The Cloud Education Certification App is an EduFlix App for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Certification Prep.
Technology is changing and is moving towards the cloud. The cloud will power most businesses in the coming years and is not taught in schools. How do we ensure that our kids and youth and ourselves are best prepared for this challenge?
Building mobile educational apps that work offline and on any device can help greatly in that sense.
The ability to tab on a button and learn the cloud fundamentals and take quizzes is a great opportunity to help our children and youth to boost their job prospects and be more productive at work.
The App covers the following certifications : AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Prep CCP CLF-C01, Azure Fundamentals AZ 900 Exam Prep, AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate SAA-C02 Exam Prep, AWS Certified Developer Associate DVA-C01 Exam Prep, Azure Administrator AZ 104 Exam Prep, Google Associate Cloud Engineer Exam Prep, Data Analytics for AWS DAS-C01, Machine Learning for AWS and Google, AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01), AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty (MLS-C01), Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer and more…
Features: – Practice exams – 1000+ Q&A updated frequently. – 3+ Practice exams per Certification – Scorecard / Scoreboard to track your progress – Quizzes with score tracking, progress bar, countdown timer. – Can only see scoreboard after completing the quiz. – FAQs for most popular Cloud services – Cheat Sheets – Flashcards – works offline
Note and disclaimer: We are not affiliated with AWS, Azure, Microsoft or Google. The questions are put together based on the certification study guide and materials available online. The questions in this app should help you pass the exam but it is not guaranteed. We are not responsible for any exam you did not pass.
Important: To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers in this app. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
Google Certified Cloud Professional Architect is the top high paying certification in the world: Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect Average Salary – $175,761
The Google Certified Cloud Professional Architect Exam assesses your ability to:
Design and plan a cloud solution architecture
Manage and provision the cloud solution infrastructure
Design for security and compliance
Analyze and optimize technical and business processes
Manage implementations of cloud architecture
Ensure solution and operations reliability
Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture
Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture: 36%
This domain tests your ability to design a solution infrastructure that meets business and technical requirements and considers network, storage and compute resources. It will test your ability to create a migration plan, and that you can envision future solution improvements.
Managing and provisioning a solution Infrastructure: 20%
This domain will test your ability to configure network topologies, individual storage systems and design solutions using Google Cloud networking, storage and compute services.
Designing for security and compliance: 12%
This domain assesses your ability to design for security and compliance by considering IAM policies, separation of duties, encryption of data and that you can design your solutions while considering any compliance requirements such as those for healthcare and financial information.
Managing implementation: 10%
This domain tests your ability to advise development/operation team(s) to make sure you have successful deployment of your solution. It also tests yours ability to interact with Google Cloud using GCP SDK (gcloud, gsutil, and bq).
Ensuring solution and operations reliability: 6%
This domain tests your ability to run your solutions reliably in Google Cloud by building monitoring and logging solutions, quality control measures and by creating release management processes.
Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes: 16%
This domain will test how you analyze and define technical processes, business processes and develop procedures to ensure resilience of your solutions in production.
Below are the Top 50 Google Certified Cloud Professional Architect Exam Questions and Answers Dumps: You will need to have the three case studies referred to in the exam open in separate tabs in order to complete the exam: Company A , Company B, Company C
Question 1:Because you do not know every possible future use for the data Company A collects, you have decided to build a system that captures and stores all raw data in case you need it later. How can you most cost-effectively accomplish this goal?
A. Have the vehicles in the field stream the data directly into BigQuery.
B. Have the vehicles in the field pass the data to Cloud Pub/Sub and dump it into a Cloud Dataproc cluster that stores data in Apache Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) on persistent disks.
C. Have the vehicles in the field continue to dump data via FTP, adjust the existing Linux machines, and use a collector to upload them into Cloud Dataproc HDFS for storage.
D. Have the vehicles in the field continue to dump data via FTP, and adjust the existing Linux machines to immediately upload it to Cloud Storage with gsutil.
ANSWER1:
D
Notes/References1:
D is correct because several load-balanced Compute Engine VMs would suffice to ingest 9 TB per day, and Cloud Storage is the cheapest per-byte storage offered by Google. Depending on the format, the data could be available via BigQuery immediately, or shortly after running through an ETL job. Thus, this solution meets business and technical requirements while optimizing for cost.
Question 2: Today, Company A maintenance workers receive interactive performance graphs for the last 24 hours (86,400 events) by plugging their maintenance tablets into the vehicle. The support group wants support technicians to view this data remotely to help troubleshoot problems. You want to minimize the latency of graph loads. How should you provide this functionality?
A. Execute queries against data stored in a Cloud SQL.
B. Execute queries against data indexed by vehicle_id.timestamp in Cloud Bigtable.
C. Execute queries against data stored on daily partitioned BigQuery tables.
D. Execute queries against BigQuery with data stored in Cloud Storage via BigQuery federation.
ANSWER2:
B
Notes/References2:
B is correct because Cloud Bigtable is optimized for time-series data. It is cost-efficient, highly available, and low-latency. It scales well. Best of all, it is a managed service that does not require significant operations work to keep running.
Question 3: Your agricultural division is experimenting with fully autonomous vehicles. You want your architecture to promote strong security during vehicle operation. Which two architecture characteristics should you consider?
A. Use multiple connectivity subsystems for redundancy.
B. Require IPv6 for connectivity to ensure a secure address space.
C. Enclose the vehicle’s drive electronics in a Faraday cage to isolate chips.
D. Use a functional programming language to isolate code execution cycles.
E. Treat every microservice call between modules on the vehicle as untrusted.
F. Use a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and verify firmware and binaries on boot.
ANSWER3:
E and F
Notes/References3:
E is correct because this improves system security by making it more resistant to hacking, especially through man-in-the-middle attacks between modules.
F is correct because this improves system security by making it more resistant to hacking, especially rootkits or other kinds of corruption by malicious actors.
Question 4: For this question, refer to the Company A case study.
Which of Company A’s legacy enterprise processes will experience significant change as a result of increased Google Cloud Platform adoption?
A. OpEx/CapEx allocation, LAN change management, capacity planning
B. Capacity planning, TCO calculations, OpEx/CapEx allocation
C. Capacity planning, utilization measurement, data center expansion
D. Data center expansion, TCO calculations, utilization measurement
ANSWER4:
B
Notes/References4:
B is correct because all of these tasks are big changes when moving to the cloud. Capacity planning for cloud is different than for on-premises data centers; TCO calculations are adjusted because Company A is using services, not leasing/buying servers; OpEx/CapEx allocation is adjusted as services are consumed vs. using capital expenditures.
Question 5: For this question, refer to the Company A case study.
You analyzed Company A’s business requirement to reduce downtime and found that they can achieve a majority of time saving by reducing customers’ wait time for parts. You decided to focus on reduction of the 3 weeks’ aggregate reporting time. Which modifications to the company’s processes should you recommend?
A. Migrate from CSV to binary format, migrate from FTP to SFTP transport, and develop machine learning analysis of metrics.
B. Migrate from FTP to streaming transport, migrate from CSV to binary format, and develop machine learning analysis of metrics.
C. Increase fleet cellular connectivity to 80%, migrate from FTP to streaming transport, and develop machine learning analysis of metrics.
D. Migrate from FTP to SFTP transport, develop machine learning analysis of metrics, and increase dealer local inventory by a fixed factor.
ANSWER5:
C
Notes/References5:
C is correct because using cellular connectivity will greatly improve the freshness of data used for analysis from where it is now, collected when the machines are in for maintenance. Streaming transport instead of periodic FTP will tighten the feedback loop even more. Machine learning is ideal for predictive maintenance workloads.
Question 6: Your company wants to deploy several microservices to help their system handle elastic loads. Each microservice uses a different version of software libraries. You want to enable their developers to keep their development environment in sync with the various production services. Which technology should you choose?
A. RPM/DEB
B. Containers
C. Chef/Puppet
D. Virtual machines
ANSWER6:
B
Notes/References6:
B is correct because using containers for development, test, and production deployments abstracts away system OS environments, so that a single host OS image can be used for all environments. Changes that are made during development are captured using a copy-on-write filesystem, and teams can easily publish new versions of the microservices in a repository.
Question 7: Your company wants to track whether someone is present in a meeting room reserved for a scheduled meeting. There are 1000 meeting rooms across 5 offices on 3 continents. Each room is equipped with a motion sensor that reports its status every second. You want to support the data upload and collection needs of this sensor network. The receiving infrastructure needs to account for the possibility that the devices may have inconsistent connectivity. Which solution should you design?
A. Have each device create a persistent connection to a Compute Engine instance and write messages to a custom application.
B. Have devices poll for connectivity to Cloud SQL and insert the latest messages on a regular interval to a device specific table.
C. Have devices poll for connectivity to Cloud Pub/Sub and publish the latest messages on a regular interval to a shared topic for all devices.
