Cloud Engineer Cloud Engineer: Essential Google Infrastructure 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which GCP load balancer type operates at Layer 7 and supports URL-based routing to different backend services?
- Network Load Balancer
- Internal TCP/UDP Load Balancer
- HTTP(S) Load Balancer (Correct answer)
- SSL Proxy Load Balancer
Correct answer: HTTP(S) Load Balancer
The HTTP(S) Load Balancer is a Layer 7 global load balancer that routes requests to backends based on URL maps, headers, and other HTTP attributes.
Question 2: A Cloud Engineer must ensure that all resources in a GCP project use only approved VM machine types. Which tool enforces this at creation time?
- IAM roles
- VPC firewall rules
- Organization Policy Service constraints (Correct answer)
- Cloud Monitoring alerts
Correct answer: Organization Policy Service constraints
Organization Policy Service with the `constraints/compute.restrictCloudSqlInstanceType` or `compute.requireShieldedVm` style constraints restricts what resources users can create.
Question 3: What distinguishes Cloud Spanner from Cloud SQL in terms of scalability?
- Cloud Spanner supports only NoSQL data models
- Cloud Spanner provides horizontal scaling across regions while maintaining ACID transactions (Correct answer)
- Cloud SQL can scale to more than 10TB natively
- Cloud Spanner requires manual sharding configuration
Correct answer: Cloud Spanner provides horizontal scaling across regions while maintaining ACID transactions
Cloud Spanner is Google's globally distributed relational database that scales horizontally across regions while guaranteeing strong consistency and ACID transactions.
Question 4: In Google Kubernetes Engine, what is a Node Pool?
- A group of Pods sharing the same namespace
- A set of nodes within a cluster that share the same configuration such as machine type (Correct answer)
- A pool of reserved IP addresses for Services
- A persistent volume group for stateful workloads
Correct answer: A set of nodes within a cluster that share the same configuration such as machine type
A Node Pool is a group of nodes within a GKE cluster that all share the same machine type, OS image, and configuration.
Question 5: A developer wants to deploy a containerized web application on GCP without managing any infrastructure, scaling automatically to zero when idle. Which service fits best?
- GKE Standard
- Compute Engine
- Cloud Run (Correct answer)
- App Engine Standard with Java
Correct answer: Cloud Run
Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless platform that runs containers and scales to zero when there is no traffic, eliminating idle costs.
Question 6: When configuring VPC firewall rules in GCP, what is the implied default rule if no matching rule is found for ingress traffic?
- Allow all ingress traffic
- Deny all ingress traffic (Correct answer)
- Allow traffic only from within the same VPC
- Forward traffic to the default gateway
Correct answer: Deny all ingress traffic
GCP VPCs have an implied deny-all ingress rule at the lowest priority (65535), blocking all inbound traffic unless a higher-priority allow rule exists.
Question 7: Which GCP monitoring feature allows a Cloud Engineer to define a threshold on a metric and send notifications when that threshold is breached?
- Cloud Logging sink
- Cloud Trace span
- Alerting policy in Cloud Monitoring (Correct answer)
- Error Reporting group
Correct answer: Alerting policy in Cloud Monitoring
An alerting policy in Cloud Monitoring specifies conditions based on metric thresholds and triggers notifications via channels like email, PagerDuty, or Pub/Sub.
Cloud Engineer Cloud Engineer: Essential Google Infrastructure 4
Which GCP load balancer type operates at Layer 7 and supports URL-based routing to different backend services?