Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Skills Flashcards

A developer needs to process messages asynchronously between microservices on GCP. Which service is the best fit?

Answer: Pub/Sub

Cloud Pub/Sub is GCP's managed messaging service for asynchronous event-driven communication between services at any scale.

What is a 'Shared VPC' in GCP?

Answer: A VPC hosted in a host project that other service projects can use

Shared VPC lets a host project own the VPC network while multiple service projects attach to it and deploy resources into its subnets.

Which BigQuery feature allows you to query data stored in Cloud Storage without loading it into BigQuery first?

Answer: External Tables

BigQuery External Tables (also called federated tables) allow querying data files in Cloud Storage, Google Drive, or Bigtable directly without ingestion.

What is the purpose of a GCP 'Service Account'?

Answer: An identity used by applications and services to authenticate to GCP APIs

A Service Account is a special identity assigned to applications, VMs, or services so they can authenticate and call GCP APIs without using personal credentials.

When would you choose Cloud Spanner over Cloud SQL?

Answer: When you need global horizontal scaling with strong consistency and high availability

Cloud Spanner provides globally distributed, strongly consistent relational storage that scales horizontally — use it when Cloud SQL's vertical scaling limits are insufficient.

What does 'preemptible' mean for a Compute Engine VM?

Answer: The VM may be stopped by GCP with 30-second notice and costs up to 91% less

Preemptible VMs are short-lived, low-cost instances that GCP can reclaim with a 30-second shutdown notice, making them ideal for fault-tolerant batch workloads.

Which Cloud Logging feature lets you export log entries to BigQuery, Cloud Storage, or Pub/Sub?

Answer: Log Sinks

Log Sinks (also called log routing) let you route filtered log entries to destinations like BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, or another Cloud Logging project.