D. Have devices create a persistent connection to an App Engine application fronted by Cloud Endpoints, which ingest messages and write them to Cloud Datastore.
ANSWER7:
C
Notes/References7:
C is correct becauseCloudPub/Sub can handle the frequency of this data, and consumers of the data can pull from the shared topic for further processing.
Question 8: Your company wants to try out the cloud with low risk. They want to archive approximately 100 TB of their log data to the cloud and test the analytics features available to them there, while also retaining that data as a long-term disaster recovery backup. Which two steps should they take?
A. Load logs into BigQuery.
B. Load logs into Cloud SQL.
C. Import logs into Stackdriver.
D. Insert logs into Cloud Bigtable.
E. Upload log files into Cloud Storage.
ANSWER8:
A and E
Notes/References8:
A is correct because BigQuery is the fully managed cloud data warehouse for analytics and supports the analytics requirement.
E is correct because Cloud Storage provides the Coldline storage class to support long-term storage with infrequent access, which would support the long-term disaster recovery backup requirement.
Question 9: You set up an autoscaling instance group to serve web traffic for an upcoming launch. After configuring the instance group as a backend service to an HTTP(S) load balancer, you notice that virtual machine (VM) instances are being terminated and re-launched every minute. The instances do not have a public IP address. You have verified that the appropriate web response is coming from each instance using the curl command. You want to ensure that the backend is configured correctly. What should you do?
A. Ensure that a firewall rule exists to allow source traffic on HTTP/HTTPS to reach the load balancer.
B. Assign a public IP to each instance, and configure a firewall rule to allow the load balancer to reach the instance public IP.
C. Ensure that a firewall rule exists to allow load balancer health checks to reach the instances in the instance group.
D. Create a tag on each instance with the name of the load balancer. Configure a firewall rule with the name of the load balancer as the source and the instance tag as the destination.
ANSWER9:
C
Notes/References9:
C is correct because health check failures lead to a VM being marked unhealthy and can result in termination if the health check continues to fail. Because you have already verified that the instances are functioning properly, the next step would be to determine why the health check is continuously failing.
Question 10: Your organization has a 3-tier web application deployed in the same network on Google Cloud Platform. Each tier (web, API, and database) scales independently of the others. Network traffic should flow through the web to the API tier, and then on to the database tier. Traffic should not flow between the web and the database tier. How should you configure the network?
A. Add each tier to a different subnetwork.
B. Set up software-based firewalls on individual VMs.
C. Add tags to each tier and set up routes to allow the desired traffic flow.
D. Add tags to each tier and set up firewall rules to allow the desired traffic flow.
ANSWER10:
D
Notes/References10:
D is correct because as instances scale, they will all have the same tag to identify the tier. These tags can then be leveraged in firewall rules to allow and restrict traffic as required, because tags can be used for both the target and source.
Question 11: Your organization has 5 TB of private data on premises. You need to migrate the data to Cloud Storage. You want to maximize the data transfer speed. How should you migrate the data?
A. Use gsutil.
B. Use gcloud.
C. Use GCS REST API.
D. Use Storage Transfer Service.
ANSWER11:
A
Notes/References11:
A is correct because gsutil gives you access to write data to Cloud Storage.
Question 12: You are designing a mobile chat application. You want to ensure that people cannot spoof chat messages by proving that a message was sent by a specific user. What should you do?
A. Encrypt the message client-side using block-based encryption with a shared key.
B. Tag messages client-side with the originating user identifier and the destination user.
C. Use a trusted certificate authority to enable SSL connectivity between the client application and the server.
D. Use public key infrastructure (PKI) to encrypt the message client-side using the originating user’s private key.
ANSWER12:
D
Notes/References12:
D is correct because PKI requires that both the server and the client have signed certificates, validating both the client and the server.
Question 13: You are designing a large distributed application with 30 microservices. Each of your distributed microservices needs to connect to a database backend. You want to store the credentials securely. Where should you store the credentials?
A. In the source code
B. In an environment variable
C. In a key management system
D. In a config file that has restricted access through ACLs
Question 14: For this question, refer to the Company B case study.
Company B wants to set up a real-time analytics platform for their new game. The new platform must meet their technical requirements. Which combination of Google technologies will meet all of their requirements?
A. Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Cloud SQL
B. Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Storage, Cloud Pub/Sub, and BigQuery
C. Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Cloud Dataflow
D. Cloud Pub/Sub, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Dataproc
ANSWER14:
B
Notes/References14:
B is correct because: – Cloud Dataflow dynamically scales up or down, can process data in real time, and is ideal for processing data that arrives late using Beam windows and triggers. – Cloud Storage can be the landing space for files that are regularly uploaded by users’ mobile devices. – Cloud Pub/Sub can ingest the streaming data from the mobile users. BigQuery can query more than 10 TB of historical data.
Question 15: For this question, refer to the Company B case study.
Company B has deployed their new backend on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You want to create a thorough testing process for new versions of the backend before they are released to the public. You want the testing environment to scale in an economical way. How should you design the process?A. Create a scalable environment in GCP for simulating production load.B. Use the existing infrastructure to test the GCP-based backend at scale. C. Build stress tests into each component of your application and use resources from the already deployed production backend to simulate load.D. Create a set of static environments in GCP to test different levels of load—for example, high, medium, and low.
ANSWER15:
A
Notes/References15:
A is correct because simulating production load in GCP can scale in an economical way.
Question 16:For this question, refer to the Company B case study.
Company B wants to set up a continuous delivery pipeline. Their architecture includes many small services that they want to be able to update and roll back quickly. Company B has the following requirements:
Services are deployed redundantly across multiple regions in the US and Europe
Only frontend services are exposed on the public internet.
They can reserve a single frontend IP for their fleet of services.
Deployment artifacts are immutable
Which set of products should they use?
A. Cloud Storage, Cloud Dataflow, Compute Engine
B. Cloud Storage, App Engine, Cloud Load Balancing
C. Container Registry, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Load Balancing
D. Cloud Functions, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Deployment Manager
ANSWER16:
C
Notes/References16:
C is correct because: –Google Kubernetes Engine is ideal for deploying small services that can be updated and rolled back quickly. It is a best practice to manage services using immutable containers. –Cloud Load Balancing supports globally distributed services across multiple regions. It provides a single global IP address that can be used in DNS records. Using URL Maps, the requests can be routed to only the services that Company B wants to expose. –Container Registry is a single place for a team to manage Docker images for the services.
Question 17: Your customer is moving their corporate applications to Google Cloud Platform. The security team wants detailed visibility of all resources in the organization. You use Resource Manager to set yourself up as the org admin. What Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) roles should you give to the security team?
A. Org viewer, Project owner
B. Org viewer, Project viewer
C. Org admin, Project browser
D. Project owner, Network admin
ANSWER17:
B
Notes/References17:
B is correct because: –Org viewer grants the security team permissions to view the organization's display name. –Project viewer grants the security team permissions to see the resources within projects.
Question 18: To reduce costs, the Director of Engineering has required all developers to move their development infrastructure resources from on-premises virtual machines (VMs) to Google Cloud Platform. These resources go through multiple start/stop events during the day and require state to persist. You have been asked to design the process of running a development environment in Google Cloud while providing cost visibility to the finance department. Which two steps should you take?
A. Use persistent disks to store the state. Start and stop the VM as needed.
B. Use the –auto-delete flag on all persistent disks before stopping the VM.
C. Apply VM CPU utilization label and include it in the BigQuery billing export.
D. Use BigQuery billing export and labels to relate cost to groups.
E. Store all state in local SSD, snapshot the persistent disks, and terminate the VM.F. Store all state in Cloud Storage, snapshot the persistent disks, and terminate the VM.
ANSWER18:
A and D
Notes/References18:
A is correct because persistent disks will not be deleted when an instance is stopped.
D is correct because exporting daily usage and cost estimates automatically throughout the day to a BigQuery dataset is a good way of providing visibility to the finance department. Labels can then be used to group the costs based on team or cost center.
Question 19: Your company has decided to make a major revision of their API in order to create better experiences for their developers. They need to keep the old version of the API available and deployable, while allowing new customers and testers to try out the new API. They want to keep the same SSL and DNS records in place to serve both APIs. What should they do?
A. Configure a new load balancer for the new version of the API.
B. Reconfigure old clients to use a new endpoint for the new API.
C. Have the old API forward traffic to the new API based on the path.
D. Use separate backend services for each API path behind the load balancer.
ANSWER19:
D
Notes/References19:
D is correct because an HTTP(S) load balancer can direct traffic reaching a single IP to different backends based on the incoming URL.
Question 20: The database administration team has asked you to help them improve the performance of their new database server running on Compute Engine. The database is used for importing and normalizing the company’s performance statistics. It is built with MySQL running on Debian Linux. They have an n1-standard-8 virtual machine with 80 GB of SSD zonal persistent disk. What should they change to get better performance from this system in a cost-effective manner?
