-time between devices. Which service is the best fit?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Cloud Spanner

    • C. Firestore

    • D. Bigtable

    • Answer: C. Firestore is a flexible NoSQL document database designed for mobile, web, and server development with real-time data synchronization.

  41. What is the purpose of Cloud Deployment Manager?

    • A. To manage your source code.

    • B. To deploy applications to GKE.

    • C. To create and manage Google Cloud resources using templates.

    • D. To manage your CI/CD pipelines.

    • Answer: C. Deployment Manager is an infrastructure-as-code service that allows you to define and manage your Google Cloud resources using declarative templates.

  42. A company has a multi-tier application. The web servers need to be able to talk to the database servers, but not to the internet. Which networking feature should you use to enforce this?

    • A. Firewall rules

    • B. Cloud VPN

    • C. Cloud CDN

    • D. Cloud Router

    • Answer: A. Firewall rules are used to control ingress and egress traffic to and from your VM instances, allowing you to create granular network security policies.

  43. A developer needs to deploy a containerized application with a low-cost, serverless model. They also need to ensure that the container can run in a managed Kubernetes environment if needed. Which service provides this flexibility?

    • A. Compute Engine

    • B. Cloud Run

    • C. App Engine

    • D. GKE

    • Answer: B. Cloud Run is built on the Knative standard, which allows you to run the same container on Cloud Run and GKE, providing portability and flexibility.

  44. You need to schedule a batch job that runs a simple Python script every day at midnight. Which service is the most suitable for this task?

    • A. Compute Engine with cron job

    • B. Cloud Functions with Cloud Scheduler

    • C. App Engine with a cron job

    • D. Cloud Dataflow

    • Answer: B. Cloud Scheduler is a fully managed cron job service that can be used to trigger a Cloud Function, providing a serverless and cost-effective solution for simple, scheduled tasks.

  45. What is a "Managed Zone" in Cloud DNS?

    • A. A physical location for your DNS servers.

    • B. A container for all your DNS records for a given domain name.

    • C. A type of firewall rule.

    • D. A billing account.

    • Answer: B. A managed zone is the container for all of your DNS records for a specific domain.

  46. What is the purpose of gcloud auth application-default login?

    • A. To log in with a user account.

    • B. To authenticate a service account.

    • C. To set up credentials for the Google Cloud CLI and client libraries.

    • D. To log in to the Cloud Console.

    • Answer: C. This command sets up your local environment to use your user credentials for authentication with the gcloud CLI and application-default credentials for client libraries.

  47. Your company wants to build a data lake for storing all raw data. The data will be semi-structured and will need to be accessible for future analysis. Which service is the most appropriate for this?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Cloud Storage

    • C. Bigtable

    • D. Firestore

    • Answer: B. Cloud Storage is a cost-effective and highly scalable object storage service that is ideal for building a data lake to store raw data in its native format.

  48. A developer needs to deploy a scalable application that requires a custom runtime environment and needs to be highly available. The developer does not want to manage the underlying infrastructure. Which App Engine environment is the best fit?

    • A. App Engine Standard

    • B. App Engine Flexible

    • C. App Engine Legacy

    • D. App Engine Microservices

    • Answer: B. App Engine Flexible supports custom runtimes and provides a fully managed environment for applications that need more flexibility than App Engine Standard.

  49. What is the purpose of a VPC peering connection?

    • A. To connect a VPC network to the internet.

    • B. To connect two VPC networks, allowing them to communicate using private IP addresses.

    • C. To connect a VPC network to an on-premises network.

    • D. To manage firewall rules.

    • Answer: B. VPC peering allows you to connect two different VPC networks, even across projects or organizations, so that resources can communicate securely and privately.

  50. You need to monitor the performance of your Compute Engine instances, including CPU utilization and network traffic. Which service should you use?

    • A. Cloud Logging

    • B. Cloud Monitoring

    • C. Cloud Trace

    • D. Cloud Profiler

    • Answer: B. Cloud Monitoring is a comprehensive service for monitoring, logging, and alerting on the performance of your Google Cloud resources.

I'll provide the next 50 questions for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Engineer certification exam, continuing from the previous set. These questions cover a broad range of topics, including networking, security, data, and management, often in scenario-based formats to test your practical knowledge.


Google Cloud Professional Cloud Engineer Practice Questions (51-100)

  1. You need to connect your on-premises data center to your Google Cloud VPC network with a secure, private connection. The traffic volume is high, and you require low latency. Which networking solution should you use?

    • A. Cloud VPN

    • B. Cloud Interconnect

    • C. Cloud CDN

    • D. Direct Peering

    • Answer: B. Cloud Interconnect provides a dedicated, high-throughput, and low-latency private connection between your on-premises network and Google Cloud.

  2. A company is building an application that needs to store confidential data. The data must be encrypted at rest, and the encryption keys must be managed by the customer. Which service and key management option is the best choice?

    • A. Cloud Storage with Google-managed encryption keys.

    • B. Cloud SQL with Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK).

    • C. Cloud Storage with Customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK).

    • D. BigQuery with Google-managed encryption keys.

    • Answer: C. CSEK allows you to provide and manage your own encryption keys for data stored in Google Cloud services like Cloud Storage.

  3. You have an application running on Compute Engine that needs to access a private API in another VPC network within your organization. The two networks are in different projects. How can you enable secure communication between them?

    • A. Create a public IP for the VM and a firewall rule.

    • B. Use a VPC peering connection.

    • C. Use Cloud VPN.

    • D. Use a shared VPC.

