Core Infrastructure Knowledge

Question 1

What are benefits of global Cloud Load Balancing?

Answer 1

• Users get a single, global anycast IP address.
• Traffic goes over the Google backbone from the closest point-of-presence to the user.
• Backends are selected based on load.
• Only healthy backends receive traffic.
• No pre-warming is required.

Question 2

What kind of load-balancing options does the Google VPC offers?

Answer 2

• Global HTTP(s)
• Global SSL Proxy
• Global TCP Proxy
• Regional
• Regional internal

Question 3

Global HTTP(s) load balancing option offers?

Answer 3

• Layer 7 load balancing based on load.

- Can route different URLs to different back ends.

Question 4

Global SSL Proxy load balancing option offers?

Answer 4

• Layer 4 load balancing of non-HTTPS SSL traffic based on load.
• Supported on specific port numbers

Question 5

Global TCP Proxy load balancing offers?

Answer 5

• Layer 4 load balacnign of non-SSL TCP traffic.

- Supported on specific port numbers.

Question 6

Regional load balancing offers?

Answer 6

• Load balancing of any traffic (TCP, UDP)

- Supported on any port number

Question 7

Regional internal load balancing offer?

Answer 7

• Load balancing of traffic inside a VPC

- Use for the internal tiers of multi-tier applications.

Question 8

What is a Cloud DNS?

Answer 8

Highly scalable and available DNS service.

Offers a cost-effective way to make services and applications available to your users.

Question 9

What is Cloud CDN?

Answer 9

It’s a Cloud Delivery Network. Uses Google’s globally distributed edge caches to cache content close to your users.

Question 10

What is Object Storage?

Answer 10

Object storage is a store for binary and object data, blobs and unstructured data.

Google Cloud provides a service called Cloud Storage for object storage.

Question 11

What are usual use cases of Object Storage?

Answer 11

Object store use cases include applications that need data to be highly available and highly durable, such as streaming videos, serving images and documents, and websites. It is also used for storing large amounts of data for use cases such as genomics and data analytics. You can also use it for storing backups and archives for compliance with regulatory requirements. Or, use it to replace old physical tape records and move them over to cloud storage. It is also widely used for disaster recovery because it takes practically no time to switch to a backup bucket to recover from a disaster.

Question 12

What is a Block Storage?

Answer 12

With block storage, files are split into evenly sized blocks of data, each with its own address but with no additional information (metadata) to provide more context for what that block of data is. Block storage can be directly accessed by the operating system as a mounted drive volume.

Question 13

What two Block Storage options does GCloud provide?

Answer 13

Persistent Disk and Local SSD

Question 14

What is a Persistent Disk?

Answer 14

Persistent Disk is a block store for VMs that offers a range of latency and performance options.

Question 15

What are use cases for Persistent Disk?

Answer 15

The use cases of Persistent Disk include disks for VMs and shared read-only data across multiple VMs. It is also used for rapid, durable backups of running VMs. Because of the high-performance options available, Persistent Disk is also a good storage option for databases.

Question 16

What is a Local SSD?

Answer 16

Local SSD is also block storage but it is ephemeral in nature, and therefore typically used for stateless workloads that require the lowest available latencies.

Question 17

What are use cases for Local SSD?

Answer 17

The use cases include flash optimized databases, host caching layers for analytics, or scratch disks for any application, as well as scale out analytics and media rendering.

Question 18

What is a File Storage?

Answer 18

TODO

Question 19

What are use cases for File Storage?

Answer 19

Typical use cases of Filestore include high performance computing (HPC), media processing, electronics design automation (EDA), application migrations, web content management, life science data analytics, and more!

Question 20

What are 4 Cloud Storage classes available?

Answer 20

• Multi-regional
• Regional
• Nearline
• Coldline

Question 21

Explain intention of use, use cases, SLAs for Multi-regional class of Cloud Storage.

Answer 21

Intended for data that is most frequently used.
Use cases: Content storage and delivery
SLA: 99.95%

Question 22

Explain intention of use, use cases, SLAs for Regional class of Cloud Storage.

Answer 22

Intended for data that is accessed frequently within a region
Use cases: In-region analytics, transcoding
SLA: 99.90%

Question 23

Explain intention of use, use cases, SLAs for Nearline class of Cloud Storage.

Answer 23

Intended for data that is accessed less than once a month
Use cases: Long tail content, backups
SLA: 99.00%

Question 24

Explain intention of use, use cases, SLAs for Coldline class of Cloud Storage.

Answer 24

Intended for data that is accessed less than once a year
Use cases: Archiving, disaster recovery
SLA: 99.00%

Question 25

What is Cloud Bigtable?

Answer 25

Cloud Bigtable is fully managed NoSQL, wide-column database service for terabyte applications. It’s accessed using HBase API. It’s natively compatibly with big data Hadoop ecosystems.

Question 26

Why choose Cloud Bigtable?

Answer 26

• Managed, scalable storage
• Data encryption in-flight and at rest
• Control access with IAM
• Bigtable drives major applications such as Google Analytics and Gmail

Question 27

Name 3 Bigtable Access Patterns

Answer 27

• Application API
• Streaming
• Batch Processing

Question 28

What is a Cloud SQL?

Answer 28

Cloud SQL is a managed RDBMS. GCloud offers MySQL and PostgreSQLBeta databases as a service. It offers automatic replication and managed backups. Can scale veritically ( improves reads and write) or horizontally (improves reads). Includes Google security.

Question 29

What is a Cloud Spanner?

Answer 29

Cloud Spanner is a horizontally scalable RDBMS. It offers strong global consistency. It manages instances with high availability. Offers SQL queries (ANSI 2011 with extensions) and automatic replication.

Question 30

What are good use cases for using Cloud Spanner?

Answer 30

Consider using Cloud Spanner if you have outgrown any relational database, or sharding your databases for throughput high performance, need transactional consistency, global data and strong consistency, or just want to consolidate your database.

Natural use cases include, financial applications, and inventory applications.

Question 31

What is Cloud Datastore?

Answer 31

Cloud Datastore is a horizontally scalable NoSQL DB.
It’s designed for application backends, supports transactions, allows you do SQL-like queries and includes a free daily quota.

Question 32

What are the differences between Cloud Bigtable and Cloud Datastore?

Answer 32

Unlike Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Datastore offers transactions that affect multiple database rows, and it lets you do SQL-like queries.

Question 33

Name two services Google Cloud provides for API management

Answer 33

Cloud Endpoints & Apigee Edge

Question 34

What are use cases for Cloud Endpoints?

Answer 34

Exposing API to trusted developers. Provides an easy way to monitor and log its use. Provides a coherent view of which end user is making which call

Question 35

What are use cases for Apigee Edge?

Answer 35

It has a focus on business problems like rate limiting, quotas, and analytics. Many users of Apigee Edge are providing a software service to other companies and those features come in handy. Because of the backend services for Apigee Edge need not be in GCP, engineers often use it when they are “taking apart” a legacy application.