Associate-Cloud-Engineer Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer Questions and Answers

https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/getting-started/set-up

https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/compute/networks/subnets/expand-ip-range

gcloud compute networks subnets expand-ip-range - expand the IP range of a Compute Engine subnetwork gcloud compute networks subnets expand-ip-range NAME --prefix-length=PREFIX_LENGTH [--region=REGION] [GCLOUD_WIDE_FLAG …]

A simple approach would be to use the command flags available when listing all the IAM policy for a given project. For instance, the following command: `gcloud projects get-iam-policy $PROJECT_ID --flatten="bindings[].members" --format="table(bindings.members)" --filter="bindings.role:roles/owner"` outputs all the users and service accounts associatedwith the role ‘roles/owner’ in the project in question.https://groups.google.com/g/google-cloud-dev/c/Z6sZs7TvygQ?pli=1

Installing Jenkins

In this section, you use Cloud Marketplace to provision a Jenkins instance. You customize this instance to use the agent image you created in the previous section.

Go to the Cloud Marketplace solution for Jenkins.

Click Launch on Compute Engine.

Change the Machine Type field to 4 vCPUs 15 GB Memory, n1-standard-4.

Machine type selection for Jenkins deployment.

Click Deploy and wait for your Jenkins instance to finish being provisioned. When it is finished, you will see:

Jenkins has been deployed.

https://cloud.google.com/solutions/using-jenkins-for-distributed-builds-on-compute-engine#installing_jenkins

The best practice is to use Organization Policies to enforce constraints across the organization and IAM Groups for granting resource access to minimize operational cost and administrative overhead.

Blocking non-company-issued emails: The Organization Policy Service with the constraint domains/restrictIdentityPropagation (or similar constraints like constraints/iam.allowedPolicyMemberDomains) is the Google-recommended, automated way to ensure that only specified domains (your company's domain) can be used as identities in IAM policies, thus blocking non-company issued emails and eliminating manual checks.

Department-specific access: Access should be granted using IAM roles assigned to Google Groups that represent the departments. This adheres to the principle of least privilege and simplifies management (you only manage group membership, not individual users' IAM bindings).

Minimizing operational costs/overhead: Using IAM with Google Groups and Organization Policies is the native, lowest-overhead, and most scalable solution on Google Cloud. Option D's manual checks are high-overhead and not recommended.

Google HTTP(S) Load Balancing has native support for the WebSocket protocol when you use HTTP or HTTPS, not HTTP/2, as the protocol to the backend.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/https#websocket_proxy_support

So the next possible step is to Meet with the cloud enablement team to discuss load balancer options.

We dont need to convert WebSocket code to use HTTP streaming or Redesign the application, as WebSocket support is offered by Google HTTP(S) Load Balancing. Reviewing the encryption requirements is a good idea but it has nothing to do with WebSockets.

The organization policy explicitly prevents the use of service account keys, so options A and B, which involve requesting exceptions to create them, are not in line with the policy and Google's recommended practices for secure authentication.

Create an instance template for the instances so VMs have same specs. Set the "˜Automatic Restart' to on to VM automatically restarts upon crash. Set the "˜On-host maintenance' to Migrate VM instance. This will take care of VM during maintenance window. It will migrate VM instance making it highly available Add the instance template to an instance group so instances can be managed.

• onHostMaintenance: Determines the behavior when a maintenance event occurs that might cause your instance to reboot.

• [Default] MIGRATE, which causes Compute Engine to live migrate an instance when there is a maintenance event.

• TERMINATE, which stops an instance instead of migrating it.

• automaticRestart: Determines the behavior when an instance crashes or is stopped by the system.

• [Default] true, so Compute Engine restarts an instance if the instance crashes or is stopped.

• false, so Compute Engine does not restart an instance if the instance crashes or is stopped.

Enabling automatic restart ensures that compute engine instances are automatically restarted when they crash. And Enabling Migrate VM Instance enables live migrates i.e. compute instances are migrated during system maintenance and remain running during the migration.

Automatic Restart  If your instance is set to terminate when there is a maintenance event, or if your instance crashes because of an underlying hardware issue, you can set up Compute Engine to automatically restart the instance by setting the automaticRestart field to true. This setting does not apply if the instance is taken offline through a user action, such as calling sudo shutdown, or during a zone outage.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/setting-instance-scheduling-options#autorestart

Enabling the Migrate VM Instance option migrates your instance away from an infrastructure maintenance event, and your instance remains running during the migration.Your instance might experience a short period of decreased performance, although generally, most instances should not notice any difference. This is ideal for instances that require constant uptime and can tolerate a short period of decreased performance.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/setting-instance-scheduling-options#live_migrate

When we create subnets in the same VPC with different CIDR ranges, they can communicate automatically within VPC. Resources within a VPC network can communicatewith one another by using internal (private) IPv4 addresses, subject to applicable network firewall rules

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/vpc

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/export-data-bigquery "Cloud Billing export to BigQuery enables you to export detailed Google Cloud billing data (such as usage, cost estimates, and pricing data) automatically throughout the day to a BigQuery dataset that you specify."

