Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Practice Questions¶

40 scenario-based questions weighted by exam domain.

Exam Domain Breakdown¶

Cert page: exams/gcp/cloud-architect/

Domain 1: Design and Plan a Cloud Solution Architecture (Questions 1-10)¶

Question 1¶

Scenario: A global e-commerce company needs to design a solution that provides consistent low latency for users worldwide. Their application requires a relational database that supports strong consistency across regions and automatic failover. Which database solution should they choose?

A. Cloud SQL with cross-region read replicas B. Cloud Spanner with multi-region configuration C. Cloud Firestore in multi-region mode D. BigQuery with regional datasets

Question 2¶

Scenario: A media company needs to process video uploads. Videos should be transcoded to multiple formats, thumbnails should be generated, and metadata should be stored. The workload is unpredictable with peaks during events. What architecture should they design?

A. VM instances with manual scaling B. Event-driven architecture with Cloud Storage triggers, Cloud Functions/Cloud Run for processing, and Firestore for metadata C. Single large Compute Engine instance D. App Engine standard environment

Question 3¶

Scenario: A company wants to migrate their monolithic application to GCP. They want to minimize changes initially but position for future modernization. What migration strategy should they use?

A. Rewrite the application from scratch B. Lift and shift to Compute Engine, then incrementally modernize using Strangler Fig pattern C. Immediately containerize everything D. Use Cloud Functions for the entire application

Question 4¶

Scenario: A healthcare company needs to store and analyze patient data. Data must be encrypted, access must be audited, and the solution must comply with HIPAA. They need to run complex analytics queries. What storage and analytics solution should they use?

A. Cloud Storage with default encryption B. BigQuery with customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK), IAM, and Cloud Audit Logs C. Compute Engine with local storage D. Cloud Bigtable for analytics

Question 5¶

Scenario: A company has a high-traffic website with static content (images, CSS, JS) and dynamic API calls. They want to optimize performance and reduce origin server load. What architecture should they implement?

A. Single Compute Engine instance for all traffic B. Cloud CDN for static content, Cloud Load Balancing with Cloud Run backend for dynamic APIs C. Cloud Storage for static content without CDN D. All content served from Cloud Functions

Question 6¶

Scenario: A startup is building a real-time multiplayer game. They need sub-100ms latency for game state updates, persistence for player data, and the ability to handle millions of concurrent connections. What architecture should they design?

A. Cloud SQL for all data B. Cloud Memorystore (Redis) for game state, Cloud Firestore for player data, and Cloud Run with WebSockets or Agones on GKE C. BigQuery for real-time updates D. Single VM with in-memory data

Question 7¶

Scenario: A financial services company needs to process streaming transaction data, detect fraud in real-time, and store data for batch analytics. What architecture should they implement?

A. Batch processing only B. Pub/Sub for ingestion, Dataflow for stream processing and fraud detection, BigQuery for storage and analytics C. Cloud SQL for all processing D. Direct writes to BigQuery

Question 8¶

Scenario: A company has development, staging, and production environments. They want environment isolation, consistent deployments, and the ability to share common resources (like container images). How should they structure their GCP organization?

A. Single project for all environments B. Separate projects per environment (dev, staging, prod) with shared services project, managed through folders C. Separate GCP accounts D. Different regions for each environment

Question 9¶

Scenario: A machine learning team needs to train models on large datasets. Training jobs run for hours and require GPUs. They want to minimize cost while maintaining performance. What compute solution should they use?

A. Persistent GPU VMs running continuously B. Vertex AI Training with preemptible/spot VMs, or GKE with spot node pools C. Cloud Functions for ML training D. Standard VMs without GPUs

Question 10¶

Scenario: A company wants to implement a data lake on GCP. They have structured data from databases, semi-structured logs, and unstructured documents. All data should be queryable and governed. What architecture should they implement?

A. Cloud SQL for all data types B. Cloud Storage as data lake with BigQuery for analytics, Data Catalog for governance, and Dataproc for processing C. Separate systems for each data type D. BigQuery only

Domain 2: Manage and Provision Cloud Solution Infrastructure (Questions 11-16)¶

Question 11¶

Scenario: A company needs to deploy consistent infrastructure across development, staging, and production environments. Changes should be reviewed before applying, and infrastructure state should be tracked. What approach should they use?

A. Manual console deployment B. Terraform with remote state in Cloud Storage, infrastructure as code in Git with Cloud Build C. Deployment Manager only D. Scripts without version control

Question 12¶

Scenario: A team needs to deploy containers to GCP without managing Kubernetes clusters. They need auto-scaling, HTTPS endpoints, and integration with Cloud SQL. What service should they use?

