GCP Financial Management & Budgeting 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is the primary purpose of a GCP billing subaccount?
- To apply committed use discounts to a single VM
- To separate charges for resellers or distinct business units under one master account (Correct answer)
- To enable cross-project network billing
- To create read-only billing access for auditors
Correct answer: To separate charges for resellers or distinct business units under one master account
Billing subaccounts allow resellers or organizations to segment billing for different clients or business units under a single master billing account.
Question 2: Which IAM role grants a user the ability to view billing information but not modify payment methods or budgets?
- Billing Account Administrator
- Billing Account Viewer (Correct answer)
- Project Billing Manager
- Billing Account User
Correct answer: Billing Account Viewer
Billing Account Viewer provides read-only access to billing data without the ability to change payment settings or budget configurations.
Question 3: A Cloud Run service experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. Which cost optimization strategy is most appropriate for this serverless workload?
- Purchase 3-year committed use discounts
- Use minimum instance settings only for peak hours
- Set maximum instance limits to cap costs while accepting some request rejection (Correct answer)
- Switch to Compute Engine for better pricing
Correct answer: Set maximum instance limits to cap costs while accepting some request rejection
Setting maximum instance limits on Cloud Run caps your cost exposure by bounding autoscaling, though it may cause request throttling at extreme load.
Question 4: Which GCP storage class should be used for compliance data that must be retained for 7 years but is almost never accessed?
- Standard storage
- Nearline storage
- Coldline storage
- Archive storage (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Archive storage
Archive storage has the lowest per-GB storage cost on GCP and is designed for data accessed less than once a year, making it ideal for long-term compliance archives.
Question 5: An organization runs batch analytics jobs nightly for 4 hours each day. Which pricing model best reduces cost for these Compute Engine workloads?
- On-demand instances with sustained use discounts
- Committed use discounts (1-year)
- Spot VMs (formerly Preemptible VMs) (Correct answer)
- Reserved instances with upfront payment
Correct answer: Spot VMs (formerly Preemptible VMs)
Spot VMs offer up to 91% discount over on-demand pricing and are ideal for fault-tolerant batch workloads that can tolerate preemption.
Question 6: What happens to unused Flex Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) at the end of a month?
- They roll over to the next month
- They are forfeited — unused commitment is still charged (Correct answer)
- They are refunded proportionally
- They convert to credits for future purchases
Correct answer: They are forfeited — unused commitment is still charged
Committed use discounts require payment for the committed amount regardless of actual usage; unused commitment is charged without rollover.
Question 7: A team wants to prevent any single GCP project from exceeding $5,000/month without manual approval. Which mechanism best enforces this?
- Set a billing budget alert that disables billing at $5,000
- Use organization policy constraints to cap resource creation
- Create a Pub/Sub notification budget action that triggers a Cloud Function to disable billing (Correct answer)
- Require manager approval for all VM creation requests
Correct answer: Create a Pub/Sub notification budget action that triggers a Cloud Function to disable billing
A budget with a Pub/Sub notification can trigger a Cloud Function to programmatically disable billing on the project when the threshold is reached.
GCP Financial Management & Budgeting 3
What is the primary purpose of a GCP billing subaccount?