"The Cloud Spanner to Cloud Storage Text template is a batch pipeline that reads in data from a Cloud Spanner table, optionally transforms the data via a JavaScript User Defined Function (UDF) that you provide, and writes it to Cloud Storage as CSV text files."

https://cloud.google.com/dataflow/docs/guides/templates/provided-batch#cloudspannertogcstext

"The Dataflow connector for Cloud Spanner lets you read data from and write data to Cloud Spanner in a Dataflow pipeline"

https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/dataflow-connector

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/external-data-sources

Billing Administrators can not create a new billing account, and the project is presumably already created. Project Billing Manager allows you to link the created billing account to the project. It is vague on how the billing account gets created but by process of elimination

Navigate to Stackdriver Logging and select resource.labels.project_id=*. is not right.

Log entries are held in Stackdriver Logging for a limited time known as the retention period  which is 30 days (default configuration). After that, the entries are deleted. To keep log entries longer, you need to export them outside of Stackdriver Logging by configuring log sinks.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/best-practices-for-working-with-google-cloud-audit-logging

Configure a Cloud Scheduler job to read from Stackdriver and store the logs in BigQuery. Configure the table expiration to 60 days. is not right.

While this works, it makes no sense to use Cloud Scheduler job to read from Stackdriver and store the logs in BigQuery when Google provides a feature (export sinks) that does exactly the same thing and works out of the box.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/export/configure_export_v2

Create a Stackdriver Logging Export with a Sink destination to Cloud Storage. Create a lifecycle rule to delete objects after 60 days. is not right.

You can export logs by creating one or more sinks that include a logs query and an export destination. Supported destinations for exported log entries are Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Pub/Sub.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/export/configure_export_v2

Sinks are limited to exporting log entries from the exact resource in which the sink was created: a Google Cloud project, organization, folder, or billing account. If it makes it easier to exporting from all projects of an organication, you can create an aggregated sink that can export log entries from all the projects, folders, and billing accounts of a Google Cloud organization.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/export/aggregated_sinks

Either way, we now have the data in Cloud Storage, but querying logs information from Cloud Storage is harder than Querying information from BigQuery dataset. For this reason, we should prefer Big Query over Cloud Storage.

Create a Stackdriver Logging Export with a Sink destination to a BigQuery dataset. Configure the table expiration to 60 days. is the right answer.

You can export logs by creating one or more sinks that include a logs query and an export destination. Supported destinations for exported log entries are Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Pub/Sub.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/export/configure_export_v2

Sinks are limited to exporting log entries from the exact resource in which the sink was created: a Google Cloud project, organization, folder, or billing account. If it makes it easier to exporting from all projects of an organication, you can create an aggregated sink that can export log entries from all the projects, folders, and billing accounts of a Google Cloud organization.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/export/aggregated_sinks

Either way, we now have the data in a BigQuery Dataset. Querying information from a Big Query dataset is easier and quicker than analyzing contents in Cloud Storage bucket. As our requirement is to Quickly analyze the log contents, we should prefer Big Query over Cloud Storage.

Also, You can control storage costs and optimize storage usage by setting the default table expiration for newly created tables in a dataset. If you set the property when the dataset is created, any table created in the dataset is deleted after the expiration period. If you set the property after the dataset is created, only new tables are deleted after the expiration period.

For example, if you set the default table expiration to 7 days, older data is automatically deleted after 1 week.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/best-practices-storage

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/autoscaler#specifications

Autoscaling works independently from autohealing. If you configure autohealing for your group and an instance fails the health check, the autohealer attempts to recreate the instance. Recreating an instance can cause the number of instances in the group to fall below the autoscaling threshold (minNumReplicas) that you specify.

Since we need the application running at all times, we need a minimum 1 instance.

Only a single instance of the VM should run, we need a maximum 1 instance.

We want the application running at all times. If the VM crashes due to any underlying hardware failure, we want another instance to be added to MIG so that application can continue to serve requests. We can achieve this by enabling autoscaling. The only option that satisfies these three is Set autoscaling to On, set the minimum number of instances to 1, and then set the maximum number of instances to 1.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/autoscaler

As to mexblood1's point, CPU utilization is a recommended proxy for traffic when it comes to Cloud Spanner. See: Alerts for high CPU utilization The following table specifies our recommendations for maximum CPU usage for both single-region and multi-region instances. These numbers are to ensure that your instance has enough compute capacity to continue to serve your traffic in the event of the loss of an entire zone (for single-region instances) or an entire region (for multi-region instances). -https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/cpu-utilization

Quickstart: using the Google Cloud Console

This page shows you how to perform basic tasks in Pub/Sub using the Google Cloud Console.

Note: If you are new to Pub/Sub, we recommend that you start with the interactive tutorial.

Before you begin

Set up a Cloud Console project.

Set up a project

Click to:

Create or select a project.

Enable the Pub/Sub API for that project.

You can view and manage these resources at any time in the Cloud Console.

Install and initialize the Cloud SDK.

Note: You can run the gcloud tool in the Cloud Console without installing the Cloud SDK. To run the gcloud tool in the Cloud Console, use Cloud Shell .

https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/docs/quickstart-console

The requirement is for a stable set of egress IP addresses from a GKE cluster for allowlisting by a third party, following best practices.

Option A is not recommended: Using a single node lacks scalability and high availability. Relying on a single node's static IP creates a single point of failure and doesn't align with GKE's design principles. Disabling autoscaling hinders elasticity.

