Chapter 1: Introduction to the Professional Cloud Architect Certification

Question 1

1. What best describes the role of a Google Cloud Architect?

• An individual within an organization who architects
• An engineer who is interested in designing robust solutions in an enterprise
• A technical subject matter expert who understands business and technical requirements and is able to translate those requirements into technical designs
• An individual who can design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objectives

Answer 1

1. What best describes the role of a Google Cloud Architect?
   * An individual who can design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objectives

Although all answers are technically correct, the question is looking for the best description of the role of a Google Cloud Architect, which is an individual who can design, develop, and manage robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objectives.

Question 2

1. Which one of these objectives is not covered on the Professional Cloud Architect exam?

• Manage and provision the cloud solution infrastructure.
• Ensure hybrid cloud solutions are integrated into cloud architecture.
• Analyze and optimize technical and business processes.
• Manage implementations of cloud architecture.

Answer 2

1. Which one of these objectives is not covered on the Professional Cloud Architect exam?
   * Ensure hybrid cloud solutions are integrated into cloud architecture.

Although hybrid cloud solutions are a big aspect of cloud architecture and you may be asked about them on the exam, this is not an exam objective.

Question 3

1. All of the following requirements are technical requirements except

• Dynamically scale up and down based on user activity.
• Connect to a transactional database service to manage user profiles and game state.
• Reduce latency to all customers.
• Run a hardened Linux distribution.

Answer 3

1. All of the following requirements are technical requirements except
   * Reduce latency to all customers.

Reducing latency to all customers is a business objective, not a technical requirement, because it states what the business has defined to improve user experience, not the technology stack.

Question 4

1. All of the following requirements are business requirements except

• Improve security by defining and adhering to a set of security and identity and access management (IAM) best practices for cloud.
• Build a reliable and reproducible environment with scaled parity of production.
• Analyze and optimize architecture for performance in the cloud.
• Implement an automation framework for provisioning resources in the cloud.

Answer 4

1. All of the following requirements are business requirements except
   * Implement an automation framework for provisioning resources in the cloud.

Although this answer may end up supporting the business in very beneficial ways, an automation framework is a technical requirement that enables the technology teams to have a smoother and more effective deployment across their applications.

Question 5

1. You are consulting on a project with Mountkirk Games for its migration to Google Cloud Platform. Mountkirk Games would like to migrate its virtual machine infrastructure onto Google Cloud and dynamically scale its infrastructure. What solution would you advise them to leverage?

• Google Compute Engine with managed instance groups
• Google App Engine
• Google Kubernetes Engine with horizontal pod autoscaling
• Google Cloud Functions

Answer 5

1. You are consulting on a project with Mountkirk Games for its migration to Google Cloud Platform. Mountkirk Games would like to migrate its virtual machine infrastructure onto Google Cloud and dynamically scale its infrastructure. What solution would you advise them to leverage?
   * Google Compute Engine with managed instance groups

Google Compute Engine is a Google Cloud infrastructure component that enables you to migrate or build large-scale virtual machine environments and manage instance group autoscaling by increasing or decreasing the virtual machines on demand.

Question 6

1. What is a blue-green deployment method?

• An application release model whereby users from a previous version are gradually transferred over to a nearly identical release in a production environment to reduce risk and minimize downtime
• An application release model in which you roll out releases to a subset of users to test your changes and then roll them out to the rest of the users
• An application release model whereby users are granted access based on how long they’ve been using the application
• An application deployment in which instances are slowly replaced with newer ones and health checks are performed to validate that they meet the requirements

Answer 6

1. What is a blue-green deployment method?
   * An application release model whereby users from a previous version are gradually transferred over to a nearly identical release in a production environment to reduce risk and minimize downtime

While B and D describe valid deployment models (they describe canary deployment and a rolling deployment), blue-green deployment methods have two nearly identical production environments.

Question 7

1. What is the difference between functional requirements and nonfunctional requirements?

• A functional requirement is a business requirement that describes what a system is supposed to be doing, and a nonfunctional requirement is a business requirement that describes how a system is expected to perform.
• A functional requirement is a technical requirement that describes what a system is supposed to be doing, and a nonfunctional requirement is a technical requirement that describes how a system is expected to perform.
• A functional requirement is a business requirement that describes how a system is expected to perform, and a nonfunctional requirement is a business requirement that describes what a system is supposed to be doing.
• A functional requirement is a technical requirement that describes how a system is expected to perform, and a nonfunctional requirement is a technical requirement that describes what a system is supposed to be doing.

Answer 7

1. What is the difference between functional requirements and nonfunctional requirements?
   * A functional requirement is a technical requirement that describes what a system is supposed to be doing, and a nonfunctional requirement is a technical requirement that describes how a system is expected to perform.

Functional requirements and nonfunctional requirements are both technical requirements. Functional requirements define the “what,” while nonfunctional requirements define the “how” of a system.

Question 8

1. Which one of the following answers is an example of a functional requirement?

• Application X needs to pull data from the third-party API, transform the data, and load it into a PostgreSQL database that will be surfaced back to end users through a frontend application.
• Application X needs to process 10,000 requests per second as it is performing its ETL.
• Application X needs to provide less than 1ms latency to all end users who are requesting the data.
• Application X should achieve the four nines of availability to ensure user satisfaction.

Answer 8

1. Which one of the following answers is an example of a functional requirement?
   * Application X needs to pull data from the third-party API, transform the data, and load it into a PostgreSQL database that will be surfaced back to end users through a frontend application.

Application X needs to pull data from the third-party API, transform the data, and load it into a PostgreSQL database that will be surfaced back to end users through a frontend application. This is an example of a functional requirement. All other answers describe performance, reliability, and scalability requirements.

Question 9

1. Which one of the following answers is an example of a nonfunctional requirement?

• Application X needs to pull data from the third-party API, transform the data, and load it into a PostgreSQL database that will be surfaced back to end users through a frontend application.
• Application X will send users an e-mail after they sign up to confirm their enrollment.
• Application X will enable users to open an account that links their information to a unique identifier used to process transactions after they sign up.
• Application X will have less than four hours of downtime per year.

Answer 9

1. Which one of the following answers is an example of a nonfunctional requirement?
   * Application X will have less than four hours of downtime per year.

Application X will have less than four hours of downtime per year. This is an example of a nonfunctional requirement. All other answers describe “what” a system is supposed to do, while uptime/downtime is a performance indicator.

Question 10

1. Which one of these is not a recommended tip for taking your certification exam?

• Eat a healthy diet and sleep well throughout your studying sessions.
• Cram out all of the pages in this book as fast as possible so you can take the exam sooner.
• Use the process of elimination while taking the exam, looking for distractors and minimizing the possible answers before choosing the right one.
• Use supplementary resources in addition to reading this book to prepare for the exam.

Answer 10

1. Which one of these is not a recommended tip for taking your certification exam?
   * Cram out all of the pages in this book as fast as possible so you can take the exam sooner.

Take your time; you shouldn’t go through the book as quickly as possible so you can take the exam sooner. You’ll pass the exam in due time! Just follow the recommendations and you’ll be a certified Cloud Architect in no time.