GCP Cheat Sheet 2026

The 30 highest-yield GCP facts, distilled from real exam questions. Print it, save it as a PDF, or study it here — free, no sign-up.

1. A project manager notices a key stakeholder has stopped attending status meetings. What is the BEST first step? → Schedule a one-on-one to understand their concerns
2. What are the five process groups in GCP project management? → Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling, and Closing
3. During project execution, a key team member resigns unexpectedly. What should the project manager do FIRST? → Assess the impact on the project schedule and identify knowledge transfer needs
4. During project planning, a team identifies a risk with a 40% probability and a $50,000 impact. What is the risk's Expected Monetary Value (EMV)? → $20,000
5. Which metric is most appropriate when evaluating the quality of a medical esthetics practice's infection control program? → Rate of post-procedure infections per 1,000 treatments
6. What is the primary purpose of a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) between a cloud customer and a cloud provider? → To legally govern how the processor handles personal data on behalf of the controller
7. A startup wants to deploy a web app on GCP with minimal ops overhead and automatic scaling including scale-to-zero. Which is the best choice? → Cloud Run
8. Which GCP database service is best suited for globally distributed ACID transactions with horizontal scaling? → Cloud Spanner
9. What is the Simplified Acquisition Threshold (SAT) as established under the FAR? → $250,000
10. What happens to data stored in a regional Cloud Storage bucket if the entire region experiences an outage? → Data becomes inaccessible until the region recovers
11. Under responsible AI principles, what should an organization do when an AI system begins producing harmful or discriminatory outputs in production? → Immediately investigate, pause the system if necessary, and implement corrective measures
12. Which practice BEST supports transparent stakeholder communication throughout a GCP project? → Providing regular updates that include both achievements and challenges
13. A company stores credit card data in Google Cloud Storage. Which compliance standard primarily governs how this data must be secured? → PCI DSS
14. Your GCP project does not have access to GCP Organizations. Which kind of account do you have? → Free Tier
15. A GCP project is approaching its Compute Engine quota limit. What is the correct way to request a quota increase? → Request an increase through the IAM & Admin > Quotas page in the Cloud Console
16. A GCP practice wants to benchmark its client satisfaction scores. Which approach reflects best practice in quality assurance? → Use industry-published benchmarks and peer comparisons alongside internal trend data
17. Which GCP service would you use to orchestrate a multi-step data pipeline that includes BigQuery jobs, Dataflow jobs, and Cloud Storage operations? → Cloud Composer (Apache Airflow)
18. An organization subject to FedRAMP requirements wants to host a government application on GCP. What must GCP demonstrate to be eligible? → FedRAMP Authorization
19. Which GCP feature allows you to set budgets and receive alerts when spending approaches a threshold? → Budgets and Alerts in Cloud Billing
20. What is the purpose of a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) in GCP? → Creating isolated, private network environments for GCP resources
21. Which approach BEST ensures stakeholder sign-off is meaningful rather than perfunctory? → Walk stakeholders through key aspects of the deliverable before requesting approval
22. When a GCP professional documents a treatment outcome using standardized photography, which quality assurance principle is being applied? → Objective outcome measurement enabling consistent before-and-after comparison
23. Which GCP service provides real-time stream processing using Apache Beam pipelines? → Dataflow
24. In Looker Studio, what does 'blending' data sources allow you to do? → Combine data from multiple sources into a single chart
25. According to Tuckman's model of team development, what stage follows 'Storming'? → Norming
26. Which GCP service provides distributed, low-latency caching compatible with the Memcached and Redis APIs? → Memorystore
27. Which planning document defines the rules for how changes will be identified, documented, approved, and controlled throughout the project? → Change management plan
28. Why is regular review important in GCP risk management? → Because conditions change and new risks emerge requiring updated assessments
29. What feature must be enabled for Compute Engine to support managed instance groups with load balancing and autoscaling? → Health checks
30. Which command correctly authenticates the gcloud CLI using Application Default Credentials for local development? → gcloud auth application-default login