A. Compute Engine with Docker B. Cloud Run with Cloud SQL connector C. App Engine Flex D. Cloud Functions

Question 13¶

Scenario: A company's application requires instances in multiple zones for high availability. If one zone fails, traffic should automatically route to healthy instances. What configuration is needed?

A. Single zone deployment B. Managed instance group (MIG) with regional configuration and Cloud Load Balancing C. Multiple unmanaged instances D. Zone-specific DNS records

Question 14¶

Scenario: A GKE cluster needs to be updated to a new Kubernetes version. The update should cause no downtime, and the team wants to test the new version before full rollout. What strategy should they use?

A. In-place upgrade of all nodes immediately B. Blue-green node pool upgrade with surge upgrades C. Delete and recreate the cluster D. Never upgrade

Question 15¶

Scenario: A company needs to provide developers self-service access to create GCP resources within budget limits and approved configurations. What should they implement?

A. Give developers project owner access B. Service Catalog with approved Terraform modules and Budget alerts C. Manual approval for each request D. No restrictions

Question 16¶

Scenario: A company needs to manage multiple GKE clusters across different environments and regions. They want centralized policy management and consistent security configurations. What should they use?

A. Manage each cluster independently B. GKE Fleet with Config Sync for policy management C. Single cluster for everything D. Different GCP accounts per cluster

Domain 3: Design for Security and Compliance (Questions 17-23)¶

Question 17¶

Scenario: A company needs to ensure that all data in Cloud Storage is encrypted with keys they control. They need to rotate keys annually and audit all key usage. What should they configure?

A. Default Google-managed encryption B. Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) with Cloud KMS and key rotation policy C. Client-side encryption only D. No encryption

Question 18¶

Scenario: A company's applications running on GCP need to access Cloud APIs without storing service account keys. Applications run on Compute Engine, GKE, and Cloud Run. What should they use?

A. Store service account keys in the application B. Workload Identity (GKE), attached service accounts (Compute Engine), and default service account (Cloud Run) C. API keys D. User credentials

Question 19¶

Scenario: A company needs to restrict which services can be used in their GCP organization. They want to prevent anyone from creating Compute Engine instances in certain projects while allowing Cloud Run. What should they configure?

A. Remove all IAM permissions B. Organization Policy with resource location constraint and service restriction policies C. Delete unwanted services D. Firewall rules

Question 20¶

Scenario: A company needs to implement zero-trust security for their GKE workloads. Services should only communicate with explicitly allowed services, and all traffic should be encrypted. What should they implement?

A. Network policies only B. Istio service mesh with mutual TLS (mTLS) and authorization policies C. No security controls D. VPC firewall only

Question 21¶

Scenario: A company needs to detect threats and vulnerabilities across their GCP environment, including compromised credentials, cryptomining, and data exfiltration. What should they enable?

A. Cloud Monitoring only B. Security Command Center Premium with Event Threat Detection and Container Threat Detection C. Manual log review D. Third-party SIEM only

Question 22¶

Scenario: A development team needs access to production data for debugging but shouldn't see actual customer PII (names, emails, phone numbers). What should be implemented?

A. Full production access B. Cloud DLP to de-identify PII in a sanitized dataset or use DLP for on-the-fly redaction C. No debugging access D. Honor system

Question 23¶

Scenario: A company needs to establish a secure connection between their on-premises network and GCP. The connection should use private IP addresses and not traverse the public internet. They have high bandwidth requirements.

A. Cloud VPN B. Dedicated Interconnect with Cloud Router C. Public IP addresses D. SSH tunnels

Domain 4: Analyze and Optimize Technical and Business Processes (Questions 24-30)¶

Question 24¶

Scenario: A company's monthly GCP bill is higher than expected. They need to identify which services, projects, and teams are driving costs and find optimization opportunities. What tools should they use?

A. Ignore costs B. Cloud Billing reports with cost breakdown, Recommender for optimization suggestions, and budget alerts C. Manual calculation D. Third-party cost tool only

Question 25¶

Scenario: A Compute Engine workload runs batch jobs that can tolerate interruption. Jobs take 4 hours to complete and can checkpoint progress. How can they reduce compute costs by up to 91%?

A. Use larger instances to finish faster B. Use Spot VMs (preemptible) with checkpointing and automatic restart C. Run fewer jobs D. Use free tier only

Question 26¶

Scenario: A company has identified that their Cloud SQL instance is oversized. The instance has 32 vCPUs but CPU utilization averages 10%. What should they do?

A. Keep the same size for future growth B. Use Active Assist Recommender suggestions to rightsize to appropriate instance size C. Delete the instance D. Add more connections

Question 27¶

Scenario: A company's application has variable traffic - high during business hours, low at night. They want to scale down at night to save costs. What should they configure?