A. Increase the virtual machine’s memory to 64 GB.
B. Create a new virtual machine running PostgreSQL.
C. Dynamically resize the SSD persistent disk to 500 GB.
D. Migrate their performance metrics warehouse to BigQuery.
ANSWER20:
C
Notes/References20:
C is correct because persistent disk performance is based on the total persistent disk capacity attached to an instance and the number of vCPUs that the instance has. Incrementing the persistent disk capacity will increment its throughput and IOPS, which in turn improve the performance of MySQL.
Question 21: You need to ensure low-latency global access to data stored in a regional GCS bucket. Data access is uniform across many objects and relatively high. What should you do to address the latency concerns?
A. Use Google’s Cloud CDN.
B. Use Premium Tier routing and Cloud Functions to accelerate access at the edges.
C. Do nothing.
D. Use global BigTable storage.
E. Use a global Cloud Spanner instance.
F. Migrate the data to a new multi-regional GCS bucket.
G. Change the storage class to multi-regional.
ANSWER21:
A
Notes/References21:
Cloud Functions cannot be used to affect GCS data access, so that option is simply wrong. BigTable does not have any “global” mode, so that option is wrong, too. Cloud Spanner is not a good replacement for GCS data: the data use cases are different enough that we can assume it would probably not be a good fit. You cannot change a bucket’s location after it has been created–not via the storage class nor any other way; you would have to migrate the data to a new bucket. Google’s Cloud CDN is very easy to turn on, but it does only work for data that comes from within GCP and only if the objects are being accessed frequently enough.
Question 22: You are building a sign-up app for your local neighbourhood barbeque party and you would like to quickly throw together a low-cost application that tracks who will bring what. Which of the following options should you choose?
A. Python, Flask, App Engine Standard
B. Ruby, Nginx, GKE
C. HTML, CSS, Cloud Storage
D. Node.js, Express, Cloud Functions
E. Rust, Rocket, App Engine Flex
F. Perl, CGI, GCE
ANSWER22:
A
Notes/References22:
The Cloud Storage option doesn’t offer any way to coordinate the guest data. App Engine Flex would cost much more to run when no one is on the sign-up site. Cloud Functions could handle processing some API calls, but it would be more work to set up and that option doesn’t mention anything about storage. GKE is way overkill for such a small and simple application. Running Perl CGI scripts on GCE would also cost more than it needs (and probably make you very sad). App Engine Standard makes it super-easy to stand up a Python Flask app and includes easy data storage options, too.
Question 23: Your company has decided to migrate your AWS DynamoDB database to a multi-regional Cloud Spanner instance and you are designing the system to transfer and load all the data to synchronize the DBs and eventually allow for a quick cut-over. A member of your team has some previous experience working with Apache Hadoop. Which of the following options will you choose for the streamed updates that follow the initial import?
A. The DynamoDB table change is captured by Cloud Pub/Sub and written to Cloud Dataproc for processing into a Spanner-compatible format.
B. The DynamoDB table change is captured by Cloud Pub/Sub and written to Cloud Dataflow for processing into a Spanner-compatible format.
C. Changes to the DynamoDB table are captured by DynamoDB Streams. A Lambda function triggered by the stream writes the change to Cloud Pub/Sub. Cloud Dataflow processes the data from Cloud Pub/Sub and writes it to Cloud Spanner.
D. The DynamoDB table is rescanned by a GCE instance and written to a Cloud Storage bucket. Cloud Dataproc processes the data from Cloud Storage and writes it to Cloud Spanner.
E. The DynamoDB table is rescanned by an EC2 instance and written to an S3 bucket. Storage Transfer Service moves the data from S3 to a Cloud Storage bucket. Cloud Dataflow processes the data from Cloud Storage and writes it to Cloud Spanner.
ANSWER23:
C
Notes/References23:
Rescanning the DynamoDB table is not an appropriate approach to tracking data changes to keep the GCP-side of this in synch. The fact that someone on your team has previous Hadoop experience is not a good enough reason to choose Cloud Dataproc; that’s a red herring. The options purporting to connect Cloud Pub/Sub directly to the DynamoDB table won’t work because there is no such functionality.
Question 24: Your client is a manufacturing company and they have informed you that they will be pausing all normal business activities during a five-week summer holiday period. They normally employ thousands of workers who constantly connect to their internal systems for day-to-day manufacturing data such as blueprints and machine imaging, but during this period the few on-site staff will primarily be re-tooling the factory for the next year’s production runs and will not be performing any manufacturing tasks that need to access these cloud-based systems. When the bulk of the staff return, they will primarily work on the new models but may spend about 20% of their time working with models from previous years. The company has asked you to reduce their GCP costs during this time, so which of the following options will you suggest?
A. Pause all Cloud Functions via the UI and unpause them when work starts back up.
B. Disable all Cloud Functions via the command line and re-enable them when work starts back up.
C. Delete all Cloud Functions and recreate them when work starts back up.
D. Convert all Cloud Functions to run as App Engine Standard applications during the break.
E. None of these options is a good suggestion.
ANSWER24:
E
Notes/References24:
Cloud Functions scale themselves down to zero when they’re not being used. There is no need to do anything with them.
Question 25: You need a place to store images before updating them by file-based render farm software running on a cluster of machines. Which of the following options will you choose?
A. Container Registry
B. Cloud Storage
C. Cloud Filestore
D. Persistent Disk
ANSWER25:
C
Notes/References25:
There are several different kinds of “images” that you might need to consider–maybe they are normal picture-image files, maybe they are Docker container images, maybe VM or disk images, or maybe something else. In this question, “images” refers to visual images, thus eliminating CI/CD products like Container Registry. Compute Engine is not a storage product and should be eliminated. The term “file-based” software means that it is unlikely to work well with object-based storage like Cloud Storage (or any of its storage classes). Persistent Disk cannot offer shared access across a cluster of machines when writes are involved; it only handles multiple readers. However, Cloud Filestore is made to provide shared, file-based storage for a cluster of machines as described in the question.
Question 26: Your company has decided to migrate your AWS DynamoDB database to a multi-regional Cloud Spanner instance and you are designing the system to transfer and load all the data to synchronize the DBs and eventually allow for a quick cut-over. A member of your team has some previous experience working with Apache Hadoop. Which of the following options will you choose for the initial data import?
A. The DynamoDB table is scanned by an EC2 instance and written to an S3 bucket. Storage Transfer Service moves the data from S3 to a Cloud Storage bucket. Cloud Dataflow processes the data from Cloud Storage and writes it to Cloud Spanner.
B. The DynamoDB table data is captured by DynamoDB Streams. A Lambda function triggered by the stream writes the data to Cloud Pub/Sub. Cloud Dataflow processes the data from Cloud Pub/Sub and writes it to Cloud Spanner.
C. The DynamoDB table data is captured by Cloud Pub/Sub and written to Cloud Dataproc for processing into a Spanner-compatible format.
D. The DynamoDB table is scanned by a GCE instance and written to a Cloud Storage bucket. Cloud Dataproc processes the data from Cloud Storage and writes it to Cloud Spanner.
ANSWER26:
A
Notes/References26:
The same data processing will have to happen for both the initial (batch) data load and the incremental (streamed) data changes that follow it. So if the solution built to handle the initial batch doesn't also work for the stream that follows it, then the processing code would have to be written twice. A Professional Cloud Architect should recognize this project-level issue and not over-focus on the (batch) portion called out in this particular question. This is why you don’t want to choose Cloud Dataproc. Instead, Cloud Dataflow will handle both the initial batch load and also the subsequent streamed data. The fact that someone on your team has previous Hadoop experience is not a good enough reason to choose Cloud Dataproc; that’s a red herring. The DynamoDB streams option would be great for the db synchronization that follows, but it can’t handle the initial data load because DynamoDB Streams only fire for data changes. The option purporting to connect Cloud Pub/Sub directly to the DynamoDB table won’t work because there is no such functionality.
Question 27: You need a managed service to handle logging data coming from applications running in GKE and App Engine Standard. Which option should you choose?
A. Cloud Storage
B. Logstash
C. Cloud Monitoring
D. Cloud Logging
E. BigQuery
F. BigTable
ANSWER27:
D
Notes/References27:
Cloud Monitoring is made to handle metrics, not logs. Logstash is not a managed service. And while you could store application logs in almost any storage service, the Cloud Logging service–aka Stackdriver Logging–is purpose-built to accept and process application logs from many different sources. Oh, and you should also be comfortable dealing with products and services by names other than their current official ones. For example, “GKE” used to be called “Container Engine”, “Cloud Build” used to be “Container Builder”, the “GCP Marketplace” used to be called “Cloud Launcher”, and so on.
Question 28: You need a place to store images before serving them from AppEngine Standard. Which of the following options will you choose?
