GCP Professional Cloud Architect Certification

What command do you use with BigQuery to determine how many bytes are read by a query?

"bq query --dry_run" to determine the number of bytes read by the query

What parameter is used to tell BigQuery to automatically detect the schema of a file on import?

--autodetect

For CPU resources, how many resources does Google Kubernetes Engine reserve?

6% of the first core, 1% of the next core (up to 2 cores), .5% of the next 2 cores (up to 4), and .25% of any cores above 4.

What is the Cloud Pub/Sub?

A Global service. An infinitely-scalable at-least-once messaging for ingestion, decoupling, etc. Similar to the combination of AWS SNS & SQS. Global by default: Publish & consume from anywhere, with consistent latency. Messages can be up to 10MB and undelivered ones are stored for 7 days- but no dead letter queue (DLQ). Push mode delivers to HTTPS endpoint & succeeds on HTTP succeeds on HTTP success status code. Slow-start algorithm ramps up on success and backs off & retries on failures. Pull mode delivers messages to requesting clients (and makes invisible to the other clients) and waits for ACK to delete. Lets clients set rate of consumption, and supports batching and long-polling.

What is Cloud Internet of Things (IoT) Core?

A Global service. Fully-managed service to connect, manage and ingest data from IoT devices globally. Device Manager handles device identity, authentication, config and control. Protocol Bridge publishes incoming telemetry to Cloud Pub/Sub for processing. It connects securely using IoT industry-standard MQTT or HTTPS protocols. Certificate Authority (CA) signed certificates can be used to verify device ownership on the first connect. Two-way device communication enables configuration & firmware updates. Device shadows enable querying & making control changes while the devices are offline. IoT Core does not publish to other services and it doesn't store data.

What is an A/B deployment model?

A deployment model that tests a hypothesis by using variant implementations. It is used to make business decisions (not only predictions) based on the results derived from data. When you perform this test, you route a subset of users to new functionality based on routing rules.

What is a cascading failure?

A failure that occurs when one system fails, causing others to be overloaded and subsequently fail.

What is a blue-green deployment model?

A model where you perform two identical deployments of your application. Only one version is live at a time. Traffic is routed to the first deployment while the second deployment is created and tested. After you're finished testing, you route traffic to the new version.

What is the GCP Data Transfer Appliance?

A rackable, high-capacity storage server to physically ship data to put in Google Cloud Storage. Ingest only, not a way to avoid egress charges. 100 TB or 480 TB.

What is the GCP Cloud Source Repository?

A single place for a team to store, manage and track code. Central repository that developers push to when they want a build to occur. It is used for code version control.

What is Cloud Container Builder?

A stand-alone tool for building container images regardless of deployment environment.

What is Apigee?

An API management platform built for enterprises with deployment options on Cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. The feature set includes an API gateway, customizable portal for on-boarding partners and developers, monetization, and deep analytics around APIs. You can use it for any HTTP, HTTPS backends, no matter where they are running on-premises, any public Cloud. It allows you to Design, Secure, Publish, Analyze, Monitor and Monetize APIs.

What is Chef?

An open source cloud configuration management and deployment application. It's meant to help anyone orchestrate servers in a cloud or just in a departmental data center. Instead of system administrators sweating over management programs that were designed for single, stand-alone servers, it allows DevOps to spin off dozens or hundreds of server instances in less time than it takes you to read this article.

What is puppet?

An open source software configuration management and deployment tool. It's most commonly used on Linux and Windows to pull the strings on multiple application servers at once.

You have deployed an app that hosts services that provide the current time in any time zone. The project containing the code is called current-time-zone, the service providing the user interfaces is called time-zone-ui, and the service performing the calculation is called time-zone-calculate. What is the URL where a user could find your service?

App Engine applications are accessible from URLs that consist of the project name followed by appspot.com, so the answer is current-time-zone.appspot.com

What is the most performant storage option to work with IoT and time series data?