Option C is complex and unreliable: Public nodes typically have ephemeral external IPs (unless manually configured per node, which is difficult to manage with autoscaling). Dynamically tracking and emailing IPs daily is operationally burdensome and prone to race conditions where the allowlist might lag behind IP changes.

Option D uses Cloud NAT but with dynamic IPs. Dynamic IPs change over time, making them unsuitable for stable firewall allowlists.

Option B is the Google-recommended practice: Configuring the GKE cluster with private nodes enhances security as nodes don't have direct external IPs. Cloud NAT provides managed network address translation for these private nodes to access the internet. By configuring Cloud NAT with a static allocation of external IP addresses, all egress traffic from the private GKE nodes will appear to originate from this stable, predictable set of IPs. This set can be given to the vendor for allowlisting without worrying about node IP changes due to scaling or maintenance.

This approach decouples the application's egress IP from the individual nodes, providing stability and adhering to the principle of least privilege (private nodes).

When encountering a quotaExceeded error in BigQuery, you should follow these steps to diagnose and mitigate the issue:

Understand the Error:

The error message indicates that a quota was exceeded (either a short-term rate limit or a longer-term limit).

The response payload contains information about which quota was reached.

Quotas can fall into two categories:

rateLimitExceeded: Short-term limits. Retry the operation after a few seconds using exponential backoff.

quotaExceeded: Longer-term limits. Wait 10 minutes or longer before retrying the operation.

Search Errors in Cloud Audit Logs (Option A):

Cloud Audit Logs provide detailed information about API requests and responses.

By searching the logs, you can identify the specific API call that triggered the quotaExceeded error.

This helps you understand which resource or operation exceeded the quota.

View Errors in Cloud Monitoring (Option C):

Cloud Monitoring (formerly known as Stackdriver) provides insights into your Google Cloud resources.

Check the monitoring dashboard for any alerts related to BigQuery quotas.

You can set up custom monitoring rules to track specific quotas and receive notifications.

Other Options:

B. Configure Cloud Trace: Cloud Trace is used for performance analysis and latency tracking. It’s not directly related to quota issues.

D. Use Information Schema Views: Information schema views provide metadata about your datasets and tables but won’t help diagnose quota errors.

E. Use BigQuery Bl Engine: There is no such tool called “BigQuery Bl Engine.” This option is invalid.

Remember that some quotas replenish incrementally over a 24-hour period, so you don’t always need to wait a full 24 hours after reaching the limit. Ifyou consistently hit longer-term quotas, consider workload optimization or requesting a quota increase

Cloud SQL Auth Proxy: This proxy ensures secure connections to your Cloud SQL database by automatically handling encryption (SSL/TLS) and IAM-based authentication. It simplifies the management of secure connections without needing to manage SSL/TLS certificates manually. IAM Database Authentication: This allows you to use IAM credentials to authenticate to the database, providing a unified and secure authentication mechanism that integrates seamlessly with Google Cloud IAM.

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/gc-launcher-for-mongodb-atlas/mongodb-atlas

https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/cluster-autoscaler#adding_a_node_pool_with_autoscaling

Understanding IAM custom roles

Key Point: Custom roles enable you to enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring that the user and service accounts in your organization have only the permissions essential to performing their intended functions.

Basic concepts

Custom roles are user-defined, and allow you to bundle one or more supported permissions to meet your specific needs. Custom roles are not maintained by Google; when new permissions, features, or services are added to Google Cloud, your custom roles will not be updated automatically.

When you create a custom role, you must choose an organization or project to create it in. You can then grant the custom role on the organization or project, as well as any resources within that organization or project.

https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/understanding-custom-roles#basic_concepts

`gcloud services list --available` returns not only the enabled services in the project but also services that CAN be enabled.

https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/services/list#--available

Run the following command to list the enabled APIs and services in your current project:

gcloud services list

whereas, Run the following command to list the APIs and services available to you in your current project:

gcloud services list –available

https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/services/list#--available

--available

Return the services available to the project to enable. This list will include any services that the project has already enabled.

To list the services the current project has enabled for consumption, run:

gcloud services list --enabled

To list the services the current project can enable for consumption, run:

gcloud services list –available

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit

Data Access audit logs Data Access audit logs contain API calls that read the configuration or metadata of resources, as well as user-driven API calls that create, modify, or read user-provided resource data.

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit#data-access

Keyword need to look for

- "High Throughput",

- "Consistent",

- "Property based data insert/fetch like ngine status, distance traveled, fuel level, and more." which can be designed in column,

- "Large Scale Customer Base + Each Customer has multiple sensor which send event in seconds" This will go for pera bytes situation,

- Export data based on the time of the event.

- Atomic

o BigTable will fit all requirement.

o DataStore is not fully Atomic

o CloudStorage is not a option where we can export data based on time of event. We need another solution to do that

o FireStore can be used with MobileSDK.

The requirements specify a relational database that provides global scale and is a managed service.

Cloud Spanner is Google Cloud's globally distributed, strong-consistency database service. It provides limitless horizontal scaling while maintaining the structure of a relational database, making it the best fit for an application with a rapidly growing, global user base. As a fully managed service, it inherently minimizes management and administration efforts.

Cloud SQL (Option A) is a regional managed relational database and does not offer the same unlimited, global horizontal scaling capability as Spanner.

