Table of Contents
1. Exam Prep: Design for Business Outcomes
Sample exam questions for Design for Business Outcomes, similar in format and difficulty to the Professional Cloud Architect exam.
Sample question 1
A retail company is migrating its microservices e‑commerce platform from on‑premises servers to Google Cloud. The application consists of several containers and a Postgres database. Their CTO wants to improve the application's availability and scalability during peak sales events and reduce database administration tasks. Which combination of Google Cloud services should they choose? Now Okay, so we have microservices, we have containers, a Postgres database. We have a mission here of what the CTO is saying, which gives us an indication that we have something to prioritize and really focus on, so availability and scalability during peak sales events and reducing database administration tasks.
Answer: the right answer here is B, deploy the microservices application to a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster, which is a perfect platform for those kinds of applications, and migrate the database to Cloud SQL, which is a managed database service that would reduce the demonstration tasks, and it supports the Postgres engine.
Sample question 2
a financial services company is decommissioning one of its data centers. As part of this process, they need to perform a one‑time migration of approximately 750 TB of historical transaction logs and associated scanned documents from their on‑premises network attached storage systems to Google Cloud for archival and compliance purposes. Security policy requires that the data remain encrypted both in transit and at rest. Which data transfer method offers the most practical and time‑efficient solution to meet these requirements? Once again, So the keywords here are one‑time migration, 750 TB, which is a lot of data, transaction logs and scanned documents, so unstructured data. And we need to encryption in transit and at rest.
Answer: the right answer here is B, order and utilize high‑capacity Transfer Appliances to copy the data locally, ship the appliances to Google, and have Google upload the data to Cloud Storage, which is how Transfer Appliance service works. So we have a lot of data. We need a time‑efficient migration. This is a one‑time migration. So this would be a good case for using Transfer Appliance.
Sample question 3
a healthcare organization is migrating its patient record system to Google Cloud using Compute Engine for application servers and Cloud SQL for the database, which contains protected health information. To comply with HIPAA regulations, the organization's security team mandates that all administrative changes to the underlying infrastructure and all read and write events to the PHI data must be logged and retained for a minimum of 6 years. Which configuration best meets these compliance and observability requirements? So So we have HIPAA regulation. We need to log administrative changes, so audit logs and also read and write events to the data.
Answer: the correct alternative here is D, enable data access audit logs for the Cloud SQL service. That way we can see who reads and writes data into or from that database. Export admin activity logs, which are enabled by default, and data access logs monthly to cloud storage for long‑term retention. This is so that we can retain them for longer than whatever default the audit log's retention period is.
2. Exam Prep: Design Robust Cloud Infrastructures
Sample exam questions for Design Robust Cloud Infrastructures, similar in format and difficulty to the Professional Cloud Architect exam.
Sample question 1
will be related to the second module, Design Robust Cloud Infrastructures. Your company runs a critical customer‑facing application on Compute Engine instances deployed in the us‑central1‑a zone. To meet new high availability requirements, the application must remain operational even if a single zone becomes unavailable. How should you configure the infrastructure to meet this requirement?
Answer: we have a critical customer‑facing application that must remain operational if a single zone becomes unavailable. So it's a simple question of designing for high availability, and the right answer is C. Redeploy the application instances across multiple zones within the region using a regional managed instance group and configure a regional HTTPS load balancer front end. Of the alternatives that we have here, this is the one that gives us the best resilience against a zonal outage with a managed instance group, which can scale automatically and also heal servers that fail health checks.
Sample question 2
Your batch processing application runs nightly on a Compute Engine managed instance group configured with autoscaling. During periods of heavy load, you observe that the MIG fails to scale out to the desired number of instances. Cloud Logging shows quota exceeded errors related to CPU resources in the region. What should you do proactively to ensure the application can scale reliably during peak processing times? Okay, so we have a group that is failing to scale out due to quota errors. So his one should be fairly straightforward.
Answer: The right answer here is D, monitor your usage using cloud monitoring and request a quota increase from Google Cloud support, something you can do through the Google Cloud console, in advance of anticipated needs.