Cloud Bigtable

What are the two appropriate types of GCP data storage / database for non-relational (may need to change the format of data over time) data?

Cloud Datastore (good for hierarchical, mobile, web ) & Cloud Bigtable (heavy read + write, events, fully managed, No-SQL wide-column database) Suitable for both low-latency single-point lookups and precalculated analytics. IoT, Finance, Adtech, Geospatial datasets, Graphs

What two services does GCP provide to manage APIs?

Cloud Endpoints and Apigee API Platform. Both solutions provide tools for services such as user authentication, monitoring, and securing, and also for OpenAPI and gRPC.

Which runtimes are supported in Cloud Functions?

Cloud Functions support three runtimes: Node.js 6, Node.js 8 and Python.

What are the two appropriate types of GCP data storage / database for relational (structured columns & rows) data?

Cloud SQL (fully managed, good for web, structured frameworks & OLTP) & Cloud Spanner (good for RDBMS+scale, HA, HTAP, mission critical, transactional consistency, global scale). Adtech, Financial Svcs, Global Supply Chain.

Google components to enable a continuous integration pipeline?

Cloud Source Repository; Cloud Build; Build Triggers; Container Registry

What is the appropriate type of GCP data storage for object data storage / database as binary large objects (blobs)?

Cloud Storage (good for binary or object data, such as images, binary media and backups)

What does the HTTP Response Code of 400 indicate?

Codes for Client errors.

What does the HTTP Response Code of 500 indicate?

Codes for Server errors.

What does the HTTP Response Code of 200 indicate?

Codes for Success.

You want to see a list of deployments. Which option from the Kubernetes Engine navigation menu would you select?

Deployments are listed under Workloads.

What does Cloud Build do?

Executes the steps required to make a deployment package or a Docker image (CI / CD).

A team of mobile developers is developing a new application. It will require synchronizing data between mobile devices and a backend database. Which database service would you recommend?

Firestore is a document database that has mobile supporting features, like data synchronization.

What is GCP Cloud Run?

GCP service that allows you to deploy containers to a Google managed Kubernetes cluster. You don't need to manage or configure the cluster. The services that you use must be stateless and the images you use must be in Container Registry.

What is the Cloud Natural Language API?

Global service. Analyzes text for sentiment, intent and content classification and extracts info about it. Pre-trained ML model for understanding what text means, so you can act on it. Syntax analysis extracts tokens/sentences, parts of speech & dependency trees. Entity analysis finds people, places, things, etc., labels them and links to Wikipedia. Analysis for sentiment and entity sentiment detect +/- feelings & strength of feelings. Content classification puts each document into one of 700+ predefined categories.

What is Cloud Data Studio?

Global service. Big Data Visualization tool for dashboards and reporting. Provides meaningful data stories / presentations to enable better business decision making. Data sources include BigQuery, Cloud SQL, other MySQL, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Analytics 360, AdWords, DoubleClick and YouTube channels. Visualizations include time series, bar charts, pie charts, tables, heat maps, geo maps, scorecards, scatter charts, bullet charts and are charts. Templates for quick start; customization options for impactful finish.

What is Dialogflow?

Global service. Build conversational interfaces for websites, mobile apps, messaging, IOT devices (chatbots). Pre-trained ML model and service for accepting, parsing, lexing input and responding. Similar to Amazon Lex service. Enables useful chatbots and other natural user interactions with your custom code. Train it to identify custom entity types by providing a small dataset of examples or choose from 30+ pre-built agents (car, currency, dates) as a starting template.

What is the Cloud Speech API?

Global service. Does Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to turn spoken word audio files into text. Pre-trained ML model for recognizing speech in 110+ languages/variants. Accepts pre-recorded or real-time audio and can stream results back in real-time. Enables voice command-and-control and transcribing user microphone dictations. Handles noisy source audio. Can filter inappropriate content in some languages. Accepts contextual hints: words and names that will likely be spoken. Pay per 15 seconds of audio that gets processed.

What is the Cloud Vision API?