If your apps are fault-tolerant and can withstand possible instance preemptions, then preemptible instances can reduce your Compute Engine costs significantly. For example, batch processing jobs can run on preemptible instances. If some of those instances stop during processing, the job slows but does not completely stop. Preemptible instances complete your batch processing tasks without placing additional workload on your existing instances and without requiring you to pay full price for additional normal instances.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible

HTTP(S) load balancing is a Google-recommended practice for distributing web traffic across multiple regions and zones, and providing high availability, scalability, and security for web applications. It supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and can handle SSL/TLS termination and encryption. It also integrates with Cloud CDN, Cloud Armor, and Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy for enhanced performance and protection. A MIG can be used as a backend service for HTTP(S) load balancing, and can automatically scale and heal the VM instances that host the web application.

To configure DNS for HTTP(S) load balancing, you need to create an A record in your DNS public zone with the load balancer’s IP address. This will map your domain name to the load balancer’s IP address, and allow users to access your web application using the domain name. A CNAME record is not recommended, as it can cause latency and DNS resolution issues. A private zone is not suitable, as it is only visible within your VPC network, and not to the public internet.

HTTP(S) Load Balancing documentation

Setting up DNS records for HTTP(S) load balancing

Choosing a load balancer

You can create two configurations – one for the development project and another for the production project. And you do that by running “gcloud config configurations create” command.

https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/config/configurations/create

In your custom script, you can load these configurations one at a time and execute gcloud compute instances list to list Google Compute Engine instances in the project that is active in the gcloud configuration.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/compute/instances/list

Once you have this information, you can export it in a suitable format to a suitable target e.g. export as CSV or export to Cloud Storage/BigQuery/SQL, etc

Creating and starting a preemptible VM instance This page explains how to create and use a preemptible virtual machine (VM) instance. A preemptible instance is an instance you can create and run at a much lower price than normal instances. However, Compute Engine might terminate (preempt) these instances if it requires access to those resources for other tasks. Preemptible instances will always terminate after 24 hours. To learn more about preemptible instances, read the preemptible instances documentation. Preemptible instances are recommended only for fault-tolerant applications that can withstand instance preemptions. Make sure your application can handle preemptions before you decide to create a preemptible instance. To understand the risks and value of preemptible instances, read the preemptible instances documentation.https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/create-start-preemptible-instance

Keyword, Version, traffic splitting, App Engine supports traffic splitting for versions before releasing.

M1 machine series Medium in-memory databases such as SAP HANA Tasks that require intensive use of memory with higher memory-to-vCPU ratios than the general-purpose high-memory machine types. In-memory databases and in-memory analytics, business warehousing (BW) workloads, genomics analysis, SQL analysis services. Microsoft SQL Server and similar databases.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types#:~:text=databases%20such%20as-,SAP%20HANA,-In%2Dmemory%20databases

https://www.sap.com/india/products/hana.html#:~:text=is%20SAP%20HANA-,in%2Dmemory,-database%3F

Signed URLs are used to give time-limited resource access to anyone in possession of the URL, regardless of whether they have a Google account.https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/access-control/signed-urls

Types of audit logs Cloud Audit Logs provides the following audit logs for each Cloud project, folder, and organization: Admin Activity audit logs Data Access audit logs System Event audit logs Policy Denied audit logs *Data Access audit logs contain API calls that read the configuration or metadata of resources, as well as user-driven API calls that create, modify, or read user-provided resource data.https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit#types

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit#data-access Cloud Storage: When Cloud Storage usage logs are enabled, Cloud Storage writes usage data to the Cloud Storagebucket, which generates Data Access audit logs for the bucket. The generated Data Access audit log has its caller identity redacted.

https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/settings/multiple-projects

https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/workspaces

Our requirement is to follow Google recommended practices to achieve the end result. Configuring Private Google Access for On-Premises Hosts is best achieved by VPN/Interconnect + Advertise Routes + Use restricted Google IP Range.

Using Cloud VPN or Interconnect, create a tunnel to a VPC in GCP

Using Cloud Router to create a custom route advertisement for 199.36.153.4/30. Announce that network to your on-premises network through the VPN tunnel.

In your on-premises network, configure your DNS server to resolve *.googleapis.com as a CNAME to restricted.googleapis.com is the right answer right, and it is what Google recommends.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/configure-private-google-access-hybrid

You must configure routes so that Google API traffic is forwarded through your Cloud VPN or Cloud Interconnect connection, firewall rules on your on-premises firewall to allow the outgoing traffic, and DNS so that traffic to Google APIs resolves to the IP range youve added to your routes.

You can use Cloud Router Custom Route Advertisement to announce the Restricted Google APIs IP addresses through Cloud Router to your on-premises network. The Restricted Google APIs IP range is 199.36.153.4/30. While this is technically a public IP range, Google does not announce it publicly. This IP range is only accessible to hosts that can reach your Google Cloud projects through internal IP ranges, such as through a Cloud VPN or Cloud Interconnect connection. Without having a public IP address or access to the internet, the only way you could connect to cloud storage is if you have an internal route to it.

So Negotiate with the security team to be able to give public IP addresses to the servers is not right. Following Google recommended practices is synonymous with using Googles services (Not quite, but it is  at least for the exam !!).

So In this VPC, create a Compute Engine instance and install the Squid proxy server on this instance is not right.