    • Answer: B. VPC peering allows you to connect two VPC networks so that resources in each network can communicate privately using internal IP addresses.

  4. A company has an application that uses a Cloud SQL database. They need to ensure the database can failover automatically to another zone in case of a zone-level outage. What should they configure?

    • A. Enable binary logging.

    • B. Configure a failover replica.

    • C. Create a manual snapshot.

    • D. Use a standard Compute Engine instance.

    • Answer: B. A Cloud SQL failover replica is a standby instance in another zone that can take over as the primary instance in case of a zonal failure, ensuring high availability.

  5. You are creating a new VPC network. You need to ensure that instances can access Google APIs and services (like Cloud Storage) without a public IP address. Which feature should you enable on the subnet?

    • A. Shared VPC

    • B. VPC peering

    • C. Private Google Access

    • D. Cloud VPN

    • Answer: C. Private Google Access allows VM instances with only an internal IP address to access Google APIs and services securely.

  6. A developer needs to deploy a containerized web application that should scale to zero when there is no traffic. Which service is the most cost-effective choice for this scenario?

    • A. GKE

    • B. App Engine Standard

    • C. Cloud Run

    • D. Compute Engine

    • Answer: C. Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless platform for containers that automatically scales up and down, including to zero instances, meaning you only pay for what you use.

  7. You need to use a single GCP account for all your projects across multiple departments, but you want to ensure each department's budget is tracked separately. How should you structure this?

    • A. Create a separate billing account for each department.

    • B. Use a single billing account with labels for each project.

    • C. Use a single billing account with sub-projects.

    • D. Use separate payment methods for each department.

    • Answer: B. Using a single billing account with labels is a standard best practice for tracking costs by department, environment, or team.

  8. A company wants to store large video files that will be accessed infrequently for archival purposes. They need the lowest possible storage cost. Which Cloud Storage class is the best option?

    • A. Standard storage

    • B. Nearline storage

    • C. Coldline storage

    • D. Archive storage

    • Answer: D. Archive storage is the lowest-cost storage class in Cloud Storage, designed for data that is accessed less than once a year.

  9. You are building an application that needs to store and process sensor data from IoT devices in real time. The data is time-series in nature. Which database service is the most suitable?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Bigtable

    • C. Cloud Spanner

    • D. Firestore

    • Answer: B. Bigtable is a petabyte-scale NoSQL database designed for large analytical and operational workloads, making it perfect for time-time series data from IoT devices.

  10. A developer needs to manage the authentication and authorization for a GKE pod to access a Cloud Storage bucket. Which mechanism is the recommended approach?

    • A. Storing a service account key in the container image.

    • B. Using a user account with a password.

    • C. Using Workload Identity.

    • D. Manually creating and managing API keys.

    • Answer: C. Workload Identity is the recommended way to securely authenticate GKE workloads to GCP services by binding a Kubernetes service account to a GCP IAM service account.

  11. You are troubleshooting a web application that is experiencing slow response times. You suspect the issue is with latency between services. Which tool is best suited for end-to-end performance analysis and tracing?

    • A. Cloud Logging

    • B. Cloud Monitoring

    • C. Cloud Trace

    • D. Cloud Profiler

    • Answer: C. Cloud Trace is a distributed tracing system that helps you track latency and performance bottlenecks across your application's services.

  12. A company needs to implement a CI/CD pipeline. The pipeline should automatically build a container image, store it, and deploy it to a GKE cluster whenever new code is pushed to a Git repository. Which combination of services should you use?

    • A. Cloud Source Repositories, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, and GKE.

    • B. Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and Kubernetes.

    • C. GitHub, Cloud Functions, and GKE.

    • D. Cloud Source Repositories, App Engine, and Cloud Build.

    • Answer: A. This is the standard best practice for a CI/CD pipeline on Google Cloud. Cloud Build is triggered by a commit, it builds and pushes the image to Artifact Registry, and then deploys it to GKE.

  13. You have a Compute Engine instance that needs to have a reserved, permanent external IP address. What type of IP address should you assign to it?

    • A. An ephemeral IP address.

    • B. A dynamic IP address.

    • C. A static IP address.

    • D. A shared IP address.

    • Answer: C. A static IP address is a reserved external IP address that remains associated with your project until you release it, even if the VM instance is stopped and restarted.

  14. What is the primary benefit of using a Shared VPC?

    • A. It allows you to share resources across different projects.

    • B. It reduces network latency.

    • C. It provides a secure, private connection to on-premises networks.

    • D. It automatically creates subnets in all regions.

    • Answer: A. Shared VPC enables you to centralize network administration and management by allowing multiple projects to connect to a single host project's VPC network.

  15. You are migrating an on-premises Oracle database to Google Cloud. The database is a single monolithic application that needs high performance. Which service is the best option for the migration?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Cloud Spanner

    • C. Compute Engine with Oracle installed

    • D. BigQuery

    • Answer: C. Cloud SQL does not support Oracle. Since it's a legacy, monolithic application, running Oracle on a Compute Engine VM is the most viable lift-and-shift approach.

  16. A company has a web application running on a single Compute Engine instance. They want to make it highly available and scalable. What should they do first?

    • A. Create a snapshot of the instance.

    • B. Change the instance to a custom machine type.

    • C. Create a Managed Instance Group with a load balancer.

    • D. Use Cloud CDN.

    • Answer: C. A MIG with a load balancer is the most effective way to ensure high availability and scalability by distributing traffic and automatically managing multiple instances.

