Designing Storage Systems Flashcards
You need to store a set of files for an extended period of time. Anytime the data in the files
needs to be accessed, it will be copied to a server first, and then the data will be accessed.
Files will not be accessed more than once a year. The set of files will all have the same
access controls. What storage solution would you use to store these files?
A. Cloud Storage Coldline
B. Cloud Storage Nearline
C. Cloud Filestore
D. Bigtable
A. The correct answer is A. The Cloud Storage Coldline service is designed for long-term
storage of infrequently accessed objects. Option B is not the best answer because Nearline
should be used with objects that are not accessed up to once a month. Coldline storage is
more cost effective and still meets the requirements. Option C is incorrect. Cloud Filestore
is a network filesystem, and it is used to store data that is actively used by applications running on Compute Engine VM and Kubernetes Engine clusters.
You are uploading files in parallel to Cloud Storage and want to optimize load performance. What could you do to avoid creating hotspots when writing files to Cloud Storage?
A. Use sequential names or timestamps for files.
B. Do not use sequential names or timestamps for files.
C. Configure retention policies to ensure that files are not deleted prematurely.
D. Configure lifecycle policies to ensure that files are always using the most appropriate
storage class.
B. The correct answer is B. Do not use sequential names or timestamps if uploading files
in parallel. Files with sequentially close names will likely be assigned to the same server.
This can create a hotspot when writing files to Cloud Storage. Option A is incorrect, as this
could cause hotspots. Options C and D affect the lifecycle of files once they are written and
do not impact upload efficiency.
As a consultant on a cloud migration project, you have been asked to recommend a strategy
for storing files that must be highly available even in the event of a regional failure. What
would you recommend?
A. BigQuery
B. Cloud Datastore
C. Multiregional Cloud Storage
D. Regional Cloud Storage
C. The correct answer is C. Multiregional Cloud Storage replicates data to multiple
regions. In the event of a failure in one region, the data could be retrieved from another
region. Options A and B are incorrect because those are databases, not file storage systems.
Option D is incorrect because it does not meet the requirement of providing availability in
the event of a single region failure.
As part of a migration to Google Cloud Platform, your department will run a collaboration and document management application on Compute Engine virtual machines. The
application requires a filesystem that can be mounted using operating system commands.
All documents should be accessible from any instance. What storage solution would you
recommend?
A. Cloud Storage
B. Cloud Filestore
C. A document database
D. A relational database
B. The correct answer is B. Cloud Filestore is a network-attached storage service that provides a filesystem that is accessible from Compute Engine. Filesystems in Cloud Filestore
can be mounted using standard operating system commands. Option A, Cloud Storage, is
incorrect because it does not provide a filesystem. Options C and D are incorrect because
databases do not provide filesystems.
Your team currently supports seven MySQL databases for transaction processing applications. Management wants to reduce the amount of staff time spent on database administration. What GCP service would you recommend to help reduce the database administration
load on your teams?
A. Bigtable
B. BigQuery
C. Cloud SQL
D. Cloud Filestore
C. The correct answer is C. Cloud SQL is a managed database service that supports
MySQL and PostgreSQL. Option A is incorrect because Bigtable is a wide-column NoSQL
database, and it is not a suitable substitute for MySQL. Option B is incorrect because
BigQuery is optimized for data warehouse and analytic databases, not transactional
databases. Option D is incorrect, as Cloud Filestore is not a database.
Your company is developing a new service that will have a global customer base. The service will generate large volumes of structured data and require the support of a transaction
processing database. All users, regardless of where they are on the globe, must have a consistent view of data. What storage system will meet these requirements?
A. Cloud Spanner
B. Cloud SQL
C. Cloud Storage
D. BigQuery
A. The correct answer is A. Cloud Spanner is a managed database service that supports
horizontal scalability across regions. It supports strong consistency so that there is no risk
of data anomalies caused by eventual consistency. Option B is incorrect because Cloud SQL
cannot scale globally. Option C is incorrect, as Cloud Storage does not meet the database
requirements. Option D is incorrect because BigQuery is not designed for transaction processing systems.
Your company is required to comply with several government and industry regulations,
which include encrypting data at rest. What GCP storage services can be used for applications subject to these regulations?
A. Bigtable and BigQuery only
B. Bigtable and Cloud Storage only
C. Any of the managed databases, but no other storage services
D. Any GCP storage service
D. The correct answer is D. All data in GCP is encrypted when at rest. The other options
are incorrect because they do not include all GCP storage services.
As part of your role as a data warehouse administrator, you occasionally need to export
data from the data warehouse, which is implemented in BigQuery. What command-line
tool would you use for that task?
