PCA-QA - 1-70

Question 1

Your company has decided to make a major revision of their API in order to create better experiences for their
developers. They need to keep the old version of the API available and deployable, while allowing new customers
and testers to try out the new API. They want to keep the same SSL and DNS records in place to serve both APIs.
What should they do?

Answer 1

D. Use separate backend pools for each API path behind the load balancer

Question 2

Your company plans to migrate a multi-petabyte data set to the cloud. The data set must be available 24hrs a day.
Your business analysts have experience only with using a SQL interface.
How should you store the data to optimize it for ease of analysis?

Answer 2

A. Load data into Google BigQuery

Question 3

The operations manager asks you for a list of recommended practices that she should consider when migrating a
J2EE application to the cloud.
Which three practices should you recommend? (Choose three.)

Answer 3

C. Instrument the application with a monitoring tool like Stackdriver Debugger
D. Select an automation framework to reliably provision the cloud infrastructure
E. Deploy a continuous integration tool with automated testing in a staging environment

Question 4

A news feed web service has the following code running on Google App Engine. During peak load, users report that they can see news articles they already viewed.
What is the most likely cause of this problem?

Answer 4

A. The session variable is local to just a single instance

Question 5

An application development team believes their current logging tool will not meet their needs for their new cloud-based product. They want a better tool to capture errors and help them analyze their historical log data. You want to help them find a solution that meets their needs.
What should you do?

Answer 5

C. Help them define their requirements and assess viable logging tools

Question 6

You need to reduce the number of unplanned rollbacks of erroneous production deployments in your company’s
web hosting platform. Improvement to the QA/
Test processes accomplished an 80% reduction.
Which additional two approaches can you take to further reduce the rollbacks? (Choose two.)

Answer 6

A. Introduce a green-blue deployment model
C. Fragment the monolithic platform into microservices

Question 7

To reduce costs, the Director of Engineering has required all developers to move their development infrastructure
resources from on-premises virtual machines
(VMs) to Google Cloud Platform. These resources go through multiple start/stop events during the day and require
state to persist. You have been asked to design the process of running a development environment in Google Cloud
while providing cost visibility to the finance department.
Which two steps should you take? (Choose two.)

Answer 7

A. Use the - -no-auto-delete flag on all persistent disks and stop the VM
D. Use Google BigQuery billing export and labels to associate cost to groups

Question 8

Your company wants to track whether someone is present in a meeting room reserved for a scheduled meeting. There are 1000 meeting rooms across 5 offices on 3 continents. Each room is equipped with a motion sensor that reports its status every second. The data from the motion detector includes only a sensor ID and several different discrete items of information. Analysts will use this data, together with information about account owners and office locations.
Which database type should you use?

Answer 8

B. NoSQL

Question 9

You set up an autoscaling instance group to serve web traffic for an upcoming launch. After configuring the instance group as a backend service to an HTTP(S) load balancer, you notice that virtual machine (VM) instances are being terminated and re-launched every minute. The instances do not have a public IP address.
You have verified the appropriate web response is coming from each instance using the curl command. You want to ensure the backend is configured correctly.
What should you do?

Answer 9

C. Ensure that a firewall rule exists to allow load balancer health checks to reach the instances in the instance group.

Question 10

You write a Python script to connect to Google BigQuery from a Google Compute Engine virtual machine. The script is printing errors that it cannot connect to
BigQuery.
What should you do to fix the script?

Answer 10

C. Create a new service account with BigQuery access and execute your script with that user

Question 11

Your customer is moving an existing corporate application to Google Cloud Platform from an on-premises data
center. The business owners require minimal user disruption. There are strict security team requirements for
storing passwords.
What authentication strategy should they use?

Answer 11

B. Federate authentication via SAML 2.0 to the existing Identity Provider

Question 12

Your company has successfully migrated to the cloud and wants to analyze their data stream to optimize
operations. They do not have any existing code for this analysis, so they are exploring all their options. These
options include a mix of batch and stream processing, as they are running some hourly jobs and live- processing
some data as it comes in.
Which technology should they use for this?

Answer 12

B. Google Cloud Dataflow

Question 13

Your customer is receiving reports that their recently updated Google App Engine application is taking
approximately 30 seconds to load for some of their users.
This behavior was not reported before the update.
What strategy should you take?

Answer 13

C. Roll back to an earlier known good release initially, then use Stackdriver Trace and Logging to diagnose the
problem in a development/test/staging environment

Question 14

A production database virtual machine on Google Compute Engine has an ext4-formatted persistent disk for data
files. The database is about to run out of storage space.
How can you remediate the problem with the least amount of downtime?