A. Compute Engine
B. Cloud Filestore
C. Cloud Storage
D. Persistent Disk
E. Container Registry
F. Cloud Source Repositories
G. Cloud Build
H. Nearline
ANSWER28:
C
Notes/References28:
There are several different kinds of “images” that you might need to consider–maybe they are normal picture-image files, maybe they are Docker container images, maybe VM or disk images, or maybe something else. In this question, “images” refers to picture files, because that’s something that you would serve from a web server product like AppEngine Standard, so we eliminate Cloud Build (which isn’t actually for storage, at all) and the other two CI/CD products: Cloud Source Repositories and Container Registry. You definitely could store image files on Cloud Filestore or Persistent Disk, but you can’t hook those up to AppEngine Standard, so those options need to be eliminated, too. The only options left are both types of Cloud Storage, but since “Cloud Storage” sits next to “Coldline” as an option, we can confidently infer that the former refers to the “Standard” storage class. Since the question implies that these images will be served by AppEngine Standard, we would prefer to use the Standard storage class over the Coldline one–so there’s our answer.
Question 29: You need to ensure low-latency global access to data stored in a multi-regional GCS bucket. Data access is uniform across many objects and relatively low. What should you do to address the latency concerns?
A. Use a global Cloud Spanner instance.
B. Change the storage class to multi-regional.
C. Use Google’s Cloud CDN.
D. Migrate the data to a new regional GCS bucket.
E. Do nothing.
F. Use global BigTable storage.
ANSWER29:
E
Notes/References29:
Cloud Functions cannot be used to affect GCS data access, so that option is simply wrong. BigTable does not have any “global” mode, so that option is wrong, too. Cloud Spanner is not a good replacement for GCS data: the data use cases are different enough that we can assume it would probably not be a good fit. You cannot change a bucket’s location after it has been created–not via the storage class nor any other way; you would have to migrate the data to a new bucket. But migrating the data to a regional bucket only helps when the data access will primarily be from that region. Google’s Cloud CDN is very easy to turn on, but it does only work for data that comes from within GCP and only if the objects are being accessed frequently enough to get cached based on previous requests. Because the access per object is so low, Cloud CDN won’t really help. This then brings us back to the question. Now, it may seem implied, but the question does not specifically state that there is currently a problem with latency, only that you need to ensure low latency–and we are already using what would be the best fit for this situation: a multi-regional CS bucket.
Question 30: You need to ensure low-latency GCP access to a volume of historical data that is currently stored in an S3 bucket. Data access is uniform across many objects and relatively high. What should you do to address the latency concerns?
A. Use Premium Tier routing and Cloud Functions to accelerate access at the edges.
B. Use Google’s Cloud CDN.
C. Use global BigTable storage.
D. Do nothing.
E. Migrate the data to a new multi-regional GCS bucket.
F. Use a global Cloud Spanner instance.
ANSWER30:
E
Notes/References30:
Cloud Functions cannot be used to affect GCS data access, so that option is simply wrong. BigTable does not have any “global” mode, so that option is wrong, too. Cloud Spanner is not a good replacement for GCS data: the data use cases are different enough that we can assume it would probably not be a good fit–and it would likely be unnecessarily expensive. You cannot change a bucket’s location after it has been created–not via the storage class nor any other way; you would have to migrate the data to a new bucket. Google’s Cloud CDN is very easy to turn on, but it does only work for data that comes from within GCP and only if the objects are being accessed frequently enough. So even if you would want to use Cloud CDN, you have to migrate the data into a GCS bucket first, so that’s a better option.
Question 31: You are lifting and shifting into GCP a system that uses a subnet-based security model. It has frontend and backend tiers and will be deployed in three regions. How many subnets will you need?
A. Six
B. One
C. Three
D. Four
E. Two
F. Nine
ANSWER31:
A
Notes/References31:
A single subnet spans and can be used across all zones in a single region, but you will need different subnets in different regions. Also, to implement subnet-level network security, you need to separate each tier into its own subnet. In this case, you have two tiers which will each need their own subnet in each of the three regions in which you will deploy this system.
Question 32: You need a place to produce images before deploying them to AppEngine Flex. Which of the following options will you choose?
A. Container Registry
B. Cloud Storage
C. Persistent Disk
D. Nearline
E. Cloud Source Repositories
F. Cloud Build
G. Cloud Filestore
H. Compute Engine
ANSWER32:
F
Notes/References32:
There are several different kinds of “images” that you might need to consider–maybe they are normal picture-image files, maybe they are Docker container images, maybe VM or disk images, or maybe something else. In this question, “deploying [these images] to AppEngine Flex” lets us know that we are dealing with Docker container images, and thus although they would likely be stored in the Container Registry, after being built, this question asks us where that building might happen, which is Cloud Build. Cloud Build, which used to be called Container Builder, is ideal for building container images–though it can also be used to build almost any artifacts, really. You could also do this on Compute Engine, but that option requires much more work to manage and is therefore worse.
Question 33: You are lifting and shifting into GCP a system that uses a subnet-based security model. It has frontend, app, and data tiers and will be deployed in three regions. How many subnets will you need?
A. Two
B. One
C. Three
D. Nine
E. Four
F. Six
ANSWER33:
D
Notes/References33:
A single subnet spans and can be used across all zones in a single region, but you will need different subnets in different regions. Also, to implement subnet-level network security, you need to separate each tier into its own subnet. In this case, you have three tiers which will each need their own subnet in each of the three regions in which you will deploy this system.
Question 34: You need a place to store images in case any of them are needed as evidence for a tax audit over the next seven years. Which of the following options will you choose?
A. Cloud Filestore
B. Coldline
C. Nearline
D. Persistent Disk
E. Cloud Source Repositories
F. Cloud Storage
G. Container Registry
ANSWER34:
B
Notes/References34:
There are several different kinds of “images” that you might need to consider–maybe they are normal picture-image files, maybe they are Docker container images, maybe VM or disk images, or maybe something else. In this question, “images” probably refers to picture files, and so Cloud Storage seems like an interesting option. But even still, when “Cloud Storage” is used without any qualifier, it generally refers to the “Standard” storage class, and this question also offers other storage classes as response options. Because the images in this scenario are unlikely to be used more than once a year (we can assume that taxes are filed annually and there’s less than 100% chance of being audited), the right storage class is Coldline.
Question 35: You need a place to store images before deploying them to AppEngine Flex. Which of the following options will you choose?
A. Container Registry
B. Cloud Filestore
C. Cloud Source Repositories
D. Persistent Disk
E. Cloud Storage
F. Code Build
G. Nearline
ANSWER35:
A
Notes/References35:
Compute Engine is not a storage product and should be eliminated. There are several different kinds of “images” that you might need to consider–maybe they are normal picture-image files, maybe they are Docker container images, maybe VM or disk images, or maybe something else. In this question, “deploying [these images] to AppEngine Flex” lets us know that we are dealing with Docker container images, and thus they would likely have been stored in the Container Registry.
Question 36: You are configuring a SaaS security application that updates your network’s allowed traffic configuration to adhere to internal policies. How should you set this up?
A. Install the application on a new appropriately-sized GCE instance running in your host VPC, and apply a read-only service account to it.
B. Create a new service account for the app to use and grant it the compute.networkViewer role on the production VPC.
C. Create a new service account for the app to use and grant it the compute.securityAdmin role on the production VPC.
D. Run the application as a container in your system’s staging GKE cluster and grant it access to a read-only service account.
E. Install the application on a new appropriately-sized GCE instance running in your host VPC, and let it use the default service account.
ANSWER36:
C
Notes/References36:
You do not install a Software-as-a-Service application yourself; instead, it runs on the vendor's own hardware and you configure it for external access. Service accounts are great for this, as they can be used externally and you maintain full control over them (disabling them, rotating their keys, etc.). The principle of least privilege dictates that you should not give any application more ability than it needs, but this app does need to make changes, so you'll need to grant securityAdmin, not networkViewer.
Question 37:You are lifting and shifting into GCP a system that uses a subnet-based security model. It has frontend and backend tiers and will be deployed across three zones. How many subnets will you need?
A. One
B. Six
C. Four
D. Three
E. Nine
ANSWER37:
F
Notes/References37:
A single subnet spans and can be used across all zones in a given region. But to implement subnet-level network security, you need to separate each tier into its own subnet. In this case, you have two tiers, so you only need two subnets.
Question 38:You have been tasked with setting up a system to comply with corporate standards for container image approvals. Which of the following is your best choice for this project?
A. Binary Authorization
B. Cloud IAM
C. Security Key Enforcement
D. Cloud SCC
E. Cloud KMS
ANSWER38:
A
Notes/References38:
Cloud KMS is Google's product for managing encryption keys. Security Key Enforcement is about making sure that people's accounts do not get taken over by attackers, not about managing encryption keys. Cloud IAM is about managing what identities (both humans and services) can access in GCP. Cloud DLP–or Data Loss Prevention–is for preventing data loss by scanning for and redacting sensitive information. Cloud SCC–the Security Command Center–centralizes security information so you can manage it all in one place. Binary Authorization is about making sure that only properly-validated containers can run in your environments.