A. Manual scaling daily B. Scheduled scaling or autoscaling based on metrics with scale-down policies C. Fixed capacity 24/7 D. Turn off the application at night

Question 28¶

Scenario: A company needs to choose between Cloud Run and GKE for a new microservices application. The team has limited Kubernetes experience, services are HTTP-based, and they want minimal operational overhead. Which should they choose?

A. GKE Autopilot for all workloads B. Cloud Run for this use case C. Compute Engine D. Cloud Functions

Question 29¶

Scenario: A BigQuery data warehouse is experiencing slow query performance. Queries scan entire tables even when filtering on specific dates. What optimization should they implement?

A. Add more slots B. Implement table partitioning by date and clustering on frequently filtered columns C. Export to CSV and re-import D. Use smaller tables

Question 30¶

Scenario: A company wants to establish SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for their application. They need to track availability and latency, alert when SLOs are at risk, and make informed decisions about feature velocity vs. reliability.

A. Manual tracking in spreadsheets B. Cloud Monitoring SLOs with alerting on burn rate and error budget dashboards C. No SLOs D. Alert on every error

Domain 5: Manage Implementation (Questions 31-34)¶

Question 31¶

Scenario: A team needs to plan the migration of 200 VMs from on-premises to GCP. They need to discover VM configurations, dependencies, and estimate GCP costs. What should they use?

A. Manual inventory B. Migration Center (formerly Migrate for Compute Engine assessment) for discovery, dependency mapping, and TCO analysis C. Guess the requirements D. Migrate everything at once

Question 32¶

Scenario: A company is migrating their database from on-premises MySQL to Cloud SQL. They need minimal downtime during cutover. What migration approach should they use?

A. Export, transfer, import (extended downtime) B. Database Migration Service with continuous replication and minimal-downtime cutover C. Recreate schema and start fresh D. Keep on-premises

Question 33¶

Scenario: A development team wants to adopt CI/CD for their GCP deployments. They use GitHub for source control and want to deploy to Cloud Run on every push to main. What should they configure?

A. Manual deployments B. Cloud Build triggered by GitHub, with cloudbuild.yaml defining build and deploy steps C. GitHub Actions only D. FTP uploads

Question 34¶

Scenario: A company has a tight deadline for GCP migration. They need to accelerate the project without sacrificing quality. What should they do?

A. Skip testing B. Engage Google Cloud consulting or a certified partner with migration experience C. Work overtime indefinitely D. Delay the deadline

Domain 6: Ensure Solution and Operations Reliability (Questions 35-40)¶

Question 35¶

Scenario: A company needs to ensure their application can survive the failure of an entire GCP region. RTO is 30 minutes and RPO is 5 minutes. What architecture should they implement?

A. Single region with multiple zones B. Multi-region architecture with Cloud Spanner (or Cloud SQL cross-region replicas), regional load balancing, and Cloud DNS failover C. Backup and restore only D. On-premises DR site

Question 36¶

Scenario: A production system experienced an outage. The team needs to conduct a blameless post-incident review (postmortem) and prevent recurrence. What should they focus on?

A. Find who to blame B. Document timeline, root cause analysis, action items for prevention, and update runbooks C. Ignore and move on D. Punish the responsible team

Question 37¶

Scenario: A team needs to automate responses to common production issues, such as restarting unhealthy services or clearing full disks. What should they implement?

A. Manual intervention for all issues B. Cloud Monitoring alerting policies with notification channels that trigger Cloud Functions for automated remediation C. Ignore alerts D. Reboot servers daily

Question 38¶

Scenario: A company wants to implement chaos engineering to test the resilience of their GKE-based application. They want to randomly terminate pods and observe system behavior. What should they use?

A. Production experiments without safeguards B. Chaos engineering tools like Chaos Mesh or LitmusChaos with controlled experiments C. Delete production pods manually D. Never test failure scenarios

Question 39¶

Scenario: A Cloud Run service is experiencing intermittent 503 errors during traffic spikes. Logs show "instance scaling" messages. What should they investigate and configure?

A. Ignore the errors B. Configure minimum instances to reduce cold starts, review concurrency settings, and optimize container startup time C. Switch to a VM D. Reduce traffic

Question 40¶

Scenario: A company needs to create comprehensive documentation for their GCP architecture, including disaster recovery procedures, runbooks, and architectural diagrams. What format and tools should they use?

A. Undocumented knowledge in engineers' heads B. Version-controlled documentation (Markdown in Git), architecture diagrams (draw.io or Lucidchart), and automated runbooks (Cloud Workflows or Terraform) C. Paper documents D. Email chains

Answer Key¶