Answer 14

A. In the Cloud Platform Console, increase the size of the persistent disk and use the resize2fs command in
Linux.

Question 15

Your application needs to process credit card transactions. You want the smallest scope of Payment Card Industry
(PCI) compliance without compromising the ability to analyze transactional data and trends relating to which
payment methods are used.
How should you design your architecture?

Answer 15

A. Create a tokenizer service and store only tokenized data

Question 16

You have been asked to select the storage system for the click-data of your company’s large portfolio of websites.
This data is streamed in from a custom website analytics package at a typical rate of 6,000 clicks per minute. With
bursts of up to 8,500 clicks per second. It must have been stored for future analysis by your data science and user
experience teams.
Which storage infrastructure should you choose?

Answer 16

B. Google Cloud Bigtable

Question 17

You are creating a solution to remove backup files older than 90 days from your backup Cloud Storage bucket. You
want to optimize ongoing Cloud Storage spend.
What should you do?

Answer 17

B. Write a lifecycle management rule in JSON and push it to the bucket with gsutil

Question 18

Your company is forecasting a sharp increase in the number and size of Apache Spark and Hadoop jobs being run on your local datacenter. You want to utilize the cloud to help you scale this upcoming demand with the least amount of operations work and code change.
Which product should you use?

Answer 18

B. Google Cloud Dataproc

Question 19

The database administration team has asked you to help them improve the performance of their new database
server running on Google Compute Engine. The database is for importing and normalizing their performance
statistics and is built with MySQL running on Debian Linux. They have an n1-standard-8 virtual machine with 80 GB
of SSD persistent disk.
What should they change to get better performance from this system?

Answer 19

C. Dynamically resize the SSD persistent disk to 500 GB

Question 20

You want to optimize the performance of an accurate, real-time, weather-charting application. The data comes
from 50,000 sensors sending 10 readings a second, in the format of a timestamp and sensor reading.
Where should you store the data?

Answer 20

C. Google Cloud Bigtable

Question 21

Your company’s user-feedback portal comprises a standard LAMP stack replicated across two zones. It is deployed in the us-central1 region and uses autoscaled managed instance groups on all layers, except the database. Currently, only a small group of select customers have access to the portal. The portal meets a
99,99% availability SLA under these conditions. However next quarter, your company will be making the portal available to all users, including unauthenticated users. You need to develop a resiliency testing strategy to ensure the system maintains the SLA once they introduce additional user load.
What should you do?

Answer 21

B. Create synthetic random user input, replay synthetic load until autoscale logic is triggered on at least one layer, and introduce ג€chaosג€ to the system by terminating random resources on both zones

Question 22

One of the developers on your team deployed their application in Google Container Engine with the Dockerfile below. They report that their application deployments are taking too long.You want to optimize this Dockerfile for faster deployment times without adversely affecting the app’s functionality.Which two actions should you take? (Choose two.)

Answer 22

C. Use a slimmed-down base image like Alpine Linux
E. Copy the source after the package dependencies (Python and pip) are installed

Question 23

Your solution is producing performance bugs in production that you did not see in staging and test environments. You want to adjust your test and deployment procedures to avoid this problem in the future.
What should you do?

Answer 23

C. Increase the load on your test and staging environments

Question 24

A small number of API requests to your microservices-based application take a very long time. You know that each request to the API can traverse many services.
You want to know which service takes the longest in those cases.
What should you do?

Answer 24

D. Instrument your application with Stackdriver Trace in order to break down the request latncies at each microservice

Question 25

During a high traffic portion of the day, one of your relational databases crashes, but the replica is never promoted
to a master. You want to avoid this in the future.
What should you do?

Answer 25

D. Implement routinely scheduled failovers of your databases

Question 26

Your organization requires that metrics from all applications be retained for 5 years for future analysis in possible
legal proceedings.
Which approach should you use?

Answer 26

D. Configure Stackdriver Monitoring for all Projects, and export to Google Cloud Storage

Question 27

Your company has decided to build a backup replica of their on-premises user authentication PostgreSQL
database on Google Cloud Platform. The database is 4
TB, and large updates are frequent. Replication requires private address space communication.
Which networking approach should you use?

Answer 27

A. Google Cloud Dedicated Interconnect

Question 28

Auditors visit your teams every 12 months and ask to review all the Google Cloud Identity and Access Management
(Cloud IAM) policy changes in the previous 12 months. You want to streamline and expedite the analysis and audit
process.
What should you do?