Question 39: For this question, refer to the Company B‘s case study. Which of the following are most likely to impact the operations of Company B’s game backend and analytics systems?
A. PCI
B. PII
C. SOX
D. GDPR
E. HIPAA
ANSWER39:
B and D
Notes/References39:
There is no patient/health information, so HIPAA does not apply. It would be a very bad idea to put payment card information directly into these systems, so we should assume they’ve not done that–therefore the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards/regulations should not affect normal operation of these systems. Besides, it’s entirely likely that they never deal with payments directly, anyway–choosing to offload that to the relevant app stores for each mobile platform. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) is about proper management of financial records for publicly traded companies and should therefore not apply to these systems. However, these systems are likely to contain some Personally-Identifying Information (PII) about the users who may reside in the European Union and therefore the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will apply and may require ongoing operations to comply with the “Right to be Forgotten/Erased”.
Question 40:Your new client has advised you that their organization falls within the scope of HIPAA. What can you infer about their information systems?
A. Their customers located in the EU may require them to delete their user data and provide evidence of such.
B. They will also need to pass a SOX audit.
C. They handle money-linked information.
D. Their system deals with medical information.
ANSWER40:
D
Notes/References40:
SOX stands for Sarbanes Oxley and is US regulation governing financial reporting for publicly-traded companies. HIPAA–the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996–is US regulation aimed at safeguarding individuals' (i.e. patients’) health information. PCI is the Payment Card Industry, and they have Data Security Standards (DSS) that must be adhered to by systems handling payment information of any of their member brands (which include Visa, Mastercard, and several others).
Question 41:Your new client has advised you that their organization needs to pass audits by ISO and PCI. What can you infer about their information systems?
A. They handle money-linked information.
B. Their customers located in the EU may require them to delete their user data and provide evidence of such.
C. Their system deals with medical information.
D. They will also need to pass a SOX audit.
ANSWER42:
A
Notes/References42:
SOX stands for Sarbanes Oxley and is US regulation governing financial reporting for publicly-traded companies. HIPAA–the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996–is US regulation aimed at safeguarding individuals' (i.e. patients’) health information. PCI is the Payment Card Industry, and they have Data Security Standards (DSS) that must be adhered to by systems handling payment information of any of their member brands (which include Visa, Mastercard, and several others). ISO is the International Standards Organization, and since they have so many completely different certifications, this does not tell you much.
Question 43:Your new client has advised you that their organization deals with GDPR. What can you infer about their information systems?
A. Their system deals with medical information.
B. Their customers located in the EU may require them to delete their user data and provide evidence of such.
C. They will also need to pass a SOX audit.
D. They handle money-linked information.
ANSWER43:
B
Notes/References43:
SOX stands for Sarbanes Oxley and is US regulation governing financial reporting for publicly-traded companies. HIPAA–the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996–is US regulation aimed at safeguarding individuals' (i.e. patients’) health information. PCI is the Payment Card Industry, and they have Data Security Standards (DSS) that must be adhered to by systems handling payment information of any of their member brands (which include Visa, Mastercard, and several others).
Question 44:For this question, refer to the Company C case study. Once Company C has completed their initial cloud migration as described in the case study, which option would represent the quickest way to migrate their production environment to GCP?
A. Apply the strangler pattern to their applications and reimplement one piece at a time in the cloud
B. Lift and shift all servers at one time
C. Lift and shift one application at a time
D. Lift and shift one server at a time
E. Set up cloud-based load balancing then divert traffic from the DC to the cloud system
F. Enact their disaster recovery plan and fail over
ANSWER44:
F
Notes/References44:
The proposed Lift and Shift options are all talking about different situations than Dress4Win would find themselves in, at that time: they’d then have automation to build a complete prod system in the cloud, but they’d just need to migrate to it. “Just”, right? 🙂 The strangler pattern approach is similarly problematic (in this case), in that it proposes a completely different cloud migration strategy than the one they’ve almost completed. Now, if we purely consider the kicker’s key word “quickest”, using the DR plan to fail over definitely seems like it wins. Setting up an additional load balancer and migrating slowly/carefully would take more time.
Question 45:Which of the following commands is most likely to appear in an environment setup script?
A. gsutil mb -l asia gs://${project_id}-logs
B. gcloud compute instances create –zone–machine-type=n1-highmem-16 newvm
C. gcloud compute instances create –zone–machine-type=f1-micro newvm
D. gcloud compute ssh ${instance_id}
E. gsutil cp -r gs://${project_id}-setup ./install
F. gsutil cp -r logs/* gs://${project_id}-logs/${instance_id}/
ANSWER45:
A
Notes/References45:
The context here indicates that “environment” is an infrastructure environment like “staging” or “prod”, not just a particular command shell. In that sort of a situation, it is likely that you might create some core per-environment buckets that will store different kinds of data like configuration, communication, logging, etc. You're not likely to be creating, deleting, or connecting (sshing) to instances, nor copying files to or from any instances.
Question 46:Your developers are working to expose a RESTful API for your company’s physical dealer locations. Which of the following endpoints would you advise them to include in their design?
A. /dealerLocations/get
B. /dealerLocations
C. /dealerLocations/list
D. Source and destination
E. /getDealerLocations
ANSWER46:
B
Notes/References46:
It might not feel like it, but this is in scope and a fair question. Google expects Professional Cloud Architects to be able to advise on designing APIs according to best practices (check the exam guide!). In this case, it's important to know that RESTful interfaces (when properly designed) use nouns for the resources identified by a given endpoint. That, by itself, eliminates most of the listed options. In HTTP, verbs like GET, PUT, and POST are then used to interact with those endpoints to retrieve and act upon those resources. To choose between the two noun-named options, it helps to know that plural resources are generally already understood to be lists, so there should be no need to add another “/list” to the endpoint.
Question 47:Which of the following commands is most likely to appear in an instance shutdown script?
A. gsutil cp -r gs://${project_id}-setup ./install
B. gcloud compute instances create –zone–machine-type=n1-highmem-16 newvm
C. gcloud compute ssh ${instance_id}
D. gsutil mb -l asia gs://${project_id}-logs
E. gcloud compute instances delete ${instance_id}
F. gsutil cp -r logs/* gs://${project_id}-logs/${instance_id}/
G. gcloud compute instances create –zone–machine-type=f1-micro newvm
ANSWER47:
F
Notes/References47:
The startup and shutdown scripts run on an instance at the time when that instance is starting up or shutting down. Those situations do not generally call for any other instances to be created, deleted, or connected (sshed) to. Also, those would be a very unusual time to make a Cloud Storage bucket, since buckets are the overall and highly-scalable containers that would likely hold the data for all (or at least many) instances in a given project. That said, instance shutdown time may be a time when you'd want to copy some final logs from the instance into some project-wide bucket. (In general, though, you really want to be doing that kind of thing continuously and not just at shutdown time, in case the instance shuts down unexpectedly and not in an orderly fashion that runs your shutdown script.)
Question 48:It is Saturday morning and you have been alerted to a serious issue in production that is both reducing availability to 95% and corrupting some data. Your monitoring tools noticed the issue 5 minutes ago and it was just escalated to you because the on-call tech in line before you did not respond to the page. Your system has an RPO of 10 minutes and an RTO of 120 minutes, with an SLA of 90% uptime. What should you do first?
A. Escalate the decision to the business manager responsible for the SLA
B. Take the system offline
C. Revert the system to the state it was in on Friday morning
D. Investigate the cause of the issue
ANSWER48:
B
Notes/References48:
The data corruption is your primary concern, as your Recovery Point Objective allows only 10 minutes of data loss and you may already have lost 5. (The data corruption means that you may well need to roll back the data to before that started happening.) It might seem crazy, but you should as quickly as possible stop the system so that you do not lose any more data. It would almost certainly take more time than you have left in your RPO to properly investigate and address the issue, but you should then do that next, during the disaster response clock set by your Recovery Time Objective. Escalating the issue to a business manager doesn't make any sense. And neither does it make sense to knee-jerk revert the system to an earlier state unless you have some good indication that doing so will address the issue. Plus, we'd better assume that “revert the system” refers only to the deployment and not the data, because rolling the data back that far would definitely violate the RPO.
Question 49:Which of the following are not processes or practices that you would associate with DevOps?
A. Raven-test the candidate
B. Obfuscate the code
C. Only one of the other options is made up
D. Run the code in your cardinal environment
E. Do a canary deploy
ANSWER49:
A and D
Notes/References49:
Testing your understanding of development and operations in DevOps. In particular, you need to know that a canary deploy is a real thing and it can be very useful to identify problems with a new change you're making before it is fully rolled out to and therefore impacts everyone. You should also understand that “obfuscating” code is a real part of a release process that seeks to protect an organization's source code from theft (by making it unreadable by humans) and usually happens in combination with “minification” (which improves the speed of downloading and interpreting/running the code). On the other hand, “raven-testing” isn't a thing, and neither is a “cardinal environment”. Those bird references are just homages to canary deployments.