Global service. Example of a pre-trained model. Classifies images into categories, detects objects/faces & finds/reads printed text. Similar to AWS Rekognition service. Pre-trained ML model to analyze images and discover their contents. Classifies images into 1000's for categories (e.g., sailboat, lion). You can upload images or point to ones stored in GCS.

What is Google Domains service?

Global service. Google's registrar for domain names. Similar to AWS Route 53. Private 'Whois' records. Built-in DNS or custom nameservers. Supports DNSSEC. Email forwarding with automatic setup of SPF and DKIM (for built-in DNS)

What is Cloud Job Discovery?

Global service. Helps career sites, company job boards, etc. to improve engagement & conversation. Pre-trained ML model to help job seekers search job posting databases.

What is Cloud DNS service?

Global service. Scalable, reliable and managed authoritative Domain Name Service (DNS) service. 100% uptime guarantee. Supports public and private managed zones. Low latency globally. Supports DNSSEC. Manage via UI, CLI or API.

What is Cloud Genomics?

Global service. Store and process genomes and related experiments. Query complete genomic information of large research projects in seconds. Process many genomes and experiments in parallel

What is the Cloud Translation API?

Global service. Translate text among 100s languages; optionally auto-detects source language. Pre-trained ML model for recognizing and translating semantics, not just syntax. Can let people support multi-regional clients in non-native languages (even two-way communication). To use, send plain text or HTML and receive translation back.

What is Cloud Dataprep?

Global service. Visually explore, clean and prepare data for analysis without running servers. "Data Wrangling" (i.e., ad-hoc ETL) for business analysts, not IT Pros. Managed version of Trifacta Wrangler-and managed by Trifacta, not Google. Source data from GCS, BQ or file upload-formatted in CSV, JSON or relational. Automatically detects schemas, datatypes, possible joins and various anomalies.

What is GCP Storage Transfer Service?

Global. Copies objects for you, so you don't need to set up a machine to do it. Destination is always a Google Cloud Storage bucket. Source can be AWS S3, HTTP/HTTPS endpoint or another GCS bucket. Can be a one-time or scheduled recurring transfer.

How can you enable logging for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)?

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) includes native integration with Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging (aka Stackdriver Logging). When you create a GKE cluster, Kubernetes Engine Monitoring is enabled by default and provides a monitoring dashboard specifically tailored for Kubernetes. With Kubernetes Engine Monitoring, you can control whether or not Cloud Logging collects application logs.

What is Cloud Endpoints?

Is an API management gateway which helps you develop, deploy, and manage APIs on any Google Cloud backend. To have your API managed by Cloud Endpoints, you have three options (depending on where your API is hosted and the type of communications protocol your API uses: OpenAPI, gRPC and App Engine Standard.

What is Ansible?

It is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs. Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, it models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

What is Terraform?

It is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. It can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions. Configuration files describe to it the components needed to run a single application or your entire datacenter.

What programming languages does GCP App Engine Support?

Java, Node.js, Python, Php and Go. You can also use App Engine 'Flex mode' to support containers and almost any language.

Is Cloud Firestore a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Multi-Regional. NoSQL document stores with ~real-time client updates via managed websockets. Has collections -> documents -> contained data.

Is BigQuery a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Multi-Regional. Serverless column-store data warehouse for analytics using SQL. Scales internally, so it can scan TB in seconds and PB in minutes. Most similar to AWS Athena (and some similarities to Redshift). Supports streaming inserts.

What programming languages does Google Cloud Functions Support?

Node.js, Python, Java and Go. Known as 'Serverless' or Functions as a Service (FaaS). Similar to AWS Lambda service.

What is Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP)?

Provides managed access to applications running on App Engine Standard or Flexible, Compute Engine and GKE. It allows employees to securely access web-based applications deployed on GCP without requiring a VPN.

You are generating an estimate of the cost of using BigQuery. One of the parameters is Query Pricing. You have to specify a value in TB units. What is the value you are specifying?