A. gsutil
B. gcloud
C. bq
D. cbt
C. The correct answer is C. The bq command-line tool is used to work with BigQuery.
Option A, gsutil, is the command-line tool for working with Cloud Storage, and Option
D, cbt, is the command-line tool for working with
Another task that you perform as data warehouse administrator is granting authorizations
to perform tasks with the BigQuery data warehouse. A user has requested permission to
view table data but not change it. What role would you grant to this user to provide the
needed permissions but nothing more?
A. dataViewer
B. admin
C. metadataViewer
D. dataOwner
A. The correct answer is A. dataViewer allows a user to list projects and tables and get
table data and metadata. Options B and D would enable the user to view data but would
grant more permissions than needed. Option C does not grant permission to view data in
tables.
A developer is creating a set of reports and is trying to minimize the amount of data each
query returns while still meeting all requirements. What bq command-line option will help
you understand the amount of data returned by a query without actually executing the
query?
A. –no-data
B. –estimate-size
C. –dry-run
D. –size
C. The correct answer is C. –dry-run returns an estimate of the number of bytes that
would be returned if the query were executed. The other choices are not actually bq
command-line options.
A team of developers is choosing between using NoSQL or a relational database. What is a
feature of NoSQL databases that is not available in relational databases?
A. Fixed schemas
B. ACID transactions
C. Indexes
D. Flexible schemas
D. The correct answer is D. NoSQL data has flexible schemas. The other options specify
features that are found in relational databases. ACID transactions and indexes are found in
some NoSQL databases as well.
A group of venture capital investors have hired you to review the technical design of a service that will be developed by a startup company seeking funding. The startup plans to collect data from sensors attached to vehicles. The data will be used to predict when a vehicle
needs maintenance and before the vehicle breaks down. Thirty sensors will be on each vehicle. Each sensor will send up to 5K of data every second. The startup expects to start with
hundreds of vehicles, but it plans to reach 1 million vehicles globally within 18 months. The
data will be used to develop machine learning models to predict the need for maintenance.
The startup is planning to use a self-managed relational database to store the time-series
data. What would you recommend for a time-series database?
A. Continue to plan to use a self-managed relational database.
B. Use a Cloud SQL.
C. Use Cloud Spanner.
D. Use Bigtable
D. The correct answer is D. Bigtable is the best option for storing streaming data because
it provides low-latency writes and can store petabytes of data. The database would need to
store petabytes of data if the number of users scales as planned. Option A is a poor choice
because a managed database would meet requirements and require less administration support. Option B will not scale to the volume of data expected. Option C, Cloud Spanner,
could scale to store the volumes of data, but it is not optimized for low-latency writes of
streaming data.
A Bigtable instance increasingly needs to support simultaneous read and write operations.
You’d like to separate the workload so that some nodes respond to read requests and others respond to write requests. How would you implement this to minimize the workload on
developers and database administrators?
A. Create two instances, and separate the workload at the application level.
B. Create multiple clusters in the Bigtable instance, and use Bigtable replication to keep
the clusters synchronized.
C. Create multiple clusters in the Bigtable instance, and use your own replication program
to keep the clusters synchronized.
D. It is not possible to accomplish the partitioning of the workload as described.
B. The correct answer is B—create multiple clusters in the instance and use Bigtable replication. Options A and C are not correct, as they require developing custom applications
to partition data or keep replicas synchronized. Option D is incorrect because the requirements can be met.
As a database architect, you’ve been asked to recommend a database service to support an
application that will make extensive use of JSON documents. What would you recommend
to minimize database administration overhead while minimizing the work required for
developers to store JSON data in the database?
A. Cloud Storage
B. Cloud Datastore
C. Cloud Spanner
D. Cloud SQL
B. The correct answer is B. Cloud Datastore is a managed document database, which
is a kind of NoSQL database that uses a flexible JSON-like data structure. Option A is
incorrect—it is not a database. Options C and D are not good fits because the JSON data
would have to be mapped to relational structures to take advantage of the full range of
relational features. There is no indication that additional relational features are required
Your Cloud SQL database is close to maximizing the number of read operations that it
can perform. You could vertically scale the database to use a larger instance, but you do
not need additional write capacity. What else could you try to reduce the number of reads
performed by the database?
A. Switch to Cloud Spanner.
B. Use Cloud Bigtable instead.
C. Use Cloud Memorystore to create a database cache that stores the results of database
queries. Before a query is sent to the database, the cache is checked for the answer to
the query.
D. There is no other option—you must vertically scale
C. The correct answer is C. You could try to cache results to reduce the number of reads on
the database. Option A is not a good choice because it does not reduce the number of reads,
and there is no indication that the scale of Cloud Spanner is needed. Option B is not a good
choice because Bigtable is a NoSQL database and may not meet the database needs of the
application. Option D is incorrect because caching is an option.