Question 50:Your CTO is going into budget meetings with the board, next month, and has asked you to draw up plans to optimize your GCP-based systems for capex. Which of the following options will you prioritize in your proposal?
A. Object lifecycle management
B. BigQuery Slots
C. Committed use discounts
D. Sustained use discounts
E. Managed instance group autoscaling
F. Pub/Sub topic centralization
ANSWER50:
B and C
Notes/References50:
Pub/Sub usage is based on how much data you send through it, not any sort of “topic centralization” (which isn't really a thing). Sustained use discounts can reduce costs, but that's not really something you structure your system around. Now, most organizations prefer to turn Capital Expenditures into Operational Expenses, but since this question is instead asking you to prioritize CapEx, we need to consider the remaining options from the perspective of “spending” (or maybe reserving) defined amounts of money up-front for longer-term use. (Fair warning, though: You may still have some trouble classifying some cloud expenses as “capital” expenditures). With that in mind, GCE's Committed Use Discounts do fit: you “buy” (reserve/prepay) some instances ahead of time and then not have to pay (again) for them as you use them (or don't use them; you've already paid). BigQuery Slots are a similar flat-rate pricing model: you pre-purchase a certain amount of BigQuery processing capacity and your queries use that instead of the on-demand capacity. That means you won't pay more than you planned/purchased, but your queries may finish rather more slowly, too. Managed instance group autoscaling and object lifecycle management can help to reduce costs, but they are not really about capex.
Question 51:In your last retrospective, there was significant disagreement voiced by the members of your team about what part of your system should be built next. Your scrum master is currently away, but how should you proceed when she returns, on Monday?
A. The scrum master is the one who decides
B. The lead architect should get the final say
C. The product owner should get the final say
D. You should put it to a vote of key stakeholders
E. You should put it to a vote of all stakeholders
ANSWER51:
C
Notes/References51:
In Scrum, it is the Product Owner's role to define and prioritize (i.e. set order for) the product backlog items that the dev team will work on. If you haven't ever read it, the Scrum Guide is not too long and quite valuable to have read at least once, for context.
Question 52:Your development team needs to evaluate the behavior of a new version of your application for approximately two hours before committing to making it available to all users. Which of the following strategies will you suggest?
A. Split testing
B. Red-Black
C. A/B
D. Canary
E. Rolling
F. Blue-Green
G. Flex downtime
ANSWER52:
D and E
Notes/References52:
A Blue-Green deployment, also known as a Red-Black deployment, entails having two complete systems set up and cutting over from one of them to the other with the ability to cut back to the known-good old one if there’s any problem with the experimental new one. A canary deployment is where a new version of an app is deployed to only one (or a very small number) of the servers, to see whether it experiences or causes trouble before that version is rolled out to the rest of the servers. When the canary looks good, a Rolling deployment can be used to update the rest of the servers, in-place, one after another to keep the overall system running. “Flex downtime” is something I just made up, but it sounds bad, right? A/B testing–also known as Split testing–is not generally used for deployments but rather to evaluate two different application behaviours by showing both of them to different sets of users. Its purpose is to gather higher-level information about how users interact with the application.
Question 53:You are mentoring a Junior Cloud Architect on software projects. Which of the following “words of wisdom” will you pass along?
A. Identifying and fixing one issue late in the product cycle could cost the same as handling a hundred such issues earlier on
B. Hiring and retaining 10X developers is critical to project success
C. A key goal of a proper post-mortem is to identify what processes need to be changed
D. Adding 100% is a safe buffer for estimates made by skilled estimators at the beginning of a project
E. A key goal of a proper post-mortem is to determine who needs additional training
ANSWER53:
A and C
Notes/References53:
There really can be 10X (and even larger!) differences in productivity between individual contributors, but projects do not only succeed or fail because of their contributions. Bugs are crazily more expensive to find and fix once a system has gone into production, compared to identifying and addressing that issue right up front–yes, even 100x. A post-mortem should not focus on blaming an individual but rather on understanding the many underlying causes that led to a particular event, with an eye toward how such classes of problems can be systematically prevented in the future.
Question 54:Your team runs a service with an SLA to achieve p99 latency of 200ms. This month, your service achieved p95 latency of 250ms. What will happen now?
A. The next month’s SLA will be increased.
B. The next month’s SLO will be reduced.
C. Your client(s) will have to pay you extra.
D. You will have to pay your client(s).
E. There is no impact on payments.
F. There is not enough information to make a determination.
ANSWER54:
D
Notes/References54:
It would be highly unusual for clients to have to pay extra, even if the service performs better than agreed by the SLA. SLAs generally set out penalties (i.e. you pay the client) for below-standard performance. While SLAs are external-facing, SLOs are internal-facing and do not generally relate to performance penalties. Neither SLAs nor SLOs are adaptively changed just because of one month’s performance; such changes would have to happen through rather different processes. A p99 metric is a tougher measure than p95, and p95 is tougher than p90–so meeting the tougher measure would surpass a required SLA, but meeting a weaker measure would not give enough information to say.
Question 55:Your team runs a service with an SLO to achieve p90 latency of 200ms. This month, your service achieved p95 latency of 250ms. What will happen now?
A. The next month’s SLA will be increased.
B. There is no impact on payments.
C. There is not enough information to make a determination.
D. Your client(s) will have to pay you extra.
E. The next month’s SLO will be reduced.
F. You will have to pay your client(s).
ANSWER55:
B
Notes/References55:
It would be highly unusual for clients to have to pay extra, even if the service performs better than agreed by the SLA. SLAs generally set out penalties (i.e. you pay the client) for below-standard performance. While SLAs are external-facing, SLOs are internal-facing and do not generally relate to performance penalties. Neither SLAs nor SLOs are adaptively changed just because of one month’s performance; such changes would have to happen through rather different processes. A p99 metric is a tougher measure than p95, and p95 is tougher than p90–so meeting the tougher measure would surpass a required SLA, but meeting a weaker measure would not give enough information to say.
Question 56:For this question, refer to the Company C case study. How would you recommend Company C address their capacity and utilization concerns?
A. Configure the autoscaling thresholds to follow changing load
B. Provision enough servers to handle trough load and offload to Cloud Functions for higher demand
C. Run cron jobs on their application servers to scale down at night and up in the morning
D. Use Cloud Load Balancing to balance the traffic highs and lows
D. Run automated jobs in Cloud Scheduler to scale down at night and up in the morning
E. Provision enough servers to handle peak load and sell back excess on-demand capacity to the marketplace
ANSWER56:
A
Notes/References56:
The case study notes, “Our traffic patterns are highest in the mornings and weekend evenings; during other times, 80% of our capacity is sitting idle.” Cloud Load Balancing could definitely scale itself to handle this type of load fluctuation, but it would not do anything to address the issue of having enough application server capacity. Provisioning servers to handle peak load is generally inefficient, but selling back excess on-demand capacity to the marketplace just isn’t a thing, so that option must be eliminated, too. Using Cloud Functions would require a different architectural approach for their application servers and it is generally not worth the extra work it would take to coordinate workloads across Cloud Functions and GCE–in practice, you’d just use one or the other. It is possible to manually effect scaling via automated jobs like in Cloud Scheduler or cron running somewhere (though cron running everywhere could create a coordination nightmare), but manual scaling based on predefined expected load levels is far from ideal, as capacity would only very crudely match demand. Rather, it is much better to configure the managed instance group’s autoscaling to follow demand curves–both expected and unexpected. A properly-architected system should rise to the occasion of unexpectedly going viral, and not fall over.
Google Cloud Latest News, Questions and Answers online:
Cloud Run vs App Engine: In a nutshell, you give Google’s Cloud Run a Docker container containing a webserver. Google will run this container and create an HTTP endpoint. All the scaling is automatically done for you by Google. Cloud Run depends on the fact that your application should be stateless. This is because Google will spin up multiple instances of your app to scale it dynamically. If you want to host a traditional web application this means that you should divide it up into a stateless API and a frontend app.
With Google’s App Engine you tell Google how your app should be run. The App Engine will create and run a container from these instructions. Deploying with App Engine is super easy. You simply fill out an app.yml file and Google handles everything for you.
With Cloud Run, you have more control. You can go crazy and build a ridiculous custom Docker image, no problem!Cloud Run is made for Devops engineers, App Engine is made for developers.Read more here…
The best choice depends on what you want to optimize, your use-cases and your specific needs.
If your objective is the lowest latency, choose Cloud Run.
Indeed, Cloud Run use always 1 vCPU (at least 2.4Ghz) and you can choose the memory size from 128Mb to 2Gb.