  17. You need to grant an external user access to a specific Cloud Storage bucket, but you don't want to create a full user account for them. What's the most secure way to grant temporary, time-bound access?

    • A. Add them to an IAM role.

    • B. Generate a signed URL for the object.

    • C. Share the bucket's public URL.

    • D. Create a new service account.

    • Answer: B. A signed URL provides temporary, limited permission to a specific resource without requiring a Google account or IAM credentials.

  18. What is the purpose of a service-level agreement (SLA) in Google Cloud?

    • A. To define the pricing for a service.

    • B. To guarantee a certain level of uptime and performance.

    • C. To define the security policy for a project.

    • D. To limit the number of resources you can use.

    • Answer: B. An SLA is a formal commitment from Google to provide a specific level of service availability and performance.

  19. You have a containerized application that needs to be deployed to a serverless platform, but you also need more control over networking and security than what Cloud Run provides. Which service is a good alternative?

    • A. App Engine Standard

    • B. App Engine Flexible

    • C. Cloud Functions

    • D. Compute Engine

    • Answer: B. App Engine Flexible runs your application in a Docker container on Compute Engine VMs, providing a managed experience with more control and customization options than Cloud Run.

  20. A company needs to implement a solution to collect and analyze application metrics, such as CPU utilization and latency. They need to create custom dashboards and set up alerts. Which service should they use?

    • A. Cloud Logging

    • B. Cloud Monitoring

    • C. Cloud Trace

    • D. Cloud Profiler

    • Answer: B. Cloud Monitoring is the primary service for collecting metrics, creating dashboards, and setting up alerting based on resource performance.

  21. You are creating a new project and need to control who can access and manage resources at the project level. What is the fundamental concept of access control in Google Cloud?

    • A. Roles and permissions

    • B. Service accounts

    • C. Quotas

    • D. Labels

    • Answer: A. IAM operates on the principle of who (principal) can do what (role) on which resource. Roles contain a set of permissions.

  22. A company needs to store a large amount of archival data from their on-premises file server. The data is rarely accessed and should be retrieved within a day. What is the most cost-effective storage option in Cloud Storage?

    • A. Standard storage

    • B. Nearline storage

    • C. Coldline storage

    • D. Archive storage

    • Answer: C. Coldline storage is designed for data that is accessed less than once a quarter and has a lower cost with an access time of hours to minutes.

  23. You are building an application that needs to perform complex data analysis on a large dataset using SQL. The data is stored in a Cloud Storage bucket. You want a serverless, highly scalable solution. Which service should you use to query the data directly?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Bigtable

    • C. BigQuery

    • D. Cloud Datastore

    • Answer: C. BigQuery allows you to query data directly from Cloud Storage buckets using external tables, providing a serverless and cost-effective way to analyze data without moving it.

  24. What is the purpose of a startup-script in Compute Engine?

    • A. To install the operating system.

    • B. To run commands and install software when an instance starts up.

    • C. To monitor the instance's performance.

    • D. To delete an instance.

    • Answer: B. A startup script is a script that runs every time a VM instance starts, used to automate configuration and software installation.

  25. A company needs to back up a large Compute Engine persistent disk. They need to be able to restore it quickly and efficiently in case of data corruption. Which feature is the best way to do this?

    • A. Creating a new disk and copying the files.

    • B. Taking a snapshot of the persistent disk.

    • C. Using a Cloud Storage bucket.

    • D. Using a regional persistent disk.

    • Answer: B. Snapshots provide a point-in-time backup of a persistent disk that can be used to create a new disk for restoration.

  26. You have a GKE cluster and need to expose an application running in a pod to the internet. Which Kubernetes resource should you use?

    • A. A ConfigMap

    • B. A Service of type LoadBalancer

    • C. A Pod

    • D. A Deployment

    • Answer: B. A Kubernetes Service of type LoadBalancer automatically provisions a Google Cloud Load Balancer to distribute external traffic to your application's pods.

  27. A data scientist needs to run a Spark job on a managed cluster. The cluster should be easy to provision and terminate. Which Google Cloud service is the best fit?

    • A. Compute Engine

    • B. Dataproc

    • C. Cloud Dataflow

    • D. Kubernetes Engine

    • Answer: B. Dataproc is a fully managed service for Spark and Hadoop clusters, making it easy to create and tear down clusters for on-demand data processing.

  28. You are designing a solution for a mobile application that needs a low-latency, scalable, and fully managed database. The data is non-relational and will be accessed by a small team of developers. Which service is the most appropriate?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Cloud Spanner

    • C. Firestore

    • D. Bigtable

    • Answer: C. Firestore is a flexible NoSQL document database, ideal for mobile apps, and offers real-time data synchronization.

  29. What is the purpose of a Committed Use Discount (CUD)?

    • A. It is an automatic discount for long-running instances.

    • B. It requires a one-time upfront payment for a discount.

    • C. It is a discount for a committed period, but without an upfront payment.

    • D. It is a discount for using more than one service.

    • Answer: C. CUDs offer a significant discount in exchange for a commitment to use a specific level of resources for 1 or 3 years.

  30. You need to control network traffic to a group of Compute Engine instances based on their application type. For example, you want to allow web traffic only to instances tagged as web-server. Which VPC feature should you use?

    • A. VPC peering

    • B. Shared VPC

    • C. Firewall rules with network tags

    • D. A Load Balancer

    • Answer: C. Network tags are a powerful feature that allows you to apply firewall rules to specific instances without needing to know their IP addresses.

  31. A company needs to store large files that are frequently accessed by many users. The files must be available globally with low latency. Which combination of services is the best choice?

