PCA sample questions with answers
The other 188 questions are in the practice tool, with answers revealed as you go.
Start 20 questionsDesigning and planning a cloud solution architecture
- A shopping app keeps a cart for each anonymous visitor. Cart reads happen on every page view and must return in under a millisecond. If the cache restarts, shoppers can rebuild their carts, so the data does not need to survive a failure. Which managed service suits this?
- Which mechanism lets a globally distributed database order transactions consistently across machines on several continents, so that externally consistent reads and writes are possible at scale?
- A streaming startup receives raw camera uploads in many codecs and must produce HLS renditions at several bitrates. Volume is bursty, with long idle periods. Which option minimizes spend and operational work?
- A developer wants a 2nd-generation Cloud Function to run each time an object is created or deleted in a Cloud Storage bucket. Which trigger mechanism should the function be deployed with?
- A hospital must keep imaging backups for seven years for compliance. The copies are read only during rare audits, and a retrieval delay of several hours is acceptable. Which Cloud Storage class minimizes the storage cost for this data?
Managing and provisioning infrastructure
- A GitHub Actions workflow runs Terraform against production projects. Security policy forbids storing long-lived JSON keys in repository secrets. Which approach meets the policy?
- An inference service in a GKE cluster must run its pods only on nodes that carry GPUs. The platform team already created a GPU node pool with labels on its nodes. What should the pod spec use to target those nodes?
- A legal team stores contract drafts in a Cloud Storage bucket. From now on, the team wants every overwrite or deletion to leave the earlier content recoverable, without depending on a separate backup job. Which bucket feature should be enabled?
- A platform team runs containers directly on Compute Engine VMs and needs each container to have its own routable internal address, taken from a secondary range attached to the VM's network interface, without adding another NIC. Which VPC capability provides this?
Designing for security and compliance
- A developer team stores a third-party API token that its Cloud Run service needs at runtime. The security team wants versioned storage, least-privilege access for the service account, and a record of each read. Which approach meets these needs?
- A company with dozens of projects wants one console that inventories its cloud assets, surfaces misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, and shows findings mapped to compliance benchmarks across the whole organization. Which service provides this?
- A retailer runs a customer storefront behind a global external HTTPS load balancer and is being hit by large volumetric floods of junk requests that slow the site for real shoppers. Which service should be attached to the backend to absorb and filter this traffic at the edge?
Analyzing and optimizing processes
- A seed-stage startup with three engineers wants every commit to be built, tested and promoted through staging to production on Google Cloud, with no servers for them to patch. Which pairing is the best fit?
- A payments ledger must recover within 45 minutes of a regional outage, and no committed transaction may be lost. Which disaster recovery design meets both targets?
- A nightly feature-engineering job processes about 10 TB and takes six hours on a fleet of standard VMs. It tolerates restarts as long as completed partitions are kept. Which change lowers cost without changing the results?
- Ad hoc analysts sometimes write queries that scan far more data than intended. The data platform lead wants any single query to fail instead of billing more than a fixed amount. Which setting provides that guardrail?
- A payments engineer wants a chart and an alert that count how often a service writes a log line containing the phrase card declined, without changing the application code. What should be created?
- A platform team wants a list of Compute Engine VMs whose CPU and memory usage stays low enough that a smaller machine type would suit them, based on observed utilization rather than guesswork. Which source should they query?
- A startup runs ad hoc analytics in BigQuery, and query volume is unpredictable. Its finance lead wants costs that rise and fall with how much data each query reads, with no fixed monthly commitment. Which BigQuery billing approach fits?
- A microservices team's log bill has grown sharply, but on-call engineers still need enough detail to diagnose incidents quickly. Which practice best balances these goals?
- A startup's finance lead wants an email warning the moment the month's cloud spend reaches 80 percent of an agreed limit, and wants an earlier warning if the forecast says the limit will be exceeded. Which feature should be configured?
Managing implementation
- A bank wants a developer portal, API product bundles with quotas, monetization plans, and analytics across APIs hosted on-premises and in several clouds. Which Google Cloud service is the best fit?
- A developer is building a Python service on a laptop that reads objects from Cloud Storage and calls Pub/Sub. The team forbids long-lived key files on developer machines. What should the developer do so the client libraries authenticate?
Ensuring solution and operations excellence
- The on-call team wants a page sent to their paging tool whenever the ratio of 5xx responses to total requests stays above 2% for five minutes. Which Cloud Monitoring feature provides this?
- An internal billing service commits to 99.9% availability measured over a rolling 30-day window. How much downtime does its error budget allow in that window?