Sample question 3
the back end for a new mobile game expected to grow rapidly from thousands to potentially millions of concurrent users globally within its first year. The back end requires a transactional database to store user state and scores, demanding high read and write throughput with low latency. Which Google Cloud database solution is best suited to meet these capability and performance requirements with minimal re‑architecture as the user base grows? All right, as usual, So we're about to have millions of concurrent users globally. We need a transactional database to handle high read and write throughput with low latency. So as we discussed in the course, Cloud Spanner, option C here, is the perfect option for that. Your company hosts a popular blog website with a global audience. The web servers and primary cloud storage bucket containing website images are located in europe‑west1. Users in Asia and North America report slow page load times, primarily due to image loading latency. How can you most effectively reduce image loading latency for users in Asia and North America? All right, So we have a global audience, but we have resources located in a specific European region, and other users in other regions are experiencing slow‑based slow times, specifically or primarily due to images. So how can you reduce the latency here?
Answer: The right option is B, configure Cloud CDN, which is perfect for caching static content‑like images, and point it to the existing Cloud Storage bucket as the origin.
3. Exam Prep: Design Network, Storage, and Compute
Sample exam questions for Design Network, Storage, and Compute, similar in format and difficulty to the Professional Cloud Architect exam.
Sample question 1
of questions, which relate to the module Design Network Storage and Compute. Your company is performing a gradual migration to Google Cloud and needs to establish a permanent, highly reliable, and private network connection between its main on‑premises data center and its Google Cloud VPC. The connection must support consistent high‑bandwidth traffic for database replication and internal application communication. Which Google Cloud connectivity option best meets these requirements? Okay, so we have a need for a highly reliable and private network connectivity between on‑premises and Google Cloud, so hybrid networking with consistent high‑bandwidth traffic.
Answer: the right alternative here is B, set up Cloud Interconnect. A VPN would rely on the public internet, so that would not be the most consistent and reliable type of connectivity. Network peering cannot be used for connecting VPCs with on‑premises network. Network Connectivity Center itself is not a service that can be used to connect on‑premises networks directly to the VPC. The organization is standardizing its Google Cloud environment. The network security team is responsible for defining and managing all core network infrastructure, while multiple application development teams operate within their own separate Google Cloud projects. These teams need to deploy instances for various tasks that consume Google APIs such as Cloud Storage and BigQuery. A key requirement is that certain Compute Engine instances that handle sensitive data must not have public IP addresses and must not send traffic to Google APIs over the public internet. Which two configurations should be implemented to meet all these organizational and security requirements? Choose two. So this question here is a little different, and it's an example of the types of questions where you have two alternatives to answer, not just one. These are not the most common type in the exam, which is why the majority of the questions we see here is a single answer, but you're going to see a few of those. So here's an example of what it looks like. So we have five alternatives, and you need to select two. So All right, so we have a network security team that will centrally manage all aspects of networking. We have other teams deploying instances, and these instances should connect to Google API and services over a private network. So hopefully you're already thinking about, first of all, a shared VPC, so option D here, implement a shared VPC architecture, designating a central project as the host project and attaching the application projects as service projects, and then E, enable the private Google access setting on the relevant subnets that are defined within the central shared VPC host project.
Sample question 2
You're tasked with building a data processing pipeline to handle real‑time telemetry data streamed from thousands of IoT devices via Pub/Sub and write the final enriched results to BigQuery for analysis. The solution must scale automatically without operational overhead while ensuring data is processed correctly. The pipeline must perform the following actions. One, group messages into 5‑minute windows based on the time of the event. Two, calculate the average sensor readings within each window. And three, enrich the aggregated data by joining it with device metadata stored in a Cloud SQL database. So which Google Cloud service is most suitable for implementing this data processing pipeline? All right, So we're talking about a data processing pipeline that can handle streaming data and scale automatically without operational overhead, so ideally a managed serverless product.
Answer: The right answer is C, Dataflow, utilizing Apache Beam's windowing capabilities and built‑in connectors for the other Google Cloud services.
Sample question 3
You are deploying a multi‑tiered web application on Compute Engine. The application requires a shared file system accessible by multiple web server instances to store and serve user‑uploaded images and shared session state files. The file system must be highly available within the GCP region and backed up on a schedule. Which Google Cloud Storage solution should you use to provide the shared file system? So we need a shared file system for our instances with high availability in the region and with the ability to be backed up on a schedule. So hopefully this one is a straightforward one.