Query pricing in BigQuery is based on the amount of data scanned.

What is the Cloud Video Intelligence API?

Regional & Global service. Annotates videos in GCS (or directly uploaded) with info about what they contain. Pre-trained ML model for video scene analysis and subject identification. Enables you to search a video catalog the same way you search text documents. Can do Label Detection (entities w/in video), Shot Change Detection (detect scene change) and Safe Search Detection (detect adult content).

Is Google Cloud Storage a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Regional & Multi-Regional. Infinitely scalable, fully-managed, versioned, and highly-durable object store. Resides in 'buckets'. This is similar to Amazon S3 & Amazon Glacier (depending on the tier). Designed for 11 9's of durability. Strongly consistent (even for overwrite PUTs and DELETEs). Integrated site hosting & CDN. Lifecycle: Multi-Regional, Regional, Nearline and Coldline

Is Cloud Datastore a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Regional & Multi-Regional. Managed & autoscaled NoSQL DB with indexes, queries and ACID transaction support. Similar to AWS DynamoDB. No joins or aggregates and must line up with the indexes. NOT, OR, and NOT EQUALS (<>, !=) operations not natively supported.

Is Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Regional (but creates VMs in specific zones). Creates managed Kubernetes cluster for running Docker containers (with autoscaling). Integrates with Persistent Disk for storage. Kubernetes DNS on by default for service discovery, but there isn't IAM integration, so need to add credentials to containers manually. Similar to AWS EC2 Container Service <ECS & EKS>.

What is Cloud Datalab?

Regional service. Interactive tool for data exploration, analysis, visualization and machine learning. Uses Jupyter Notebook. Supports iterative development of data analysis algorithms in Python/SQL/JavaScript for BigQuery defined functions. Most useful for Data Scientists.

What is the Cloud Machine Learning (ML) Engine?

Regional service. Massively scalable managed service for training ML models & making predictions. Similar to AWS SageMaker. Based on TensorFlow. Enables apps/devs to use TensorFlow on datasets of any size; endless use cases. Integrates with: GCS/BQ, Cloud Datalab (dev), Cloud Dataflow (preprocessing). Supports online & batch predictions, prioritizing latency (online) & job time (batch). Also, download models & make predictions anywhere: desktop, mobile, own servers. HyperTune automatically tunes model hyperparameters to avoid manual tweaking. Training: pay per hour to train your model depending on chosen cluster capabilities (ML training units). Prediction: pay per provisioned node-hour plus by prediction request volume made.

Is Cloud Spanner a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Regional, Multi-Regional, Global. The "first horizontally scalable, strongly consistent, relational database service." Can scale from 1 to 100s or 1000s of nodes. One node is actually a server at each replication location.

Is GCP App Engine a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Regional. It is PaaS (takes your code and runs it). Similar to AWS' Elastic Beanstalk.

Are Google Cloud Functions a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Regional. Runs code is response to an event. Pay for CPU and RAM assigned to function, per 100ms (min. 100ms). Each function automatically gets an HTTP endpoint. Can be triggered by GCS objects, Pub/Sub messages, etc. Massively scalable (horizontally) - runs many copies when needed. Often used for chatbots, message processors, IoT, automation, etc.

Is Cloud SQL a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Regional. Supports MySQL & PostgreSQL databases. Compares to Amazon RDS.

What does REST stand for?

Representational State Transfer. It is protocol independent, but HTTP is the most common and another is gRPC. Service endpoints supporting REST are called RESTful. Client and Server communicate with Request-Response processing. REST architecture supports loose coupling, but requires strong engineering practices to maintain the loose coupling. Streaming (gRPC) is also possible.

What is the construct of an HTTP request?

Request Line + Request Header: metadata about the message...often in JSON or XML + Request Body (optional): request state. Example: POST /add HTTP/1.1 Host: pets.drehnstrom.com Content-Type: json Content-Length: 35 {"name":"Noir", "breed":"Schnoodle"}

What are the three parts of an HTTP response?