With Cloud Functions, if you want the best processing performance (2.4Ghz of CPU), you have to pay 2Gb of memory. If your memory footprint is low, a Cloud Functions with 2Gb of memory is overkill and cost expensive for nothing.
Cutting cost is not always the best strategy for customer satisfaction, but business reality may require it. Anyway, it highly depends of your use-case
Both Cloud Run and Cloud Function round up to the nearest 100ms. As you could play with the GSheet, the Cloud Functions are cheaper when the processing time of 1 request is below the first 100ms. Indeed, you can slow the Cloud Functions vCPU, with has for consequence to increase the duration of the processing but while staying under 100ms if you tune it well. Thus less Ghz/s are used and thereby you pay less.
the cost comparison between Cloud Functions and Cloud Run goes further than simply comparing a pricing list. Moreover, on your projects, you often will have to use the 2 solutions for taking advantage of their strengths and capabilities.
My first choice for development is Cloud Run. Its portability, its testability, its openess on the libraries, the languages and the binaries confer it too much advantages for, at least, a similar pricing, and often with a real advantage in cost but also in performance, in particular for concurrent requests. Even if you need the same level of isolation of Cloud functions (1 instance per request), simply set the concurrent param to 1!
In addition, the GA of Cloud Run is applied on all containers, whatever the languages and the binaries used. Read more here…
Google Cloud Storage : What bucket class for the best performance?: Multiregional buckets perform significantly better for cross-the-ocean fetches, however the details are a bit more nuanced than that. The performance is dominated by the latency of physical distance between the client and the cloud storage bucket.
If caching is on, and your access volume is high enough to take advantage of caching, there’s not a huge difference between the two offerings (that I can see with the tests). This shows off the power of Google’s Awesome CDN environment.
If caching is off, or the access volume is low enough that you can’t take advantage of caching, then the performance overhead is dominated directly by physics. You should be trying to get the assets as close to the clients as possible, while also considering cost, and the types of redundancy and consistency you’ll need for your data needs.
For privacy sake, it is very important for a lot of people to not trust cloud providers with their financial data. Below are some free desktop financial software products that do not require you to store data in the cloud.
Reliable, clean data, you only pay for what you use, your data stays on your computer.
2- LibreOffice Calc : Calc is the free spreadsheet program you’ve always needed. Newcomers find it intuitive and easy to learn, while professional data miners and number crunchers appreciate the comprehensive range of advanced functions. Built-in wizards guide you through choosing and using a comprehensive range of advanced features.
Calc is the spreadsheet application you’ve always wanted. Newcomers find it intuitive and easy to learn; professional data miners and number crunchers will appreciate the comprehensive range of advanced functions.
4- Google Sheets: With Google Sheets, you can create, edit, and collaborate wherever you are. For free. Price: Free for non-business use $5/month per user for basic G-Suite $10/month per user for business license
5- Excel: Well it is Microsoft Excel….Enough said. Excel provides a simple way to download financial data into a preconfigured spreadsheet at the click of a button.
Money Manager Ex is a free, open-source, cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software. It primarily helps organize one’s finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. It is also a great tool to get a bird’s eye view of your financial worth.
Money Manager includes all the basic features that 90% of users would want to see in a personal finance application. The design goals are to concentrate on simplicity and user-friendliness – something one can use everyday.
7- Xero: Xero backs up your data and protects it with multiple layers of security including industry-standard data encryption and secure data centres. We also offer two-step authentication as an additional layer of protection for your Xero account.
8- Smartsheet Smartsheet is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company focused entirely on its core cloud-based work automation platform. Their competency is in simplifying tasks and including many diverse types of output. Since all their efforts revolve around a single product and its extensions, there is strong user support.
Cloud computing is the new big thing in Information Technology. Everyone, every business will sooner or later adopt it, because of hosting cost benefits, scalability and more.
This blog outlines the Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing, Pros and Cons of Cloud Technology, Faqs, Facts, Questions and Answers Dump about cloud computing.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Prep PWA AppCloud Practitioner Exam Prep AWS vs Azure vs Google
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is an information technology paradigm that enables ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable system resources and higher-level services that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, similar to a public utility. Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change.
Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers
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Benefits of AWS Cloud Computing
Cost effective & Time saving: Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters; the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, and the IT experts for managing the infrastructure.
The ability to pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs.
Powerful server capabilities and Performance: The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure datacenters, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.
Powerful and scalable server capabilities: The ability to scale elastically; That means delivering the right amount of IT resources—for example, more or less computing power, storage, bandwidth—right when they’re needed, and from the right geographic location.
SaaS ( Software as a service). Software as a service is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure, and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet, or PC.
PaaS ( Platform as a service). Platform as a service refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering, and managing software applications. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network, and databases needed for development.
IaaS ( Infrastructure as a service). The most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis
Serverless: Running complex Applications without a single server. Overlapping with PaaS, serverless computing focuses on building app functionality without spending time continually managing the servers and infrastructure required to do so. The cloud provider handles the setup, capacity planning, and server management for you. Serverless architectures are highly scalable and event-driven, only using resources when a specific function or trigger occurs.
Infrastructure provisioning as code, helps recreating same infrastructure by re-running the same code in a few click.
Automatic and Reliable Data backup and storage of data: Cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.
Increase Productivity: On-site datacenters typically require a lot of “racking and stacking”—hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals.
Security: Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls that strengthen your security posture overall, helping protect your data, apps, and infrastructure from potential threats.
Speed: Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning. In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only a click away. This means that the time those resources are available to your developers is reduced from weeks to minutes. As a result, the organization experiences a dramatic increase in agility because the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is lower
Go global in minutes
Easily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks. This means that you can provide a lower latency and better experience for your customers simply and at minimal cost.
Privacy: Cloud computing poses privacy concerns because the service provider can access the data that is in the cloud at any time. It could accidentally or deliberately alter or delete information.Many cloud providers can share information with third parties if necessary for purposes of law and order without a warrant. That is permitted in their privacy policies, which users must agree to before they start using cloud services.
Security: According to the Cloud Security Alliance, the top three threats in the cloud are Insecure Interfaces and API’s, Data Loss & Leakage, and Hardware Failure—which accounted for 29%, 25% and 10% of all cloud security outages respectively. Together, these form shared technology vulnerabilities.
Ownership of Data: There is the problem of legal ownership of the data (If a user stores some data in the cloud, can the cloud provider profit from it?). Many Terms of Service agreements are silent on the question of ownership.
Limited Customization Options: Cloud computing is cheaper because of economics of scale, and—like any outsourced task—you tend to get what you get. A restaurant with a limited menu is cheaper than a personal chef who can cook anything you want.
Downtime: Technical outages are inevitable and occur sometimes when cloud service providers (CSPs) become overwhelmed in the process of serving their clients. This may result to temporary business suspension.
Security of stored data and data in transit may be a concern when storing sensitive data at a cloud storage provider[10]
Users with specific records-keeping requirements, such as public agencies that must retain electronic records according to statute, may encounter complications with using cloud computing and storage. For instance, the U.S. Department of Defense designated the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to maintain a list of records management products that meet all of the records retention, personally identifiable information (PII), and security (Information Assurance; IA) requirements
Cloud storage is a rich resource for both hackers and national security agencies. Because the cloud holds data from many different users and organizations, hackers see it as a very valuable target.
Piracy and copyright infringement may be enabled by sites that permit filesharing. For example, the CodexCloud ebook storage site has faced litigation from the owners of the intellectual property uploaded and shared there, as have the GrooveShark and YouTube sites it has been compared to.
Public clouds: A cloud is called a “public cloud” when the services are rendered over a network that is open for public use. They are owned and operated by a third-party cloud service providers, which deliver their computing resources, like servers and storage, over the Internet. Microsoft Azure is an example of a public cloud. With a public cloud, all hardware, software, and other supporting infrastructure is owned and managed by the cloud provider. You access these services and manage your account using a web browser. For infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) hold a commanding position among the many cloud companies.
Private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third party, and hosted either internally or externally. A private cloud refers to cloud computing resources used exclusively by a single business or organization. A private cloud can be physically located on the company’s on-site datacenter. Some companies also pay third-party service providers to host their private cloud. A private cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network.
Hybrid cloud is a composition of a public cloud and a private environment, such as a private cloud or on-premise resources, that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. Hybrid cloud can also mean the ability to connect collocation, managed and/or dedicated services with cloud resources. Hybrid clouds combine public and private clouds, bound together by technology that allows data and applications to be shared between them. By allowing data and applications to move between private and public clouds, a hybrid cloud gives your business greater flexibility, more deployment options, and helps optimize your existing infrastructure, security, and compliance.
Community Cloud: A community cloud in computing is a collaborative effort in which infrastructure is shared between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. This is controlled and used by a group of organizations that have shared interest. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud, so only some of the cost savings potential of cloud computing are realized.