    • A. Cloud Storage with Standard storage class and Cloud CDN.

    • B. Cloud Storage with Archive storage class and Cloud Interconnect.

    • C. Cloud SQL and Cloud VPN.

    • D. Bigtable and Cloud Storage.

    • Answer: A. Standard storage provides low latency, and Cloud CDN caches the content at edge locations, ensuring fast delivery to users worldwide.

  32. You need to migrate an on-premises web server with a local database to Google Cloud. The team wants a fully managed platform where they don't have to manage the underlying OS or hardware. Which service is the best fit?

    • A. Compute Engine

    • B. App Engine

    • C. Cloud Functions

    • D. GKE

    • Answer: B. App Engine is a fully managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that abstracts away the infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on their code.

  33. A team needs to audit all IAM policy changes in their project. Where can they find a log of these changes?

    • A. Cloud Monitoring

    • B. Cloud Logging

    • C. Cloud Audit Logs

    • D. Cloud Trace

    • Answer: C. Cloud Audit Logs record API calls and administrative actions for all Google Cloud services, including IAM policy changes.

  34. What is the purpose of a Cloud DNS managed zone?

    • A. To manage physical DNS servers.

    • B. To host and manage your domain's DNS records.

    • C. To provide a static IP address for a VM.

    • D. To route traffic between different regions.

    • Answer: B. Cloud DNS is a managed, authoritative DNS service that allows you to manage DNS zones and records for your domain names.

  35. You are building an application that will ingest a continuous stream of events from an external source. You need a scalable, durable, and real-time messaging service. Which GCP service is the best fit?

    • A. Cloud Pub/Sub

    • B. Cloud Storage

    • C. BigQuery

    • D. Cloud SQL

    • Answer: A. Cloud Pub/Sub is a messaging service for ingesting and distributing data streams, providing a scalable and durable way to handle real-time events.

  36. A developer needs to configure a VM instance to run as a specific identity to access other GCP services. Which feature should they use?

    • A. A personal user account.

    • B. A service account.

    • C. A public IP address.

    • D. A firewall rule.

    • Answer: B. A service account is a special type of Google account that an application or a VM instance can use to authenticate and get permissions.

  37. What is the primary benefit of using a Regional Managed Instance Group?

    • A. It is cheaper.

    • B. It provides increased resilience against zonal failures.

    • C. It provides a single point of failure.

    • D. It can only scale manually.

    • Answer: B. A regional MIG distributes instances across multiple zones within a region, ensuring the application remains available even if one zone experiences an outage.

  38. You are using Cloud Build to create and deploy container images. Which service is the recommended repository for storing these container images?

    • A. Cloud Storage

    • B. Artifact Registry

    • C. Cloud Source Repositories

    • D. Docker Hub

    • Answer: B. Artifact Registry is the modern, fully managed artifact repository that is the recommended successor to Container Registry.

  39. A company wants to collect and analyze application logs from multiple Compute Engine instances. Which service should they use?

    • A. Cloud Monitoring

    • B. Cloud Logging

    • C. Cloud Trace

    • D. BigQuery

    • Answer: B. Cloud Logging is a fully managed service for collecting, storing, and analyzing logs from your cloud and on-premises applications.

  40. You need to migrate an on-premises database to Google Cloud. The database is a NoSQL, wide-column database that requires petabyte-scale and very high throughput. Which service is the best fit?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Cloud Spanner

    • C. Bigtable

    • D. Firestore

    • Answer: C. Bigtable is a petabyte-scale, high-performance NoSQL database that is an excellent fit for migrating wide-column databases.

  41. What is the purpose of a VPC Flow Log?

    • A. To monitor API calls.

    • B. To capture network flow information for all traffic in a VPC network.

    • C. To monitor CPU usage.

    • D. To log SSH connections.

    • Answer: B. VPC Flow Logs record a summary of all network flows sent from and received by VM instances, which is useful for network monitoring and security analysis.

  42. A company needs a database for a web application. They need to ensure strong consistency and the ability to run SQL queries. Which service is a good option?

    • A. Bigtable

    • B. Firestore

    • C. Cloud SQL

    • D. Cloud Storage

    • Answer: C. Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service that provides strong consistency and supports standard SQL.

  43. You are building an application that needs to store and process a small amount of key-value data. The data needs to be highly available and has a flexible schema. Which service is a good fit?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Firestore

    • C. Cloud Spanner

    • D. Bigtable

    • Answer: B. Firestore is a flexible NoSQL database that is great for small amounts of data and provides real-time updates and a flexible schema.

  44. What is the gcloud compute instances delete command used for?

    • A. To stop a VM instance.

    • B. To delete a VM instance.

    • C. To suspend a VM instance.

    • D. To list all VM instances.

    • Answer: B. The delete command is used to permanently remove a VM instance.

  45. A company needs to implement a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan for their Compute Engine instances. They need to be able to recover their instances in another region. Which feature is most relevant for this?

    • A. Live Migration

    • B. Preemptible VMs

    • C. Snapshots and Instance Templates

    • D. Sustained Use Discounts

    • Answer: C. Snapshots of persistent disks can be used to create new disks in another region, and instance templates can be used to quickly provision new VMs.

  46. You have an application running on Compute Engine that needs to be able to send emails. You want to use a managed service to handle the email sending. Which GCP service is the best option?

    • A. Cloud Pub/Sub

    • B. App Engine Mail API

    • C. Cloud Functions

    • D. Google Workspace

    • Answer: B. The App Engine Mail API provides a managed service for sending emails from your applications, simplifying the process of sending notifications and other emails.