Answer 28

B. Enable Logging export to Google BigQuery and use ACLs and views to scope the data shared with the auditor

Question 29

You are designing a large distributed application with 30 microservices. Each of your distributed microservices
needs to connect to a database back-end. You want to store the credentials securely.
Where should you store the credentials?

Answer 29

C. In a secret management system

Question 30

A lead engineer wrote a custom tool that deploys virtual machines in the legacy data center. He wants to migrate
the custom tool to the new cloud environment.
You want to advocate for the adoption of Google Cloud Deployment Manager.
What are two business risks of migrating to Cloud Deployment Manager? (Choose two.)

Answer 30

E. Cloud Deployment Manager can be used to permanently delete cloud resources
F. Cloud Deployment Manager only supports automation of Google Cloud resources

Question 31

A development manager is building a new application. He asks you to review his requirements and identify what
cloud technologies he can use to meet them. The application must:
1. Be based on open-source technology for cloud portability
2. Dynamically scale compute capacity based on demand
3. Support continuous software delivery
4. Run multiple segregated copies of the same application stack
5. Deploy application bundles using dynamic templates
6. Route network traffic to specific services based on URL
Which combination of technologies will meet all of his requirements?

Answer 31

A. Google Kubernetes Engine, Jenkins, and Helm

Question 32

You have created several pre-emptible Linux virtual machine instances using Google Compute Engine. You want to
properly shut down your application before the virtual machines are preempted.
What should you do?

Answer 32

C. Create a shutdown script and use it as the value for a new metadata entry with the key shutdown-script in
the Cloud Platform Console when you create the new virtual machine instance

Question 33

Your organization has a 3-tier web application deployed in the same network on Google Cloud Platform. Each tier
(web, API, and database) scales independently of the others. Network traffic should flow through the web to the
API tier and then on to the database tier. Traffic should not flow between the web and the database tier.
How should you configure the network?

Answer 33

D. Add tags to each tier and set up firewall rules to allow the desired traffic flow

Question 34

Your development team has installed a new Linux kernel module on the batch servers in Google Compute Engine
(GCE) virtual machines (VMs) to speed up the nightly batch process. Two days after the installation, 50% of the
batch servers failed the nightly batch run. You want to collect details on the failure to pass back to the
development team.
Which three actions should you take? (Choose three.)

Answer 34

A. Use Stackdriver Logging to search for the module log entries\
C. Use gcloud or Cloud Console to connect to the serial console and observe the logs
E. Adjust the Google Stackdriver timeline to match the failure time, and observe the batch server metrics

Question 35

Your company wants to try out the cloud with low risk. They want to archive approximately 100 TB of their log data
to the cloud and test the analytics features available to them there, while also retaining that data as a long-term
disaster recovery backup.
Which two steps should you take? (Choose two.)

Answer 35

A. Load logs into Google BigQuery
E. Upload log files into Google Cloud Storage

Question 36

You created a pipeline that can deploy your source code changes to your infrastructure in instance groups for selfhealing. One of the changes negatively affects your key performance indicator. You are not sure how to fix it, and
investigation could take up to a week.
What should you do?

Answer 36

B. Revert the source code change, and rerun the deployment pipeline

Question 37

Your organization wants to control IAM policies for different departments independently, but centrally.
Which approach should you take?

Answer 37

C. A single Organization with Folders for each department

Question 38

You deploy your custom Java application to Google App Engine. It fails to deploy and gives you the following stack
trace.What should you do?

Answer 38

B. Digitally sign all of your JAR files and redeploy your application

Question 39

You deploy your custom Java application to Google App Engine. It fails to deploy and gives you the following stacktrace.What should you do?

Answer 39

B. Digitally sign all of your JAR files and redeploy your application

Question 40

You are designing a mobile chat application. You want to ensure people cannot spoof chat messages, by providing
a message were sent by a specific user.
What should you do?

Answer 40

C. Use public key infrastructure (PKI) to encrypt the message client side using the originating user’s private
key.

Question 41

As part of implementing their disaster recovery plan, your company is trying to replicate their production MySQL
database from their private data center to their
GCP project using a Google Cloud VPN connection. They are experiencing latency issues and a small amount of
packet loss that is disrupting the replication.
What should they do?

Answer 41

B. Configure a Google Cloud Dedicated Interconnect.

Question 42

Your customer support tool logs all email and chat conversations to Cloud Bigtable for retention and analysis.
What is the recommended approach for sanitizing this data of personally identifiable information or payment card
information before initial storage?