Migrating the VM to Compute Engine is a bit drastic when Google says it is perfectly fine to have Hybrid Connectivity architectures https://cloud.google.com/hybrid-connectivity.

So,

Use Migrate for Compute Engine (formerly known as Velostrata) to migrate these servers to Compute Engine is not right.

The reason is that when you do health check, you want the VM to be working. Do the first check after initial setup time of 3 mins = 180 s < 200 s is reasonable.

The reason why our autoscaling is adding more instances than needed is that it checks 30 seconds after launching the instance and at this point, the instance isnt up and isnt ready to serve traffic. So our autoscaling policy starts another instance  again checks this after 30 seconds and the cycle repeats until it gets to the maximum instances or the instances launched earlier are healthy and start processing traffic  which happens after 180 seconds (3 minutes). This can be easily rectified by adjusting the initial delay to be higher than the time it takes for the instance to become available for processing traffic.So setting this to 200 ensures that it waits until the instance is up (around 180-second mark) and then starts forwarding traffic to this instance. Even after a cool out period, if the CPU utilization is still high, the autoscaler can again scale up but this scale-up is genuine and is based on the actual load.

Initial Delay Seconds  This setting delays autohealing from potentially prematurely recreating the instance if the instance is in the process of starting up. The initial delay timer starts when the currentAction of the instance is VERIFYING.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instance-groups/autohealing-instances-in-migs

https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/vpc#manually_created_subnet_ip_ranges

You can use the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to total the estimated monthly costs for each GCP product. You dont incur any charges for doing so.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator

The best option is to attach a single service account to the compute instances and add minimal rights to the service account. Then, allow the service account to impersonate a Cloud Identity user with elevated permissions to create, update, or delete resources. This way, the service account can use short-lived access tokens to authenticate to Google Cloud APIs without needing to manage service account keys. This option follows the principle of least privilege and reduces the risk of credential leakage and misuse.

Option A is not recommended because it requires human intervention, which can slow down the CI/CD pipeline and introduce human errors. Option C is not secure because it grants all required IAM permissions to a single service account, which can increase the impact of a compromised key. Option D is not cost-effective because it requires creating and managing multiple service accounts and keys, as well as using a secret manager service.

1: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/impersonating-service-accounts

2: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/best-practices-for-managing-service-account-keys

3: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/understanding-service-accounts

Autopilot is more reliable and stable release gives more time to fix issues in new version of GKE

1. In Stackdriver Logging, create a filter to view only Compute Engine logs. 2. Click Create Export. 3. Choose BigQuery as Sink Service, and the platform-logs dataset as Sink Destination.

This command correctly lists pods that have the label app=prod. When creating the deployment, we used the label app=prod so listing pods that have this label retrieve the pods belonging to nginx deployments. You can list pods by using Kubernetes CLI  kubectl get pods.

Ref: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/list-all-running-container-images/

Ref: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/list-all-running-container-images/#list-containers-filtering-by-pod-label

This is the most optimal solution. Rather than recreating all nodes, you create a new node pool with GPU enabled. You then modify the pod specification to target particular GPU types by adding node selector to your workloads Pod specification. YOu still have a single cluster so you pay Kubernetes cluster management fee for just one cluster thus minimizing the cost.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/gpus

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing

Example:

apiVersion: v1

kind: Pod

metadata:

name:my-gpu-pod

spec:

containers:

name:my-gpu-container

image: nvidia/cuda:10.0-runtime-ubuntu18.04

command: [/bin/bash]

resources:

limits:

nvidia.com/gpu: 2

nodeSelector:

cloud.google.com/gke-accelerator: nvidia-tesla-k80# or nvidia-tesla-p100 or nvidia-tesla-p4 or nvidia-tesla-v100 or nvidia-tesla-t4

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instance-groups/autohealing-instances-in-migs#setting_up_an_autohealing_policy

https://blog.doit-intl.com/the-truth-behind-google-cloud-egress-traffic-6e8f57b5c2f8

Cloud Functions is Google Cloud’s event-driven serverless compute platform that lets you run your code locally or in the cloud without having to provision servers. Cloud Functions scales up or down, so you pay only for compute resources you use. Cloud Functions have excellent integration with Cloud Pub/Sub, lets you scale down to zero and is recommended by Google as the ideal serverless platform to use when dependent on Cloud Pub/Sub.

"If you’re building a simple API (a small set of functions to be accessed via HTTP or Cloud Pub/Sub), we recommend using Cloud Functions."

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/serverless-options

Cloud Billing export to BigQuery enables you to export detailed Google Cloud billing data (such as usage, cost estimates, and pricing data) automatically throughout the day to a BigQuery dataset that you specify. Then you can access your Cloud Billing data from BigQuery for detailed analysis, or use a tool like Looker Studio to visualize your data.

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/api/v2/resource-list

GKE Containers have more log than GKE Cluster Operations:

-GKE Containe:

cluster_name: An immutable name for the cluster the container is running in.

namespace_id: Immutable ID of the cluster namespace the container is running in.

instance_id: Immutable ID of the GCE instance the container is running in.

pod_id: Immutable ID of the pod the container is running in.

container_name: Immutable name of the container.

zone: The GCE zone in which the instance is running.

VS

-GKE Cluster Operations

project_id: The identifier of the GCP project associated with this resource, such as "my-project".

cluster_name: The name of the GKE Cluster.

location: The location in which the GKE Cluster is running.