  47. What is the primary benefit of using a VPC in auto mode?

    • A. It allows you to create your own subnets.

    • B. It automatically creates a subnet in each new region.

    • C. It provides better security.

    • D. It supports on-premises connectivity.

    • Answer: B. A VPC in auto mode automatically creates a subnet in each new region as it becomes available, simplifying network management.

  48. A company needs to analyze petabytes of customer data to identify trends. The analysis requires a serverless, highly scalable data warehouse. Which service should they use?

    • A. Cloud SQL

    • B. Bigtable

    • C. Cloud Datastore

    • D. BigQuery

    • Answer: D. BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse designed for analyzing massive datasets using SQL.

  49. What is the purpose of an IAM Service Account?

    • A. To provide a personal identity for a human user.

    • B. To provide an identity for a VM, application, or process to interact with GCP services.

    • C. To provide a role for a group of users.

    • D. To manage project quotas.

    • Answer: B. Service Accounts are a special type of Google account that an application or a VM can use to make authorized API calls.

  50. A developer needs to configure a firewall rule to allow SSH access to a specific VM instance. The instance has the tag web-server. Which command is correct?

    * A. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:22 --target-tags=web-server

    * B. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:80 --source-tags=web-server

    * C. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:22 --source-tags=web-server

    * D. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:80 --target-tags=web-server

    * Answer: A. The command should specify the correct port for SSH (22) and use --target-tags to apply the rule to instances with the web-server tag.

This set of 50 questions is a continuation of the previous set, focusing on more advanced and nuanced topics within Google Cloud. They are designed to test your understanding of how different GCP services work together in real-world scenarios, a crucial skill for the Professional Cloud Engineer certification.


Google Cloud Professional Cloud Engineer Practice Questions (101-150)

  1. You need to deploy a serverless web application that processes user-uploaded images. The processing takes 10-20 seconds per image, and you want to use a fully managed, event-driven service. Which GCP service is the most appropriate?

    * A. Cloud Functions

    * B. Cloud Run

    * C. App Engine Standard

    * D. Compute Engine

    * Answer: B. Cloud Run is an ideal choice for this scenario as it is designed for stateless, request-driven containers and is suitable for workloads that might take a bit longer to process, unlike Cloud Functions which has a shorter execution time limit.

  2. A company wants to securely transfer large datasets from their on-premises network to a Cloud Storage bucket. The data transfer should be as fast as possible and not use the public internet. What is the best service to use?

    * A. Cloud VPN

    * B. Cloud Interconnect

    * C. Transfer Appliance

    * D. gsutil

    * Answer: C. Transfer Appliance is a high-capacity storage server that you can use to transfer terabytes or petabytes of data from your data center to Google Cloud, bypassing the public internet.

  3. Your company has a legacy application that requires a static private IP address for a VM instance. You also need to ensure that the VM remains available even if the underlying hardware fails. How can you fulfill these requirements?

    * A. Use a custom machine type and a static external IP.

    * B. Use a reserved internal IP and a Managed Instance Group.

    * C. Use a static internal IP and a live migration-enabled VM.

    * D. Use a reserved external IP and a preemptible VM.

    * Answer: B. A reserved internal IP ensures a static private address. A Managed Instance Group can automatically recreate the VM if it fails, ensuring availability.

  4. A company needs to analyze log data from all their Google Cloud projects. They want to centralize the logs in a single location for long-term storage and analysis. What is the most effective way to do this?

    * A. Create a sink in each project to export logs to a central Cloud Storage bucket.

    * B. Use Cloud Logging's built-in log viewer.

    * C. Use a VPC Flow Log to capture all traffic.

    * D. Create a Compute Engine instance and install a log aggregator.

    * Answer: A. The recommended practice for centralizing logs is to use a logs sink to export logs from individual projects to a centralized Cloud Storage bucket or BigQuery dataset in a dedicated log aggregation project.

  5. You are creating a private GKE cluster. The nodes should not have public IP addresses but need to be able to access the internet to download software packages and security updates. How can you achieve this?

    * A. Configure a Cloud VPN connection to an on-premises network.

    * B. Use a shared VPC network.

    * C. Enable Private Google Access on the subnet.

    * D. Configure a Cloud NAT Gateway.

    * Answer: D. Cloud NAT (Network Address Translation) allows instances in a private network to securely access the internet without having public IP addresses. This is a common requirement for private GKE clusters.

  6. What is the purpose of an IAM Policy and how is it applied?

    * A. A policy is a set of roles that is applied to a resource to grant permissions to a principal.

    * B. A policy is a set of principals that is applied to a role.

    * C. A policy is a set of permissions that is applied to a principal.

    * D. A policy is a set of resources that is applied to a principal.

    * Answer: A. An IAM policy is a collection of bindings that define who (the principal) has what access (the role) on a resource.

  7. A developer needs to deploy an application that requires a specific version of a Java runtime not supported by App Engine Standard. The application must be highly scalable and the developer wants a managed platform. Which service is the best fit?

    * A. App Engine Standard

    * B. App Engine Flexible

    * C. Cloud Functions

    * D. Cloud Run

    * Answer: B. App Engine Flexible supports custom runtimes using Docker containers, providing the necessary flexibility while still being a fully managed platform.

  8. You need to find out why a specific Compute Engine VM instance is not starting. Where should you look for error information?

    * A. Cloud Monitoring dashboards

    * B. VPC Flow Logs

    * C. Cloud Audit Logs

    * D. Serial port output in Cloud Logging

    * Answer: D. The serial port output of a Compute Engine VM is where boot-up messages and startup script logs are written, which are essential for debugging boot failures.

