Associate-Cloud-Engineer Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer Free Practice Exam Questions (2026 Updated)

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 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

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

Cloud Spanner is a relational database and is highly scalable. Cloud Spanner is a highly scalable, enterprise-grade, globally-distributed, and strongly consistent database service built for the cloud specifically to combine the benefits of relational database structure with a non-relational horizontal scale. This combination delivers high-performance transactions and strong consistency across rows, regions, and continents with an industry-leading 99.999% availability SLA, no planned downtime, and enterprise-grade security

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/spanner

Graphical user interface, application, Teams Description automatically generated

https://cloud.google.com/architecture/identity/migrating-consumer-accounts

According to the Google Cloud documentation, you can use organization policy constraints to control the creation and expiration of service account keys. The constraints are:

constraints/iam.allowServiceAccountKeyCreation: This constraint allows you to specify which projects or folders can create service account keys. You can set the value to true or false, or use a condition to apply the constraint to specific service accounts. By setting this constraint to false for the organization and adding an exception for the pj-sa project, you can prevent developers from creating service account keys in other projects.

constraints/iam.serviceAccountKeyMaxLifetime: This constraint allows you to specify the maximum lifetime of service account keys. You can set the value to a duration in seconds, such as 86400 for one day. By setting this constraint to 86400 for the organization, you can ensure that all service account keys expire after one day.

These constraints are recommended by Google Cloud as best practices to minimize the risk of service account key misuse or compromise. They also help you reduce the cost of managing service account keys, as you do not need to implement a custom solution to rotate or delete them.

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

5: Create and delete service account keys - Google Cloud

Organization policy constraints for service accounts

Implied rules Every VPC network has two implied firewall rules. These rules exist, but are not shown in the Cloud Console: Implied allow egress rule. An egress rule whose action is allow, destination is 0.0.0.0/0, and priority is the lowest possible (65535) lets any instance send traffic to any destination, except for traffic blocked by Google Cloud. A higher priority firewall rule may restrict outbound access. Internet access is allowed if no other firewall rules deny outbound traffic and if the instance has an external IP address or uses a Cloud NAT instance. For more information, see Internet access requirements. Implied deny ingress rule. An ingress rule whose action is deny, source is 0.0.0.0/0, and priority is the lowest possible (65535) protects all instances by blocking incoming connections to them. A higher priority rule might allow incoming access. The default network includes some additional rules that override this one, allowing certain types of incoming connections.https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/firewalls#default_firewall_rules

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

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/access-control#custom_roles

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.

A custom image belongs only to your project. To create an instance with a custom image, you must first have a custom image.

The best option is to instruct the external consultant to generate an SSH key pair, and request the public key from the consultant. Then, add the public key to the instance yourself, and have the consultant access the instance through SSH with their private key. This way, you can grant the consultant access to the instance without requiring a Google account or exposing the instance’s public IP address. This option also follows the best practice of using user-managed SSH keys instead of service account keys for SSH access1.

Option A is not feasible because the external consultant does not have a Google account, and therefore cannot use Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) to access the instance. IAP requires the user to authenticate with a Google account and have the appropriate IAM permissions to access the instance2. Option B is not secure because it exposes the instance’s public IP address, which can increase the risk of unauthorized access or attacks. Option D is not correct because it reverses the roles of the public and private keys. The public key should be added to the instance, and the private key should be kept by the consultant. Sharing the private key with anyone else can compromise the security of the SSH connection3.

1: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/adding-removing-ssh-keys

2: https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/using-tcp-forwarding

3: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/connecting-advanced#sshbetweeninstances

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

In Google compute engine, if predefined machine types don’t meet your needs, you can create an instance with custom virtualized hardware settings. Specifically, you can create an instance with a custom number of vCPUs and custom memory, effectively using a custom machine type. Custom machine types are ideal for the following scenarios:

   1. Workloads that aren’t a good fit for the predefined machine types that are available to you.

   2. Workloads that require more processing power or more memory but don’t need all of the upgrades that are provided by the next machine type level.

In our scenario, we only need a memory upgrade. Moving to a bigger instance would also bump up the CPU which we don’t need so we have to use a custom machine type. It is not possible to change memory while the instance is running so you need to first stop the instance, change the memory and then start it again. See below a screenshot that shows how CPU/Memory can be customized for an instance that has been stopped.

Ref: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/creating-instance-with-custom-machine-type

As mentioned in Schema and data model, you should be careful when choosing a primary key to not accidentally create hotspots in your database. One cause of hotspots is having a column whose value monotonically increases as the first key part, because this results in all inserts occurring at the end of your key space. This pattern is undesirable because Cloud Spanner divides data among servers by key ranges, which means all your inserts will be directed at a single server that will end up doing all the work.https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/schema-design#primary-key-prevent-hotspots

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/splitting-traffic#gcloud