Answer: The right answer is Filestore. It's a managed file system service in Google Cloud with exactly those features and capabilities. All right, final question. Your company wants to deploy a new containerized stateless web application. The application experiences highly variable traffic, ranging from almost zero requests overnight to thousands of requests per second during peak hours. You want a platform that automatically scales based on incoming requests and minimizes infrastructure management overhead. Which Google Cloud compute platform best meets these requirements? Go ahead and Okay, so we have a containerized stateless web application with variable traffic going from almost zero to thousands of requests, and we want to minimize infrastructure management overhead. Now hopefully by looking at these keywords, you're already thinking about serverless products and specifically the serverless product on Google Cloud for containerized applications, and that is Cloud Run. Now notice that if we had an alternative with GKE Autopilot, it would have been a good contender as well. But we have here one application and we're not mentioning several services, microservices, so maybe GKE would be a little bit of complexity. And in any case, in the alternatives here, we only have the standard option, which would not be serverless and not exactly be the best option here. So Cloud Run, option C, is the best one.
4. Exam Prep: Plan Cloud Migrations
Sample exam questions for Plan Cloud Migrations, similar in format and difficulty to the Professional Cloud Architect exam.
Sample question 1
related to the module Plan Cloud Migrations. Your team is developing a migration plan to move a complex mission‑critical application from your on‑premises data center to Google Compute Engine. The application consists of numerous interdependent services that communicate frequently. There is significant uncertainty about how infrastructure changes will impact the application's overall stability and responsiveness post‑migration and whether there will be a positive return on investment. According to Google Cloud migration best practices, what should be a key initial component of your migration plan to mitigate risks associated with these dependencies and uncertainties?
Answer: we're developing a migration plan. We have services with a lot of dependencies. There's a lot of uncertainty, and we need to justify the migration from a return on investment perspective. So according to Google Cloud migration best practices, what should be the key initial component? And the right option is B, run a thorough discovery and assessment of the current environment, identify app dependencies, and calculate total cost of ownership. These are tasks listed under the assess phase of the Google Cloud migration plan, which is the initial phase of migrations. Your organization is planning to migrate several critical business applications to Google Cloud over the next year. However, a key identity management system in a large file server must remain on‑premises indefinitely. Applications migrated to GCP will need continuous secure and reliable access to both the on‑premises identity system for authentication and a file server for data access. The expected traffic volume for this cross‑premises communication is moderate but consistent. When creating the network design portion of the migration plan, which element is essential for enabling this required integration between GCP and the on‑premises systems? Go ahead and All right, so we have an identity system with a large file server on‑premises. And basically, we need to set up hybrid networking. And the right answer is C, establishing secure and private hybrid connectivity using Cloud VPN or Cloud Interconnect. Next, your company wants to migrate an on‑premises MySQL deployment to a managed offering on Google Cloud. You need to minimize downtime and performance impact during the migration. Which approach should you recommend? Go ahead and All right, so the right answer for migrating a MySQL database into a managed offering in Google Cloud while minimizing down time is option D, provision the Cloud SQL instance and use the database migration service, setting up continuous data application until cut‑over.
5. Exam Prep: Evolve and Adapt Solutions
Sample exam questions for Evolve and Adapt Solutions, similar in format and difficulty to the Professional Cloud Architect exam.
Sample question 1
we'll cover the topics of the module Evolve and Adapt Solutions. Your company performed the lift‑and‑shift migration of its core inventory management system from on‑premises servers to Compute Engine instances 3 years ago. The system currently functions but requires significant manual effort to scale for peak holiday seasons, resulting in high costs due to overprovisioning. The business now requires faster updates to the inventory system to support new omnichannel initiatives and wants to reduce operational expenses. Which recommendation best aligns with leveraging cloud investments to meet these evolving business needs? So So we have a setup that requires significant manual effort to scale, and we need faster updates to the inventory system.
Answer: The right alternative is C, develop a plan to gradually refactor the inventory system, potentially containerizing components and migrating the database to a managed service like Cloud SQL or Spanner. So this is a case of application modernization and adopting managed services and modern cloud‑native practices. The organization adopted Google Cloud several years ago, but cloud maturity varies significantly across different business units. Some teams effectively use managed services and serverless architectures, while others continue to deploy manually configured Compute Engine instances, resulting in operational inefficiencies, inconsistent security postures, and slower innovation cycles. As a cloud architect, you want to promote broader adoption of cloud‑native patterns and automation across the organization. What is the most effective strategy to evangelize best practices and drive adoption of more advanced cloud capabilities? So this is a case of evangelism and promoting broader adoption of cloud‑native patents. And the right answer here is A, create a Cloud Center of Excellence that develops shareable templates, establishes reference architectures, shares success stories, and provides targeted training. So these are some of the practices we discussed in the module about evolving and adopting solutions. At the time of recording, the topics we covered in this module make up about 24% of the Professional Cloud Architect exam. You're well on your way in your learning journey. Keep going.
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