  9. What is the purpose of a Cloud DNS private zone?

    * A. To manage DNS records for public domain names.

    * B. To manage DNS records for resources within your VPC network.

    * C. To provide a static IP address for a VM.

    * D. To route traffic between different regions.

    * Answer: B. A Cloud DNS private zone provides a managed DNS service for resources within your VPC network, allowing them to resolve names using private DNS.

  10. A company has a legacy database that requires a static IP address and a fixed block of CPU and memory. They need to migrate it to Google Cloud. Which Compute Engine resource is the best fit?

    * A. Preemptible VM

    * B. Custom Machine Type

    * C. Sole-tenant Node

    * D. Dedicated Host

    * Answer: B. A custom machine type allows you to specify a fixed amount of CPU and memory that meets the application's specific requirements.

  11. You are building an application that needs to receive a high volume of sensor data from IoT devices. The data needs to be processed in real-time. Which messaging service is designed for this type of workload?

    * A. Cloud Functions

    * B. Cloud Pub/Sub

    * C. Cloud Tasks

    * D. Cloud SQL

    * Answer: B. Cloud Pub/Sub is a real-time messaging service that is highly scalable and can handle a massive number of messages from sources like IoT devices.

  12. A company needs to track and analyze all API calls and administrative actions performed in their Google Cloud projects for security and auditing purposes. Which service should they use?

    * A. Cloud Monitoring

    * B. Cloud Logging

    * C. Cloud Audit Logs

    * D. Cloud Trace

    * Answer: C. Cloud Audit Logs automatically records all API calls and administrative activities, providing a complete audit trail.

  13. You have a containerized application that needs to be deployed to a fully managed environment. The application is stateless and you want to pay only for the time the container is actively serving requests. Which service is the most cost-effective?

    * A. GKE

    * B. App Engine Flexible

    * C. Cloud Run

    * D. Compute Engine

    * Answer: C. Cloud Run scales to zero instances when idle, meaning you only pay for the resources consumed during request processing, making it highly cost-effective for stateless applications.

  14. A company is developing a new application. The development team needs to deploy new versions and roll back to previous versions quickly. Which deployment tool is best suited for this?

    * A. Cloud Deployment Manager

    * B. Cloud Build

    * C. Cloud Source Repositories

    * D. Cloud Code

    * Answer: B. Cloud Build is a CI/CD service that can be configured to build, test, and deploy applications, including rolling back to previous versions, by using triggers and build steps.

  15. What is the primary benefit of using Cloud CDN?

    * A. It provides a static external IP address.

    * B. It reduces latency for content delivery and offloads traffic from backend servers.

    * C. It encrypts all data in transit.

    * D. It provides a managed relational database.

    * Answer: B. Cloud CDN caches web content at edge locations, which reduces the time it takes for content to reach users and reduces the load on the backend servers.

  16. You need to store a large amount of semi-structured data, like JSON files, that will be used for analytics. You need a cost-effective, durable, and highly scalable storage solution. Which service is the best fit?

    * A. Cloud SQL

    * B. BigQuery

    * C. Cloud Spanner

    * D. Cloud Storage

    * Answer: D. Cloud Storage is a durable, scalable, and cost-effective object storage service that is a perfect data lake for storing large volumes of semi-structured data for later analysis with services like BigQuery.

  17. A developer needs to deploy an application that requires a stateful persistent disk. They want a solution that automatically handles instance failures and rolling updates. Which service is the best fit?

    * A. App Engine

    * B. Cloud Functions

    * C. Compute Engine with a Managed Instance Group

    * D. Cloud Run

    * Answer: C. Managed Instance Groups provide auto-healing and rolling updates. When combined with a stateful persistent disk, it can manage the lifecycle of stateful applications.

  18. A company needs to set up a secure, private connection between their on-premises network and their Google Cloud VPC network. The connection must support a high volume of traffic and be highly available. Which two networking products should they use?

    * A. Cloud VPN and Cloud Router

    * B. Cloud Interconnect and Cloud Router

    * C. Cloud CDN and Cloud Load Balancing

    * D. VPC Peering and Cloud DNS

    * Answer: B. Cloud Interconnect provides a dedicated, high-speed connection, and Cloud Router provides the dynamic routing (BGP) to ensure a highly available connection.

  19. What is the purpose of a service account key?

    * A. To provide a password for a human user.

    * B. To provide a way for an application or a VM to authenticate as a service account.

    * C. To encrypt data in Cloud Storage.

    * D. To provide a public key for SSH access.

    * Answer: B. A service account key is a private key file that can be used by an application to authenticate as the service account and gain its permissions.

  20. A company needs a database that can handle millions of writes per second and petabytes of data for an analytics application. The data is non-relational and will be stored in a key-value format. Which service is the most appropriate?

    * A. Cloud SQL

    * B. Bigtable

    * C. Cloud Spanner

    * D. Firestore

    * Answer: B. Bigtable is a petabyte-scale, high-performance NoSQL database designed for high-throughput write operations, making it suitable for this type of workload.

  21. You need to migrate an on-premises web server with a local database to Google Cloud. The team wants a fully managed platform where they don't have to manage the underlying OS or hardware. Which service is the best fit?

    * A. Compute Engine

    * B. App Engine

    * C. Cloud Functions

    * D. GKE

    * Answer: B. App Engine is a fully managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that abstracts away the infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on their code.