Response Line (HTTP Version + Response Code) + Response Header + Response Body.

What does the Container Registry do?

Store your Docker images or deployment packages in a central location for deployment.

You want to get an estimate of the volume of data scanned by BigQuery from the command line. Which command structure should you use?

The bq command structure, which includes location and the --dry_run option: bq --location=[LOCATION] query --use_legacy_sql=false--dry_run [SQL QUERY]

What is the name of the cookie used by App Engine when cookie splitting is used?

The cookie used for splitting in App Engine is called GOOGAPPUID.

What command will export a MySQL database called pca-exam-mysql1 to a file called pca-exam-mysql-export.sql in a bucket named pca-exam-buckete1?

The correct command, gcloud sql export sql, indicating that the service is Cloud SQL, the operation is export, and the export file format: gcloud sql export sql pca-exam-mysql1 gs://ace-exam-buckete1/pca-exam-mysql-export.sql \ --database=mysql

As required by your company's policy, you need to back up your Datastore database at least once per day. An auditor is questioning whether or not Datastore export is sufficient. You explain that the Datastore export command produces what outputs?

The export process creates a metadata file with information about the data exported and a folder that has the data itself (i.e., a metadata file and a folder with the data).

What is the best way to implement back-out/rollback for websites with 100s of VMs? Site has frequent critical updates.

Use managed instance groups with the "rolling-action start-update" command when starting a rolling update. In this type of deployment, you update a subset of running application instances instead of simultaneously updating every application instance.

What does the 'Put' command do?

Used to create data or alter existing data. Entity ID must be known. It shouldn't be 'idempotent', which means that whether the request is made once or multiple times, the effects on the data are exactly the same.

What does the 'Post' command do?

Used to create data. Generates entity ID and returns it to the client.

What does the 'Delete' command do?

Used to remove data.

What does the 'Get' command do?

Used to retrieve data.

You work for a startup and costs are a major concern. You are willing to take a slight performance hit if it will save you money. How should you configure the scaling for your apps running in App Engine?

Using dynamic instances by specifying autoscaling or basic scaling will automatically adjust the number of instances in use based on load.

What is the construct of the HTTP 'Request Line'?

Verb + Uniform Resource Identifier / URI <endpoint> + HTTP Version. Example: POST /add HTTP/1.1

You have designed a microservice that you want to deploy to production. Before it can be deployed, you have to review how you will manage the service lifecycle. The architect is particularly concerned about how you will deploy updates to the service with minimal disruption. What aspect of App Engine components would you use to minimize disruptions during updates to the service?

Versions support migration. An app can have multiple versions, and by deploying with the --migrate parameter, you can migrate traffic to the new version.

What do Build Triggers do?

Watches for changes in the Git Repo and starts the build

When should you choose App Engine Flexible (instead of App Engine Standard)?

When 1) Source code that is written in a version of any of the supported programming languages, 2) Runs in a Docker container that includes a custom runtime or source code written in other programming languages, 3) Uses or depends on frameworks that include native code and 4) Accesses the resources or services of your Google Cloud project that reside in the Compute Engine network. Application instances run within Docker containers on Compute Engine VMs. Ideal for applications that receive consistent traffic, experience regular traffic fluctuations, or meet the parameters for scaling up and down gradually.

When should you choose App Engine Standard (instead of App Engine Flexible)?

When 1) source code is written in a specific version of a supported language, 2) when the environment is intended to run for free or at very low cost <app can scale to zero instances when there is no traffic> and 3) the app experiences sudden and extreme spikes of traffic. Runs in a sandbox environment using the runtime environment.

What is a correlated failure?

When related items fail at the same time.

What is white box monitoring?

When the application is assumed to be known to you. The inner workings of the application are transparent. You can use that special knowledge when defining the test.

What is a fault or failure domain?

When we have a group of related items that could fail together.

What is the canary deployment method?

When you expose a new version of your app to a small portion of your production traffic and analyze its behavior before going ahead with the full deployment.