Read the dataset's metadata and to list tables in the dataset. Read data and metadata from the dataset's tables. When applied at the project or organization level, this role can also enumerate all datasets in the project. Additional roles, however, are necessary to allow the running of jobs.

BigQuery Data Viewer

(roles/bigquery.dataViewer)

When applied to a table or view, this role provides permissions to:

Read data and metadata from the table or view.

This role cannot be applied to individual models or routines.

When applied to a dataset, this role provides permissions to:

Read the dataset's metadata and list tables in the dataset.

Read data and metadata from the dataset's tables.

When applied at the project or organization level, this role can also enumerate all datasets in the project. Additional roles, however, are necessary to allow the running of jobs.

Lowest-level resources where you can grant this role:

Table

View

BigQuery Job User

(roles/bigquery.jobUser)

Provides permissions to run jobs, including queries, within the project.

Lowest-level resources where you can grant this role:

Project

to run jobs https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/access-control#bigquery.jobUser databaseUser needs additional role permission to run jobshttps://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/iam#spanner.databaseUser

Using primitive roles The following table lists the primitive roles that you can grant to access a project, the description of what the role does, and the permissions bundled within that role. Avoid using primitive roles except when absolutely necessary. These roles are very powerful, and include a large number of permissions across all Google Cloud services. For more details on when you should use primitive roles, see the Identity and Access Management FAQ. IAM predefined roles are much more granular, and allow you to carefully manage the set of permissions that your users have access to. See Understanding Roles for a list of roles that can be granted at the project level. Creating custom roles can further increase the control you have over user permissions.https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/access-control-proj#using_primitive_roles

https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/understanding-custom-roles

The most direct and recommended way to get a granular breakdown of your Google Cloud costs in BigQuery is to enable Cloud Billing data export to BigQuery when you create or manage your Cloud Billing account. This automatically sets up a daily export of your billing data to a BigQuery dataset you specify.

Option A: Enabling the BigQuery API and managing IAM roles are necessary for interacting with BigQuery, but they don't automatically populate it with Cloud Billing data. Selecting a data location is also important for BigQuery datasets but is a separate step from enabling billing export.

Option B: The BigQuery Data Transfer Service is used for transferring data from various sources into BigQuery, but for Cloud Billing data, the direct export feature is the standard and simpler method.

Option D: Enabling Cloud Billing and linking an account makes billing data available in the Cloud Billing console, but it doesn't automatically export it to BigQuery for detailed analysis. You need to explicitly configure the BigQuery export.

Reference to Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer Documents:

The process of setting up Cloud Billing export to BigQuery is clearly documented in the Google Cloud Billing documentation, which is a fundamental area for the Associate Cloud Engineer certification. Understanding how to access and analyze billing data is crucial for cost management.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types#n1_machine_type

What is Google Cloud Memorystore?

Overview. Cloud Memorystore for Redis is a fully managed Redis service for Google Cloud Platform. Applications running on Google Cloud Platform can achieve extreme performance by leveraging the highly scalable, highly available, and secure Redis service without the burden of managing complex Redis deployments.

https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/organization-policy/org-policy-constraints This list constraint defines the set of domains that email addresses added to Essential Contacts can have. By default, email addresses with any domain can be added to Essential Contacts. The allowed/denied list must specify one or more domains of the form @example.com. If this constraint is active and configured with allowed values, only email addresses with a suffix matching one of the entries from the list of allowed domains can be added in Essential Contacts. This constraint has no effect on updating or removing existing contacts. constraints/essentialcontacts.allowedContactDomains

Predefined roles

The following table describes Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles that are associated with Cloud Storage and lists the permissions that are contained in each role. Unless otherwise noted, these roles can be applied either to entire projects or specific buckets.

Storage Object Creator (roles/storage.objectCreator) Allows users to create objects. Does not give permission to view, delete, or overwrite objects.

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/access-control/iam-roles#standard-roles

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/object-versioning

This aligns with Googles recommended practices. By creating a new project, we achieve complete isolation between development and production environments; as well as isolate this production application from production applications of other departments.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/docs/enterprise/best-practices-for-enterprise-organizations#define-hierarchy

GKE Autopilot is a mode of operation in GKE where Google manages the underlying infrastructure, including nodes, node pools, and their upgrades. This significantly reduces the management and operational overhead for the user, allowing teams to focus solely on deploying and managing their containerized applications. Since the applications are not exposed publicly, the zonal or regional nature of the cluster primarily impacts availability within Google Cloud, and Autopilot is available for both. Autopilot minimizes the operational burden, which is a key requirement.

Option A: A Standard zonal GKE cluster requires you to manage the nodes yourself, including sizing, scaling, and upgrades, increasing operational overhead compared to Autopilot.

Option B: Manually installing and managing Kubernetes on a fleet of Compute Engine instances involves the highest level of management overhead, which contradicts the requirement to minimize it.

Option D: A Standard regional GKE cluster provides higher availability than a zonal cluster by replicating the control plane and nodes across multiple zones within a region. However, it still requires you to manage the underlying nodes, unlike Autopilot.

Reference to Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer Documents:

The different modes of GKE operation, including Standard and Autopilot, and their respective management responsibilities and benefits, are clearly outlined in the Google Kubernetes Engine documentation, a core topic for the Associate Cloud Engineer certification. The emphasis on reduced operational overhead with Autopilot is a key differentiator.