  22. A team needs to audit all IAM policy changes in their project. Where can they find a log of these changes?

    * A. Cloud Monitoring

    * B. Cloud Logging

    * C. Cloud Audit Logs

    * D. Cloud Trace

    * Answer: C. Cloud Audit Logs record API calls and administrative actions for all Google Cloud services, including IAM policy changes.

  23. What is the purpose of a Cloud DNS managed zone?

    * A. To manage physical DNS servers.

    * B. To host and manage your domain's DNS records.

    * C. To provide a static IP address for a VM.

    * D. To route traffic between different regions.

    * Answer: B. A managed zone is the container for all of your DNS records for a specific domain.

  24. You are building an application that will ingest a continuous stream of events from an external source. You need a scalable, durable, and real-time messaging service. Which GCP service is the best fit?

    * A. Cloud Pub/Sub

    * B. Cloud Storage

    * C. BigQuery

    * D. Cloud SQL

    * Answer: A. Cloud Pub/Sub is a messaging service for ingesting and distributing data streams, providing a scalable and durable way to handle real-time events.

  25. A developer needs to configure a VM instance to run as a specific identity to access other GCP services. Which feature should they use?

    * A. A personal user account.

    * B. A service account.

    * C. A public IP address.

    * D. A firewall rule.

    * Answer: B. A service account is a special type of Google account that an application or a VM instance can use to authenticate and get permissions.

  26. What is the primary benefit of using a Regional Managed Instance Group?

    * A. It is cheaper.

    * B. It provides increased resilience against zonal failures.

    * C. It provides a single point of failure.

    * D. It can only scale manually.

    * Answer: B. A regional MIG distributes instances across multiple zones within a region, ensuring the application remains available even if one zone experiences an outage.

  27. You are using Cloud Build to create and deploy container images. Which service is the recommended repository for storing these container images?

    * A. Cloud Storage

    * B. Artifact Registry

    * C. Cloud Source Repositories

    * D. Docker Hub

    * Answer: B. Artifact Registry is the modern, fully managed artifact repository that is the recommended successor to Container Registry.

  28. A company wants to collect and analyze application logs from multiple Compute Engine instances. Which service should they use?

    * A. Cloud Monitoring

    * B. Cloud Logging

    * C. Cloud Trace

    * D. BigQuery

    * Answer: B. Cloud Logging is a fully managed service for collecting, storing, and analyzing logs from your cloud and on-premises applications.

  29. You need to migrate an on-premises database to Google Cloud. The database is a NoSQL, wide-column database that requires petabyte-scale and very high throughput. Which service is the best fit?

    * A. Cloud SQL

    * B. Cloud Spanner

    * C. Bigtable

    * D. Firestore

    * Answer: C. Bigtable is a petabyte-scale, high-performance NoSQL database that is an excellent fit for migrating wide-column databases.

  30. What is the purpose of a VPC Flow Log?

    * A. To monitor API calls.

    * B. To capture network flow information for all traffic in a VPC network.

    * C. To monitor CPU usage.

    * D. To log SSH connections.

    * Answer: B. VPC Flow Logs record a summary of all network flows sent from and received by VM instances, which is useful for network monitoring and security analysis.

  31. A company needs a database for a web application. They need to ensure strong consistency and the ability to run SQL queries. Which service is a good option?

    * A. Bigtable

    * B. Firestore

    * C. Cloud SQL

    * D. Cloud Storage

    * Answer: C. Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service that provides strong consistency and supports standard SQL.

  32. You are building an application that needs to store and process a small amount of key-value data. The data needs to be highly available and has a flexible schema. Which service is a good fit?

    * A. Cloud SQL

    * B. Firestore

    * C. Cloud Spanner

    * D. Bigtable

    * Answer: B. Firestore is a flexible NoSQL database that is great for small amounts of data and provides real-time updates and a flexible schema.

  33. What is the gcloud compute instances delete command used for?

    * A. To stop a VM instance.

    * B. To delete a VM instance.

    * C. To suspend a VM instance.

    * D. To list all VM instances.

    * Answer: B. The delete command is used to permanently remove a VM instance.

  34. A company needs to implement a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan for their Compute Engine instances. They need to be able to recover their instances in another region. Which feature is most relevant for this?

    * A. Live Migration

    * B. Preemptible VMs

    * C. Snapshots and Instance Templates

    * D. Sustained Use Discounts

    * Answer: C. Snapshots of persistent disks can be used to create new disks in another region, and instance templates can be used to quickly provision new VMs.

  35. You have an application running on Compute Engine that needs to be able to send emails. You want to use a managed service to handle the email sending. Which GCP service is the best option?

    * A. Cloud Pub/Sub

    * B. App Engine Mail API

    * C. Cloud Functions

    * D. Google Workspace

    * Answer: B. The App Engine Mail API provides a managed service for sending emails from your applications, simplifying the process of sending notifications and other emails.

  36. What is the primary benefit of using a VPC in auto mode?

    * A. It allows you to create your own subnets.

    * B. It automatically creates a subnet in each new region.

    * C. It provides better security.

    * D. It supports on-premises connectivity.

    * Answer: B. A VPC in auto mode automatically creates a subnet in each new region as it becomes available, simplifying network management.

  37. A company needs to analyze petabytes of customer data to identify trends. The analysis requires a serverless, highly scalable data warehouse. Which service should they use?

    * A. Cloud SQL

    * B. Bigtable

    * C. Cloud Datastore

    * D. BigQuery

    * Answer: D. BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse designed for analyzing massive datasets using SQL.