What is black box monitoring?

When you're not supposed to know or think about the inner workings of the application. All you can see is the user interface or the API interface. This is good for validating user experience. You end up monitoring things like latency between request and response.

What is 'positive feedback cycle overload failure'?

Where a problem is caused by trying to prevent problems. This happens when you try to make the system more reliable by adding retries in the event of a failure. Instead of fixing the failure, this creates the potential for overload.

What is a 'query of death'?

Where a request made to a service causes a failure in the service. The error manifests itself as over consumption of resources, but in reality is due to an error in the business-logic itself.

Is Local SSD a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Zonal (connected to a specific GCE instance). Data will be lost if the instance is shut down (on purpose or by accident), but can survive a Live Migration. Data encrypted at rest.

What is Cloud Dataproc?

Zonal service. Batch MapReduce processing via configurable, managed Spark & Hadoop clusters. Handles being told to scale (add or remove nodes) while running jobs. Integrated with Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Bigtable and some Stackdriver services. "Image versioning" switches between versions of Spark, Hadoop and other tools. Best for moving existing Spark/Hadoop setups to GCP (use Cloud Dataflow for new). Its clusters can be scaled up or down after creation (do not need to be destroyed and recreated).

What is Cloud Dataflow?

Zonal service. Smartly-autoscaled & fully-managed batch or stream MapReduce-like processing. Released as open-source Apache Beam. Autoscales & dynamically redistributes lagging work, mid-job to optimize run time. Integrated with Cloud Pub-Sub, Datastore, BQ, Bigtable, Cloud ML, Stackdriver, etc. Dataflow Shuffle service for batch offloads Shuffle ops from workers for big gains.

Is Cloud Filestore a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Zonal. File-based storage system. Compares to AWS Elastic File System (EFS). Primary use case is application migration to the cloud ("lift and shift"). Have 'Standard' (min 1TB / 5000 IOPs) vs 'Premium' (min 2.5TB / 60,000 IOPs).

Is Persistent Disk a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Zonal. Flexible, block-based network-attached storage that is the boot disk for every GCE instance. Data encrypted in transit and at rest. Compares to AWS EBS. Snapshots of Persistent Disks are available Globally. Can mount to multiple instances IF all are read-only.

Is Cloud Bigtable a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Zonal. Low latency & high throughput NoSQL DB for larger operational & analytical apps. Wide-column stores NoSQL DB (like AWS DynamoDB & Cassandra). Integrates with Hadoop, Dataflow and Dataproc. Storage autoscales, but processing nodes must be scaled manually. Ideal for storing very large amounts of single-keyed data. It is used to power many Google services including Search, Analytics, Maps and Gmail. You can modify its instance labels, application profiles, number of clusters, number of nodes, upgrade DEV -> PRD and display name without any downtime.

Is Firebase Realtime DB a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Zonal. NoSQL document stores with ~real-time client updates via managed websockets. Is a single (potentially huge) JSON doc, located only in the central US. Free tier (Spark), flat tier (Flame), or usage-based pricing (Blaze).

Is Google Compute Engine (GCE) a Zonal, Regional, Multi-Regional or Global service?

Zonal. Pay by the second for CPUs & RAM (60 second minimum). Automatically get cheaper if you keep running it (sustained use discount). Even cheaper for 'preemptible' (like AWS spot) or long-term use commitment in a region (like AWS reserved).

You have received a large data set from an internet of Things (IoT) system. You want to use BigQuery to analyze the data. What command-line command would you use to make data available for analysis in BigQuery?

bq load --autodetect --source_format=[FORMAT] [DATASET].[TABLE] [PATH_TO_SOURCE]

What command should you use to deploy an App Engine app from the command line?

gcloud app deploy

Considerations for Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)?

plural nouns for sets <collections>; singular nouns for individual resources; strive for consistent naming; URI is case-insensitive; Don't use verbs to identify a resource; include version information

What is the format of the REST API?

service.collection.verb (e.g.,