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Professional Cloud Architect Practice Questions

Professional Cloud Architect

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Question 1

A large healthcare provider's primary electronic health record (EHR) application runs on Compute Engine instances with a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database, all located in the us-west1 region. A new regulatory mandate requires you to implement and document a business continuity plan (BCP). This plan must ensure that the EHR application can be fully recovered and operational in a different geographical region with a recovery time objective (RTO) of two hours and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. You need to design a disaster recovery strategy that meets these strict BCP requirements. What should you do?

Deploy active managed instance groups (MIGs) in both us-west1 and us-east1 , fronted by a global external HTTP(S) Load Balancer. For the database, use a cross-region read replica in us-east1 , and rely on load balancer health checks to automatically fail over all traffic during an outage.
Use Terraform to define the application's compute infrastructure. During a disaster, configure the Cloud SQL database in us-west1 to use a cross-region read replica in us-east1 , build the environment in us-east1 , and promote the replica.
Take daily snapshots of the Compute Engine disks and Cloud SQL database. Copy these snapshots to a Cloud Storage bucket in us-east1 . During a disaster, manually restore the virtual machines (VMs) and database from the latest snapshots.
Deploy a regional MIG in us-west1 for high availability, and rely on the Google Cloud SLA to ensure the region remains online.

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Question 2

Your company runs a critical, revenue-generating ecommerce application that is served by a regional managed instance group (MIG) behind an external HTTP(S) Load Balancer. The operations team is currently overwhelmed with low-priority notifications and is starting to ignore alerts. Your team's service level objective (SLO) is to maintain 99.9% availability, which is measured by the ratio of successful requests (2xx status codes) to total requests. You want to minimize noise from non-critical events and ensure that the team is only notified of issues that are actionable and threaten the SLO. What should you do?

Configure alerts based on predictive metrics. Use the instance count of the MIG as the primary metric to trigger an alert.
Create log-based alerts for only the WARN and ERROR log entries generated by the application to ensure that no potential issue is missed.
Focus on cause-based alerts, creating alerting policies with thresholds for the Compute Engine instances, including CPU utilization, memory usage, disk I/O, and network traffic.
Implement an error budget policy based on the availability of the SLO. Create a "page" alert that triggers only when the rate of burn of the error budget predicts a full exhaustion within the next 24 hours.

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Question 3

Your team runs a complex risk modeling application on Google Cloud for a financial services company. The application consists of a large, in-memory database that must be available 24/7 and a fleet of VMs that run thousands of independent, fault-tolerant simulation jobs. These simulation jobs are designed to be preemptible and can be restarted without losing significant progress. You need to optimize the cost of the compute resources for this app, maintain the required availability for the database, and ensure the simulation jobs are processed cost-effectively. You want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?

Deploy the in-memory database on an accelerator-optimized machine type. Run the simulation jobs on custom machine types.
Deploy the in-memory database on an on-demand, custom machine type. Run the simulation jobs on E2 on-demand machine types.
Deploy the in-memory database on a memory-optimized, on-demand machine type. Run the simulation jobs on Spot VMs.
Deploy both the database and the simulation jobs on Spot VMs.

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Question 4

You are designing the architecture for a stateless, public-facing, containerized web application. The marketing department uses this web application to run unpredictable flash sales that cause sudden, massive spikes in user traffic. The application is a critical revenue driver and must always be available and responsive to users. Your design must automatically handle high traffic fluctuations and allow for new application versions to be deployed with zero downtime and a safe, fast rollback capability. What should you do?

Deploy the application to a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster. Use the Recreate deployment strategy to roll out new application versions.
Deploy the application as a Cloud Run service. Configure request-based auto-scaling and use gradual rollouts by splitting traffic between revisions.
Deploy the application to a regional Managed Instance Group (MIG). Configure a CPU-based autoscaling policy and use the MIG's rolling update feature for deployments.
Deploy the application to a single, large Compute Engine instance and use a startup script to pull and run the latest container image on boot.

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Question 5

You are a cloud architect for a company that has migrated its on-premises VMware workloads to a Google Cloud VMware Engine. The VMware workloads running in the VMware Engine need to communicate with a set of microservices running in a dedicated Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network following Google Cloud best practices. You have already established a private services access connection. You need to enable the VMware VMs to access the microservices in the VPC. What should you do?

Configure a Shared VPC and attach the VMware Engine private cloud as a service project.
Establish a Cloud VPN tunnel between the VMware Engine network and the dedicated VPC network.
Deploy a Cloud NAT gateway in the VPC network to allow traffic from the VMware Engine private cloud.
Create a VPC Network Peering connection between the VMware Engine network and the dedicated VPC network.

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Question 6

To improve governance and security, your organization has structured the Google Cloud environment using folders for different business units. Each business unit folder has subfolders for development, staging, and production environments, which must comply with internal security controls:

Production workloads must be protected from direct internet ingress by default unless explicitly tagged.
The application must be accessible to customers over HTTPS.

You need to design a scalable and enforceable model that blocks internet ingress traffic to the production folders while selectively allowing direct HTTPS traffic to the necessary virtual machines. You must also ensure that individual project teams cannot overwrite these controls once they are implemented for all current and future production projects. What should you do?

Mandate the application teams to deploy a Terraform module to create VPC firewall rules in each project that deny ingress and allow HTTPS.
At each production folder, use an organization policy to block all external IPs and require teams to use external HTTPS load balancers.
At each production folder, apply a hierarchical firewall policy to deny all ingress except for HTTPS to tagged VMs.
At the organization root, apply a hierarchical firewall policy to deny all ingress except for HTTPS to tagged VMs.

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