PCNE sample questions with answers
The other 86 questions are in the practice tool, with answers revealed as you go.
Start 20 questionsDesigning and planning VPC networks
- A financial services firm wants every packet leaving one spoke subnet to pass through a third-party deep-packet inspection appliance. The appliances run on several VMs that must scale out. Which construct lets the VPC steer traffic into that appliance pool?
- A company uses Shared VPC. Service project administrators must manage firewall rules that protect only the instances their own team runs, and the host project must not grant broad network-wide control. How should this be implemented?
- Which network service tier keeps user traffic on Google's own global backbone for most of its path, entering the network at an edge location close to the client?
Configuring hybrid connectivity
- A logistics firm pushes multi-terabyte nightly backups from its warehouse servers to Google Cloud and needs a private, high-throughput path that never touches the public internet. Which option fits?
- A media archive holds roughly 40 TB of video that must reach Cloud Storage within about two weeks. The office uplink cannot move that volume in time. Which offering should the team evaluate for shipping the data on physical hardware?
- A manufacturer wants its on-premises core switches to share one extended LAN with its Google Cloud VPCs, so a legacy appliance can use a VLAN that spans both sides. The company will buy the link from a connectivity provider. Which attachment type fits?
- Your team must link Google Cloud to workloads running in AWS over dedicated, high-throughput private links, and you want Google to manage the cross-provider connection rather than sending traffic over the internet. What should you deploy?
- An HA VPN tunnel to a branch firewall keeps dropping and reconnecting every few minutes. Tunnel logs show phase 1 failing with a proposal mismatch. What is the most likely cause?
Load balancing
- A real-time trading dashboard streams updates over WebSocket connections from browsers worldwide. The team wants a single global anycast entry point that understands HTTP so it can route requests by URL path. Which load balancer should front the dashboard?
- An e-commerce cart service sits behind a global external Application Load Balancer and must keep each shopper pinned to one backend across requests. The team wants the load balancer to issue the affinity token itself rather than rely on the shopper's network address. Which session affinity setting should be selected?
- A media company runs a global site behind a global external Application Load Balancer and wants TLS handled at Google's edge so backend VMs spend their CPU on the application. Where is TLS terminated and where is the certificate held?
Cloud DNS and routing
Network security
- A batch-processing service makes thousands of simultaneous outbound API calls from a fleet of VMs that have no external IP addresses, and some calls fail with port exhaustion errors. Which Cloud NAT setting should the team adjust so each VM receives more source ports?
- A subnet hosts 100 VMs, and each VM may open up to 500 concurrent outbound connections through Cloud NAT. Which factor determines how many NAT IP addresses the gateway needs?