1. A distributed application is not performing as well as expected during peak load periods. The application uses three microservices. The first of the microservices has the ability to send more data to the second service than the second service can process and keep up with. This causes the first microservice to wait while the second service processes data. What can be done to decouple the first service from the second service?

2. You are consulting for a client that is considering moving some on-premises workloads to the Google Cloud Platform. The workloads are currently running on VMs that use a specially hardened operating system. Application administrators will need root access to the operating system as well. The client wants to minimize changes to the existing configuration. Which GCP compute service would you recommend?

3. You have inherited a monolithic Ruby application that you need to keep running. There will be minimal changes, if any, to the code. The previous developer who worked with this application created a Dockerfile and image container with the application and needed libraries. You’d like to deploy this in a way that minimizes your effort to maintain it. How would you deploy this application?

4. You are leading a lift-and-shift migration to the cloud. Your company has several load-balanced clusters that use VMs that are not identically configured. You want to make as few changes as possible when moving workloads to the cloud. What feature of GCP would you use to implement those clusters in the cloud?

5. An IoT startup collects streaming data from industrial sensors and evaluates the data for anomalies using a machine learning model. The model scales horizontally. The data collected is buffered in a server for 10 minutes. Which of the following is a true statement about the system?

6. Your department provides audio transcription services for other departments in your company. Users upload audio files to a Cloud Storage bucket. Your application transcribes the audio and writes the transcript file back to the same bucket. Your process runs every day at midnight and transcribes all files in the bucket. Users are complaining that they are not notified if there is a problem with the audio file format until the next day. Your application has a program that can verify the quality of an audio file in less than two seconds. What changes would you make to the workflow to improve user satisfaction?

7. You have been asked to give a presentation on Kubernetes. How would you explain the difference between the cluster master and nodes?

8. Your team has been tasked with deploying infrastructure for development, test, staging, and production environments in region us-west1. You will likely need to deploy the same set of environments in two additional regions. What service would allow you to use an Infrastructure as code (IaC) approach?

9. External services are not able to access services running in a Kubernetes cluster. You suspect a controller may be down. Which type of controller would you check?

10. Your startup has a stateless web application written in Python 3.7. You are not sure what kind of load to expect on the application. You do not want to manage servers or containers if you can avoid it. What GCP service would you use?

11. You are planning to run stateful applications in Kubernetes Engine. What should you use to support stateful applications?

12. Your manager wants more data on the performance of applications running in Compute Engine, specifically, data on CPU and memory utilization. What Google Cloud service would you use to collect that data?

13. Your team is designing a stream processing application that collects temperature and pressure measurements from industrial sensors. You estimate that for the initial release, the application will need 8 to 12 n1-highmem-32 instances. Someone on the team suggests using a Cloud Memorystore cache. What could that cache be used for?

14. You are receiving alerts that CPU utilization is high on several Compute Engine instances. The instances are all running a custom C++ application. When you receive these alerts, you deploy an additional instance running the application. A load balancer automatically distributes the workload across all of the instances. What is the best option to avoid having to add servers manually when CPU utilization is high?

15. A colleague complains that the availability and reliability of GCP VMs is poor because their instances keep shutting down with them issuing shutdown commands. No instance has run for more than 24 hours without shutting down for some reason. What would you suggest your colleague check to understand why the instances may be shutting down?

16. A retailer has sales data streaming into a Cloud Pub/Sub topic from stores across the country. Each time a sale is made, data is sent from the point of sale to Google Cloud. The data needs to be transformed and aggregated before it is written to BigQuery. What service would you use to perform that processing and write data to BigQuery?

17. A colleague has suggested that you use the Apache Beam framework for implementing a highly scalable workflow. Which Google Cloud service would you use?

18. You have just joined a startup that analyzes healthcare data and makes recommendations to healthcare providers to improve the quality of care while controlling costs. You have to comply with privacy regulations. A compliance consultant recommends that your startup control encryption keys used to encrypt data stored on cloud servers. You’d rather have GCP manage all encryption components to minimize your work and infrastructure management responsibilities. What would you recommend?

19. Every time a database administrator logs into a Firebase database, you would like a message sent to your mobile device. Which compute service could you use that would minimize your work in deploying and running the code that sends the message?

20. Your company is working on a government contract that requires all instances of VMs to have a virtual Trusted Platform Module. What Compute Engine configuration option would you enable or disable your instances?