Answer 42

C. De-identify the data with the Cloud Data Loss Prevention API

Question 43

You are using Cloud Shell and need to install a custom utility for use in a few weeks. Where can you store the file
so it is in the default execution path and persists across sessions?

Answer 43

A. ~/bin

Question 44

You want to create a private connection between your instances on Compute Engine and your on-premises data
center. You require a connection of at least 20
Gbps. You want to follow Google-recommended practices. How should you set up the connection?

Answer 44

A. Create a VPC and connect it to your on-premises data center using Dedicated Interconnect.

Question 45

You are analyzing and defining business processes to support your startup’s trial usage of GCP, and you don’t yet
know what consumer demand for your product will be. Your manager requires you to minimize GCP service costs
and adhere to Google best practices. What should you do?

Answer 45

B. Utilize free tier and sustained use discounts. Provide training to the team about service cost management.

Question 46

You are building a continuous deployment pipeline for a project stored in a Git source repository and want to
ensure that code changes can be verified before deploying to production. What should you do?

Answer 46

D. Use Jenkins to monitor tags in the repository. Deploy staging tags to a staging environment for testing. After
testing, tag the repository for production and deploy that to the production environment.

Question 47

You have an outage in your Compute Engine managed instance group: all instances keep restarting after 5
seconds. You have a health check configured, but autoscaling is disabled. Your colleague, who is a Linux expert,
offered to look into the issue. You need to make sure that he can access the VMs. What should you do?

Answer 47

C. Disable the health check for the instance group. Add his SSH key to the project-wide SSH Keys

Question 48

Your company is migrating its on-premises data center into the cloud. As part of the migration, you want to
integrate Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for workload orchestration. Parts of your architecture must also be PCI
DSS-compliant. Which of the following is most accurate?

Answer 48

C. GKE and GCP provide the tools you need to build a PCI DSS-compliant environment.

Question 49

Your company has multiple on-premises systems that serve as sources for reporting. The data has not been maintained well and has become degraded over time.
You want to use Google-recommended practices to detect anomalies in your company data. What should you do?

Answer 49

B. Upload your files into Cloud Storage. Use Cloud Dataprep to explore and clean your data.

Question 50

Google Cloud Platform resources are managed hierarchically using organization, folders, and projects. When
Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies exist at these different levels, what is the effective policy at
a particular node of the hierarchy?

Answer 50

C. The effective policy is the union of the policy set at the node and policies inherited from its ancestors

Question 51

You are migrating your on-premises solution to Google Cloud in several phases. You will use Cloud VPN to maintain
a connection between your on-premises systems and Google Cloud until the migration is completed. You want to
make sure all your on-premise systems remain reachable during this period. How should you organize your
networking in Google Cloud?

Answer 51

C. Use an IP range on Google Cloud that does not overlap with the range you use on-premises

Question 52

You have found an error in your App Engine application caused by missing Cloud Datastore indexes. You have
created a YAML file with the required indexes and want to deploy these new indexes to Cloud Datastore. What
should you do?

Answer 52

A. Point gcloud datastore create-indexes to your configuration file

Question 53

You have an application that will run on Compute Engine. You need to design an architecture that takes into
account a disaster recovery plan that requires your application to fail over to another region in case of a regional
outage. What should you do?

Answer 53

C. Deploy the application on two Compute Engine instance groups, each in the same project but in a different
region. Use the first instance group to serve traffic, and use the HTTP load balancing service to fail over to the
standby instance group in case of a disaster.

Question 54

You are deploying an application on App Engine that needs to integrate with an on-premises database. For security
purposes, your on-premises database must not be accessible through the public internet. What should you do?

Answer 54

D. Deploy your application on App Engine flexible environment and use Cloud VPN to limit access to the onpremises database.

Question 55

You are working in a highly secured environment where public Internet access from the Compute Engine VMs is
not allowed. You do not yet have a VPN connection to access an on-premises file server. You need to install
specific software on a Compute Engine instance. How should you install the software?

Answer 55

A. Upload the required installation files to Cloud Storage. Configure the VM on a subnet with a Private Google
Access subnet. Assign only an internal IP address to the VM. Download the installation files to the VM using
gsutil.

Question 56

Your company is moving 75 TB of data into Google Cloud. You want to use Cloud Storage and follow Google recommended practices. What should you do?