Other AWS Facts and Summaries and Questions/Answers Dump
What do the top 3 public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Google cloud do to insure customer data loss?
As cloud user, cloud customer, company storing customer data in the cloud, you probably have a lot of personal or private data hosted in various infrastructure in the cloud. Losing that data or having the data accessed by hackers or unauthorized third party can be very harmful both financially and emotionally to you or your customers. A cloud User or Customer Insurance can protect you against data lost or stolen data. Practically, the cloud computing insurance is a cyber liability policy that covers web-based services. Before looking for a customer insurance in the cloud, you need to clarify “What data should the insurance cover and under which governing laws?“, “What data can be considered a loss?” . The good news is : as cloud adoption is increasing in the insurance industry, insurers have the opportunity to better understand their operations models and to implement tailored insurance solutions for cloud.
Cloud Data loss can happen in the following forms:
First Party Losses: losses where the cloud provider incurs damages. Those types of losses include:
Destruction of Data
Denial of Service Attack (DOS)
Virus, Malware and Spyware
Human Error
Electrical Malfunctions and Power Surges in data centers
Natural Disasters
Network Failures
Cyber Extortion
Each of the above exposures to loss would result in direct damages to the insured, or first-party loss.
Third-Party Losses – damages that would occur to customers outside of the cloud provider. These types of losses include:
Breach of Privacy
Misuse of Private Personal Information
Defamation or Slander
Transmission of Malicious Content
The above exposures could result in a company being held liable for the damages caused to others (liability).
Cyber insurance is a form of insurance for businesses and individuals against internet-based risks. The most common risk that is insured against is data breaches. … It also covers losses from network security breaches, theft of intellectual property and loss of privacy.
Data Compromise coverage insures a commercial entity when there is a data breach, theft or unauthorized disclosure of personal information. … Thus Cyber Liability covers both the expenses to notify affected individuals of data breaches and the expenses to make the insured whole for their own damages incurred.
Contact an Independent Insurance Agent near you that writes Cyber Insurance and ask them to get multiple quotes for your business.
However, a more effective risk management solution might be loss control rather than financing. If you encrypt your data at rest and set up and adopt a process of automatic regular backups, and geographically distribute those backups , then you have effectively minimized the potential costs of loss.
Cyber Insurance is not yet standardized as many other forms of commercial insurance. Therefore, breadth of coverage and pricing can vary widely.
Access: As a customer, you maintain full control of your content and responsibility for configuring access to AWS services and resources. We provide an advanced set of access, encryption, and logging features to help you do this effectively (e.g., AWS Identity and Access Management, AWS Organizations and AWS CloudTrail). We provide APIs for you to configure access control permissions for any of the services you develop or deploy in an AWS environment. We do not access or use your content for any purpose without your consent. We never use your content or derive information from it for marketing or advertising.
Storage: You choose the AWS Region(s) in which your content is stored and the type of storage. You can replicate and back up your content in more than one AWS Region. We will not move or replicate your content outside of your chosen AWS Region(s) without your consent, except as legally required and as necessary to maintain the AWS services.
Security: You choose how your content is secured. We offer you strong encryption for your content in transit and at rest, and we provide you with the option to manage your own encryption keys. These features include:
Data encryption capabilities available in AWS storage and database services, such as Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Relational Database Service, and Amazon Redshift.
Flexible key management options, including AWS Key Management Service (KMS), allow customers to choose whether to have AWS manage the encryption keys or enable customers to keep complete control over their keys.
AWS customers can employ Server-Side Encryption (SSE) with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3), SSE with AWS KMS-Managed Keys (SSE-KMS), or SSE with Customer-Provided Encryption Keys (SSE-C).
Disclosure of customer content: We do not disclose customer information unless we’re required to do so to comply with a legally valid and binding order. Unless prohibited from doing so or there is clear indication of illegal conduct in connection with the use of Amazon products or services, Amazon notifies customers before disclosing content information.
Security Assurance: We have developed a security assurance program that uses best practices for global privacy and data protection to help you operate securely within AWS, and to make the best use of our security control environment. These security protections and control processes are independently validated by multiple third-party independent assessments
Property and Casualty Insurance: Property insurance covers the physical location of the business and its contents from things like fire, theft, flood, and earthquakes—although read the terms carefully to make sure they include everything you need. Casualty insurance, on the other hand, covers the operation of the business, but the two are usually grouped together in policies.
Auto Insurance:Auto insurance protects you against financial loss if you have an accident. It is a contract between you and the insurance company.
Liability Insurance: Liability insurance is insurance that provides protection against claims resulting from injuries and damage property.
Business Insurance: Business interruption insurance can make up for lost cash flow and profits incurred because of an event that has interrupted your normal business operations.
Health and Disability Insurance: Health insurance provides health coverage for you and your employees. This insurance covers your employees for the expenses and loss of income caused by non work-related injuries, illnesses, and disabilities and death from any cause.
Life Insurance: Life and disability insurance covers your business in the event of the death or disability of key owners.
Cyber Insurance: Cover Data loss, destruction of data, privacy breach, Denial of Service Attack (DOS), Network failure, Transmission of Malicious Content, Misuse of personal or private information, etc.
Crime & Employee Dishonesty Insurance: To cover your business for fraudulent acts committed by your employees, e.g. theft or embezzlement of money, securities, and other business-owned property and for burglary, theft, and robbery of cash and other representations of money, e.g. money orders, postage stamps, travelers checks, and readily convertible securities, e.g. bearer bonds;
Mandatory Workers Compensation Insurance: To cover your employees for injuries and illnesses sustained during the course of employment. This would include medical expenses and loss of income due to a work-related disability;
Transportation/Inland & Ocean Marine Insurance: To pay for loss of damage to property you own or are responsible for while it is being transported or shipped to or from customers, manufacturers, processors, assemblers, warehouses, etc. by air, ship, or land vehicles either domestically or internationally.
Umbrella Liability Insurance: To provide an additional layer of liability insurance over your primary automobile liability, general liability, employers liability, and, if applicable, watercraft or aircraft liability policies;
Directors & Officers Liability Insurance: To defend your business and its directors or officers against allegations that they mismanaged the business in some way which caused financial loss to your clients (and/or others) and pay money damages in a court trial or settlement;
Condos Unit Owners Personal Insurance & Landlord / Rental Property Insurance: Cover expenses that come from having a loss within your property. Whether the unit owner is living in their unit or not, it is your responsibility to ensure that your personal assets and liabilities are adequately protected by your own personal insurance policy. This coverage includes all the content items that are brought into a unit or stored in a storage locker or premises, such as furnishings, electronics, clothing, etc. Most policies out there will also cover personal property while it is temporary off premises, on vacation for example.
Landlord property coverage is to protect the property that you own within your rental unit, which includes but is not limited to, appliances, window coverings, or if you rent out your unit fully furnished, then all of that property that is yours.
Rental Property insurance coverage allows you to protect you revenue source. Your property is your responsibility and if you property gets damaged by an insured peril, and your tenant can’t live there for a month or two (or more), you can purchase insurance to replace that rental income for the period of time your property is inhabitable.
Do online businesses need insurance?
All businesses need insurance. Here are some suggestions:
Property Insurance: To cover your owned, non-owned, and leased business property (contents, buildings if applicable, computers, office supplies, and any other property that you need to operate your business) for such perils as fire, windstorm, smoke damage, water damage, and theft.
EDP Insurance: To cover your computer hardware and software for such perils as mechanical breakdown and electrical injury;
Cyber Property and Liability Insurance: To cover your business for its activities on the Internet. Cyber Property coverages apply to losses sustained by your company directly. An example is damage to your company’s electronic data files caused by a hacker/security breach. Cyber Liability coverages apply to claims against your company by people who have been injured as a result of your actions or failure to act. For instance, a client sues you for negligence after his personal data, e.g credit card numbers or confidential information is stolen from your computer system and released online.
Loss of Income (Business Interruption) Insurance: To cover your business for the loss of income you would sustain because it was damaged by a covered peril under your property insurance, e.g. fire, windstorm, smoke damage, and theft;
Thinking of purchasing cyber insurance? Make sure the policy you choose covers more than paying ransomware. Paying cyber criminals should be a last resort. Your policy should include cleaning & rebuilding current systems, hiring experts, & purchasing new protections.
The purpose of cyber security is to protect all forms of digital data. Protecting personal information (SSN, credit card information, etc.), protecting proprietary information .(Facebook algorithms, Tesla vehicle designs, etc.), and other forms of digital data.
Cloud computing insurance is meant to protect a cloud provider. The implementation of a system and the preservation of important information comes with risks. If anything goes wrong, such as an outage at a critical time that results in business interruption, your client can hold you responsible and seek damages. Cloud insurance can not only provide compensation to your client as a result of a claim against you, but can also cover your legal defense and lost income.