Logged information Within Cloud Audit Logs, there are two types of logs: Admin Activity logs: Entries for operations that modify the configuration or metadata of a project, bucket,or object. Data Access logs: Entries for operations that modify objects or read a project, bucket, or object. There are several sub-types of data access logs: ADMIN_READ: Entries for operations that read the configuration or metadata of a project, bucket, or object. DATA_READ: Entries for operations that read an object. DATA_WRITE: Entries for operations that create or modify an object.https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/audit-logs#types

Google Cloud Storage Triggers

Cloud Functions can respond to change notifications emerging from Google Cloud Storage. These notifications can be configured to trigger in response to various events inside a bucket—object creation, deletion, archiving and metadata updates.

Note: Cloud Functions can only be triggered by Cloud Storage buckets in the same Google Cloud Platform project.

Event types

Cloud Storage events used by Cloud Functions are based on Cloud Pub/Sub Notifications for Google Cloud Storage and can be configured in a similar way.

Supported trigger type values are:

google.storage.object.finalize

google.storage.object.delete

google.storage.object.archive

google.storage.object.metadataUpdate

Object Finalize

Trigger type value: google.storage.object.finalize

This event is sent when a new object is created (or an existing object is overwritten, and a new generation of that object is created) in the bucket.

https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/calling/storage#event_types

An external passthrough Network Load Balancer operates at layer 4 (TCP/UDP) and preserves the original client IP address. This is a key requirement stated in the question. It's also designed for external-facing applications that need to handle TCP or UDP traffic directly without proxying at the application layer.

Option A: An internal passthrough Network Load Balancer is used for load balancing traffic within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network, not for exposing applications to the public internet.

Option C & D: Global and regional external proxy Network Load Balancers operate at layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) or use a proxy for TCP/SSL, which means they terminate the client connection at the load balancer and establish a new connection to the backend instances. This does not preserve the original client IP address by default (though there are ways to retrieve it via headers, it's not a direct passthrough).

Reference to Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer Documents:

The different types of Google Cloud Load Balancers, their operating layers (L4 vs. L7), and their capabilities, including client IP preservation, are thoroughly documented in the Google Cloud Load Balancing documentation, a critical area for the Associate Cloud Engineer certification. The distinction between passthrough and proxy load balancers is essential.

https://cloud.google.com/network-connectivity/docs/vpn/concepts/best-practices

Choosing a region and zone You choose which region or zone hosts your resources, which controls where your data is stored and used. Choosing a region and zone is important for several reasons:

Handling failures

Distribute your resources across multiple zones and regions to tolerate outages. Google designs zones to be independent from each other: a zone usually has power, cooling, networking, and control planes that are isolated from other zones, and most single failure events will affect only a single zone. Thus, if a zone becomes unavailable, you can transfer traffic to another zone in the same region to keep your services running. Similarly, if a region experiences any disturbances, you should have backup services running in a different region. For more information about distributing your resources and designing a robust system, see Designing Robust Systems. Decreased network latency To decrease network latency, you might want to choose a region or zone that is close to your point of service.https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones#choosing_a_region_and_zone

The goal is to simplify, automate, and maintain audit compliance for SSH access across all projects.

OS Login: OS Login is the primary, Google-recommended method to centralize and simplify SSH access control for Compute Engine, integrating it with IAM. This eliminates the manual management of keys in metadata (Option A and D).

Automation/Scope: The most effective way to enforce this standard company-wide across projects is to use the Organization Policy Service with the constraint constraints/compute.requireOsLogin to automatically enable OS Login on all Compute Engine instances created in the projects where the policy is enforced. This enforces the standard without manual configuration per-instance or per-project.

Option C vs. B: While two-factor authentication adds security, the action that enforces the use of OS Login as the standard method for SSH key management is enabling it via an Organization Policy on the project/folder/organization hierarchy.

The Google-recommended and most automated solution for tracking spending against a specific limit for a group of projects is using Cloud Billing Budgets.

Structure: Placing all sandbox projects under a single Folder allows the budget to be scoped accurately to the entire sandbox environment's spend.

Automation/Notification: A Budget Alert is a native feature that automates the monitoring and notification process. You can configure multiple alert thresholds (e.g., 50%, 90%, 100%) and specify email addresses for recipients, including the engineers (users) and administrators.

Cost Minimization: This uses native Google Cloud functionality, minimizing the need for custom code (Option D) or additional external services (Option A and D). Option C imposes a hard stop, which is not what the question asks for (which is notification).

Comprehensive and Detailed In Depth Explanation:

The core requirements are secure access to a specific BigQuery dataset from a Compute Engine instance, using short-lived credentials, adhering to Google's best practices, and minimizing operational overhead.

A. Project-level IAM role: Granting the BigQuery Data Viewer role at the project level gives the service account broad access to all BigQuery datasets within that project. This violates the principle of least privilege, a fundamental security best practice, as the application should only have access to the designated dataset.

B. Hourly new service account with dataset-level role: While this aims to achieve short-lived credentials, the operational burden of creating, attaching, and managing IAM policies for a new service account every hour is significant and not a Google-recommended practice for routine access. It introduces unnecessary complexity and potential for errors.