Answer 56

A. Move your data onto a Transfer Appliance. Use a Transfer Appliance Rehydrator to decrypt the data into Cloud Storage.

Question 57

You have an application deployed on Google Kubernetes Engine using a Deployment named echo-deployment. The
deployment is exposed using a Service called echo-service. You need to perform an update to the application with
minimal downtime to the application. What should you do?

Answer 57

A. Use kubectl set image deployment/echo-deployment <new-image></new-image>

Question 58

Your company is using BigQuery as its enterprise data warehouse. Data is distributed over several Google Cloud
projects. All queries on BigQuery need to be billed on a single project. You want to make sure that no query costs
are incurred on the projects that contain the data. Users should be able to query the datasets, but not edit them.
How should you configure users’ access roles?

Answer 58

C. Add all users to a group. Grant the group the roles of BigQuery jobUser on the billing project and BigQuery
dataViewer on the projects that contain the data.

Question 59

You have developed an application using Cloud ML Engine that recognizes famous paintings from uploaded
images. You want to test the application and allow specific people to upload images for the next 24 hours. Not all
users have a Google Account. How should you have users upload images?

Answer 59

B. Have users upload the images to Cloud Storage using a signed URL that expires after 24 hours.

Question 60

Your web application must comply with the requirements of the European Union’s General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR). You are responsible for the technical architecture of your web application. What should you
do?

Answer 60

D. Define a design for the security of data in your web application that meets GDPR requirements

Question 61

You need to set up Microsoft SQL Server on GCP. Management requires that there’s no downtime in case of a data
center outage in any of the zones within a
GCP region. What should you do?

Answer 61

A. Configure a Cloud SQL instance with high availability enabled.

Question 62

The development team has provided you with a Kubernetes Deployment file. You have no infrastructure yet and
need to deploy the application. What should you do?

Answer 62

B. Use gcloud to create a Kubernetes cluster. Use kubectl to create the deployment.

Question 63

You need to evaluate your team readiness for a new GCP project. You must perform the evaluation and create a
skills gap plan which incorporates the business goal of cost optimization. Your team has deployed two GCP
projects successfully to date. What should you do?

Answer 63

B. Allocate budget for team training. Create a roadmap for your team to achieve Google Cloud certification
based on job role.

Question 64

You are designing an application for use only during business hours. For the minimum viable product release, you’d
like to use a managed product that automatically scales to zero so you don’t incur costs when there is no activity.
Which primary compute resource should you choose?

Answer 64

A. Cloud Functions

Question 65

You are creating an App Engine application that uses Cloud Datastore as its persistence layer. You need to retrieve
several root entities for which you have the identifiers. You want to minimize the overhead in operations performed
by Cloud Datastore. What should you do?

Answer 65

A. Create the Key object for each Entity and run a batch get operation

Question 66

You need to upload files from your on-premises environment to Cloud Storage. You want the files to be encrypted
on Cloud Storage using customer-supplied encryption keys. What should you do?

Answer 66

A. Supply the encryption key in a .boto configuration file. Use gsutil to upload the files.

Question 67

Your customer wants to capture multiple GBs of aggregate real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) from their
game servers running on Google Cloud Platform and monitor the KPIs with low latency. How should they capture
the KPIs?

Answer 67

B. Output custom metrics to Stackdriver from the game servers, and create a Dashboard in Stackdriver
Monitoring Console to view them.

Question 68

You have a Python web application with many dependencies that requires 0.1 CPU cores and 128 MB of memory to
operate in production. You want to monitor and maximize machine utilization. You also want to reliably deploy new
versions of the application. Which set of steps should you take?

Answer 68

C. Perform the following: 1. Create a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster with n1-standard-1 type machines.
2. Build a Docker image from the production branch with all of the dependencies, and tag it with the version
number. 3. Create a Kubernetes Deployment with the imagePullPolicy set to ‘IfNotPresent’ in the staging
namespace, and then promote it to the production namespace after testing.

Question 69

Your company wants to start using Google Cloud resources but wants to retain their on-premises Active Directory
domain controller for identity management.
What should you do?

Answer 69

B. Use Google Cloud Directory Sync to synchronize Active Directory usernames with cloud identities and
configure SAML SSO.

Question 70

You are running a cluster on Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to serve a web application. Users are reporting that a
specific part of the application is not responding anymore. You notice that all pods of your deployment keep
restarting after 2 seconds. The application writes logs to standard output. You want to inspect the logs to find the
cause of the issue. Which approach can you take?

Answer 70

B. Review the Stackdriver logs for the specific GKE container that is serving the unresponsive part of the
application.