GCP Financial Management & Budgeting 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company exports GCP billing data to BigQuery. What is a key advantage of using BigQuery for billing analysis over the standard Billing Console?
- BigQuery provides real-time per-second billing data
- BigQuery allows custom SQL queries and joining with non-GCP data sources (Correct answer)
- BigQuery automatically creates budget alerts
- BigQuery billing data is available for free with no storage costs
Correct answer: BigQuery allows custom SQL queries and joining with non-GCP data sources
BigQuery billing export enables custom SQL analysis and lets you join cloud cost data with internal business data like revenue or headcount.
Question 2: Which statement about GCP Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) is correct?
- CUDs apply only to the specific VM instance they were purchased for
- CUDs are flexible and apply to any matching resource usage across a project or billing account (Correct answer)
- CUDs can be canceled within 30 days for a full refund
- CUDs apply automatically without any configuration
Correct answer: CUDs are flexible and apply to any matching resource usage across a project or billing account
Resource-based CUDs apply to any usage matching the committed resource type within the project or billing account, not to specific VM instances.
Question 3: An organization wants to enforce that no GCP resource is created in regions outside North America to control data transfer costs. Which tool enforces this?
- Cloud Billing budgets
- VPC firewall rules
- Organization Policy Service resource location constraints (Correct answer)
- Cloud Armor policies
Correct answer: Organization Policy Service resource location constraints
Organization Policy Service allows enforcing resource location constraints that prevent resource creation in unapproved regions across the entire organization.
Question 4: What is the minimum number of hours a Preemptible VM (now Spot VM) must run before it can be preempted by GCP?
- 30 minutes
- 1 hour
- There is no guaranteed minimum runtime (Correct answer)
- 24 hours
Correct answer: There is no guaranteed minimum runtime
Spot VMs can be preempted at any time with a 30-second notice; GCP provides no guaranteed minimum runtime before preemption.
Question 5: A financial services firm requires that all GCP cost reports include a specific project-level cost center code for internal chargebacks. What mechanism enables this?
- Billing subaccounts named by cost center
- Resource labels applied at project creation with the cost center value (Correct answer)
- IAM tags on service accounts
- Cloud Asset Inventory custom fields
Correct answer: Resource labels applied at project creation with the cost center value
Resource labels on projects (e.g., cost-center=CC-1234) propagate to billing data export, enabling chargeback reports filtered by cost center code.
Question 6: Which GCP pricing concept describes the automatic cost reduction that applies when you use a Compute Engine VM for a significant portion of a billing month?
- Committed Use Discount
- Sustained Use Discount (Correct answer)
- Spot VM pricing
- Preemptible discount
Correct answer: Sustained Use Discount
Sustained Use Discounts automatically reduce the effective hourly rate for VMs used more than 25% of a month, with no commitment required.
Question 7: A team is evaluating whether to use Cloud SQL or BigQuery for storing and querying financial transaction records. From a cost perspective, BigQuery is more economical when:
- Transactions are written and read thousands of times per second
- Data volume is small (under 10 GB) and queries are frequent
- Data is large and analytical queries scan it infrequently (Correct answer)
- Low-latency transactional inserts are the primary workload
Correct answer: Data is large and analytical queries scan it infrequently
BigQuery's query-on-demand pricing is cost-effective for large datasets with infrequent analytical scans, while frequent small queries can become expensive.
GCP Financial Management & Budgeting 5
A company exports GCP billing data to BigQuery.
What is a key advantage of using BigQuery for billing analysis over the standard Billing Console?