C. Custom service account with dataset-level IAM role: This is the recommended and most efficient approach. You create a dedicated Google Cloud service account specifically for this application. You then grant this service account the necessary IAM role (e.g., BigQuery Data Viewer, or a more specific custom role) directly on the target BigQuery dataset. When the Compute Engine instance runs as this service account, the Google Cloud client libraries automatically handle the acquisition and rotation of short-lived OAuth 2.0 access tokens from the instance's metadata server. This eliminates the need to manage long-lived credentials (like service account keys) and ensures the application only has access to the intended dataset. This adheres to the principle of least privilege and minimizes operational costs.

D. Hourly new service account with project-level role: This option combines the high operational overhead of frequently creating new service accounts with the security risk of granting overly permissive project-level access. It is not a recommended practice.

Therefore, the most secure, cost-effective, and operationally efficient solution is to create a custom service account, attach it to the Compute Engine instance, and grant it the appropriate BigQuery IAM role specifically on the target dataset. The platform handles the short-lived credentials automatically.

Google Cloud Documentation References:

Creating and enabling service accounts for instances: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/access/create-enable-service-accounts-for-instances - Explains how to create and associate service accounts with Compute Engine VMs.  

Granting, changing, and revoking access to resources: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/granting-changing-revoking-access - Details how to manage IAM policies and grant roles to service accounts on specific resources (like BigQuery datasets).  

BigQuery IAM roles: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/control-access - Provides information on the various IAM roles available for controlling access to BigQuery resources at different levels (project, dataset, table, etc.).

Best practices for using service accounts: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/best-practices-for-using-service-accounts - Emphasizes the importance of the principle of least privilege and avoiding the management of long-lived service account keys when possible (relying on the metadata server for short-lived tokens).

/25:

CIDR to IP Range

Result

CIDR Range 172.16.20.128/25

Netmask 255.255.255.128

Wildcard Bits 0.0.0.127

First IP 172.16.20.128

First IP (Decimal) 2886734976

Last IP 172.16.20.255

Last IP (Decimal) 2886735103

Total Host 128

CIDR

172.16.20.128/25

/24:

CIDR to IP Range

Result

CIDR Range 172.16.20.128/24

Netmask 255.255.255.0

Wildcard Bits 0.0.0.255

First IP 172.16.20.0

First IP (Decimal) 2886734848

Last IP 172.16.20.255

Last IP (Decimal) 2886735103

Total Host 256

CIDR

172.16.20.128/24

The gcloud projects get-iam-policy command displays the IAM policy for a project, which includes the roles and members assigned to those roles. The Project Owner role grants full access to all resources and actions in the project. By using this command, you can review who has been granted this role and make any necessary changes. References:

1: Associate Cloud Engineer Certification Exam Guide | Learn - Google Cloud

2: gcloud projects get-iam-policy | Cloud SDK Documentation | Google Cloud

3: Understanding roles | Cloud IAM Documentation | Google Cloud

https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres

"Run gcloud configurations list to start the Compute Engine instances". How the heck are you expecting to "start" GCE instances doing "configuration list".

Each gcloud configuration has a 1 to 1 relationship with the region (if a region is defined). Since we have two different regions, we would need to create two separate configurations using gcloud config configurations create

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/config/configurations/create

Secondly, you can activate each configuration independently by running gcloud config configurations activate [NAME]

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/config/configurations/activate

Finally, while each configuration is active, you can run the gcloud compute instances start [NAME] command to start the instance in the configurations region.

https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/compute/instances/start

You can deploy to a different project by using –project flag.

By default, the service is deployed the current project configured via:

$ gcloud config set core/project PROJECT

To override this value for a single deployment, use the –project flag:

$ gcloud app deploy ~/my_app/app.yaml –project=PROJECT

Ref:https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/app/deploy

The Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) in Kubernetes automatically adjusts the CPU and memory requests and limits of the containers within a pod based on historical and real-time resource usage. In this scenario, where a single-replica stateful application needs more CPU during peak times, VPA can dynamically increase the CPU allocated to the pod when needed and potentially decrease it during off-peak periods to optimize resource utilization and cost efficiency.

Option A: Cluster autoscaling adds or removes nodes in your GKE cluster based on the resource requests of your pods. While it can help with overall cluster capacity, it oesn't directly address the need for more CPU for a specific pod.

Option C: Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) scales the number of pod replicas based on observed CPU utilization or other select metrics. Since the application can only have one replica, HPA is not suitable.

Option D: Node auto-provisioning is similar to cluster autoscaling, automatically creating and deleting node pools based on workload demands. It doesn't directly manage the resources of individual pods.

Reference to Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer Documents:

The functionality and use cases of the Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) are detailed in the Google Kubernetes Engine documentation, specifically within the resource management and autoscaling sections. Understanding how VPA can dynamically adjust pod resources is relevant to the Associate Cloud Engineer certification.

Folders are nodes in the Cloud Platform Resource Hierarchy. A folder can contain projects, other folders, or a combination of both. Organizations can use folders to group projects under the organization node in a hierarchy. For example, your organization might contain multiple departments, each with its own set of Google Cloud resources. Folders allow you to group these resources on a per-department basis. Folders are used to group resources that share common IAM policies. While a folder can contain multiple folders or resources, a given folder or resource can have exactly one parent.https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/creating-managing-folders

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/debug-application/#debugging-pods