  38. What is the purpose of an IAM Service Account?

    * A. To provide a personal identity for a human user.

    * B. To provide an identity for a VM, application, or process to interact with GCP services.

    * C. To provide a role for a group of users.

    * D. To manage project quotas.

    * Answer: B. Service Accounts are a special type of Google account that an application or a VM can use to make authorized API calls.

  39. A developer needs to configure a firewall rule to allow SSH access to a specific VM instance. The instance has the tag web-server. Which command is correct?

    * A. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:22 --target-tags=web-server

    * B. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:80 --source-tags=web-server

    * C. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:22 --source-tags=web-server

    * D. gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-ssh --allow=tcp:80 --target-tags=web-server

    * Answer: A. The command should specify the correct port for SSH (22) and use --target-tags to apply the rule to instances with the web-server tag.

  40. A company needs to host a static website that will be accessed by users worldwide. They want a cost-effective, scalable, and highly available solution. Which combination of services is the best choice?

    * A. Compute Engine and Cloud SQL

    * B. Cloud Storage and Cloud CDN

    * C. App Engine and Cloud Spanner

    * D. Kubernetes Engine and Memorystore

    * Answer: B. Hosting a static website on Cloud Storage is very cost-effective and scalable. Integrating it with Cloud CDN provides low-latency access to users worldwide.

  41. A data scientist needs to run a machine learning training job that is fault-tolerant and can be completed in under 24 hours. The budget is very limited. Which Compute Engine feature is best for this use case?

    * A. Sole-tenant Nodes

    * B. Preemptible VMs

    * C. Committed Use Discounts

    * D. Custom Machine Types

    * Answer: B. Preemptible VMs are ideal for short-duration, fault-tolerant workloads like ML training because they offer a significant cost reduction.

  42. What is the purpose of an IAM Service Account?

    * A. To provide a personal identity for a human user.

    * B. To provide an identity for a VM, application, or process to interact with GCP services.

    * C. To provide a role for a group of users.

    * D. To manage project quotas.

    * Answer: B. Service Accounts are a special type of Google account that an application or a VM can use to make authorized API calls.

  43. A web application needs to send messages from one service to another asynchronously. The messages should be delivered reliably, and the receiving service should be decoupled from the sending service. Which service should you use?

    * A. Cloud Storage

    * B. Pub/Sub

    * C. BigQuery

    * D. Cloud Functions

    * Answer: B. Pub/Sub is a real-time messaging service that provides a scalable and durable way for services to communicate asynchronously.

  44. A team is building a serverless web API that needs to respond to HTTP requests. The code is written in Python and is stateless. They want to pay only for the requests they serve. Which service is the best fit?

    * A. Compute Engine

    * B. App Engine Standard

    * C. Cloud Functions

    * D. Kubernetes Engine

    * Answer: C. Cloud Functions is a fully managed, serverless execution environment that is ideal for event-driven, stateless functions like a web API, and you are billed per invocation.

  45. Your company has a large relational database that requires high availability and needs to scale horizontally. Which Google Cloud service is the best option?

    * A. Cloud SQL

    * B. Bigtable

    * C. Cloud Spanner

    * D. Firestore

    * Answer: C. Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, highly available, and horizontally scalable relational database service, unique in its ability to provide both.

  46. What is the purpose of a VPC network in Google Cloud?

    * A. To connect on-premises networks to Google Cloud.

    * B. To provide a global, scalable network for your Google Cloud resources.

    * C. To manage user access to your projects.

    * D. To store your application's data.

    * Answer: B. A VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) network is a global, software-defined network that connects your GCP resources and provides network isolation.

  47. You have an application running on GKE that needs to connect to an external API. The API key must be managed securely. Which service should you use to store the API key?

    * A. Cloud Storage

    * B. Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

    * C. Secret Manager

    * D. BigQuery

    * Answer: C. Secret Manager is a dedicated service for storing, managing, and accessing sensitive data like API keys, passwords, and certificates.

  48. A company wants to host a static website. They need a cost-effective, scalable, and highly available solution. Which combination of services is the best choice?

    * A. Compute Engine and Cloud SQL

    * B. Cloud Storage and Cloud CDN

    * C. App Engine and Cloud Spanner

    * D. Kubernetes Engine and Memorystore

    * Answer: B. Hosting a static website on Cloud Storage is very cost-effective and scalable. Integrating it with Cloud CDN provides low-latency access to users worldwide.

  49. A data scientist needs to run a machine learning training job that is fault-tolerant and can be completed in under 24 hours. The budget is very limited. Which Compute Engine feature is best for this use case?

    * A. Sole-tenant Nodes

    * B. Preemptible VMs

    * C. Committed Use Discounts

    * D. Custom Machine Types

    * Answer: B. Preemptible VMs are ideal for short-duration, fault-tolerant workloads like ML training because they offer a significant cost reduction.

  50. What is the purpose of an IAM Service Account?

    * A. To provide a personal identity for a human user.

    * B. To provide an identity for a VM, application, or process to interact with GCP services.

    * C. To provide a role for a group of users.

    * D. To manage project quotas.

    * Answer: B. Service Accounts are a special type of Google account that an application or a VM can use to make authorized API calls.

You might find this video helpful for your exam preparation: GCP Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) 600+ Real Questions & Answers. This video provides a large collection of practice questions and answers that are highly relevant to the Google Cloud certification exam topics.



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GCP Professional Cloud Engineer certification Practice Questions

Instead, I can provide a comprehensive list of 50 top-tier practice questions covering key domains of the Google Cloud Professional Cloud E...