Professional-Cloud-DevOps-Engineer Google Cloud Certified - Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Exam Question and Answers

The correct answer is C. Configure Cloud Profiler, and initialize the cloud.google.com/go/profiler library in the application.

According to the Google Cloud documentation, Cloud Profiler is a statistical, low-overhead profiler that continuously gathers CPU usage and memory-allocation information from your production applications1. Cloud Profiler can help you identify slow paths in your code and optimize the performance of your applications. Cloud Profiler supports applications written in Go that run on App Engine standard environment2. To use Cloud Profiler, you need to configure it in your Google Cloud project and initialize the cloud.google.com/go/profiler library in your application code3. You can then use the Cloud Profiler interface to analyze the profiling data and visualize the results by using flame graphs4. Cloud Profiler has minimal performance impact and management overhead, as it only samples a small fraction of the application activity and does not require any additional infrastructure or agents.

The other options are incorrect because they do not meet the requirements of minimizing performance impact and management overhead. Option A is incorrect because it requires installing a continuous profiling tool into Compute Engine, which is an additional infrastructure that needs to be managed and maintained. Option B is incorrect because it requires periodically running the go tool pprof command against the application instance, which is a manual and disruptive process that can affect the application performance. Option D is incorrect because it only uses Cloud Monitoring to assess the App Engine CPU utilization metric, which is not enough to identify slow paths in the code or optimize the application performance.

The keywords here is "developers or operators". Option A the operators could push images to production without approval (operators could touch the cluster directly and the cluster cannot do any action against them). Rest same as francisco_guerra.

 The best option for optimizing your cloud spend by ensuring that only a single instance of your infrastructure stack exists at a time is to confirm that the pipeline is storing and retrieving the terraform.tfstate file from Cloud Storage with the Terraform gcs backend. The terraform.tfstate file is a file that Terraform uses to store the current state of your infrastructure. The Terraform gcs backend is a backend type that allows you to store the terraform.tfstate file in a Cloud Storage bucket. By using the Terraform gcs backend, you can ensure that your pipeline has access to the latest state of your infrastructure and avoid creating multiple copies of the entire infrastructure stack.

https://devops.com/when-it-disaster-strikes-part-3-conducting-a-blameless-post-mortem/

The best option for determining whether the increase in availability is worth the investment for a single year of usage is to calculate the value of improved availability to be $900, and determine that the increase in availability is not worth the investment. To calculate the value of improved availability, we can use the following formula:

Value of improved availability = Revenue * (New availability - Current availability)

Plugging in the given numbers, we get:

Value of improved availability = $1,000,000 * (0.9999 - 0.999) = $900

Since the value of improved availability is less than the investment of $2,000, we can conclude that the increase in availability is not worth the investment.

The correct answer is B. Use shadow testing with continuous deployment.

Shadow testing is a deployment technique that involves routing a copy of the live traffic to a new version of the application, without affecting the production environment. This way, you can gather performance metrics and compare them with the current version, without exposing the new version to the users. Shadow testing can help you test against the full production load and identify any issues or bottlenecks before launching the new version. You can use continuous deployment to automate the process of deploying the new version after it passes the shadow testing.

The correct answer is D. Review the design of the product with the product development team to provide feedback early in the design phase.

According to the Google Cloud DevOps best practices, a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) should collaborate with the product development team from the beginning of the product lifecycle, not just after the product is deployed or tested. This way, the SRE can provide operational input on the product design, such as scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency. The SRE can also help define service level objectives (SLOs) and service level indicators (SLIs) for the product, as well as monitoring and alerting strategies. By collaborating early and often, the SRE and the product development team can ensure that the product meets the operational requirements and expectations of the customers.

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/routing/overview

The best option for selecting a deployment and testing strategy that meets your requirements is to use blue/green deployment and canary testing. A blue/green deployment is a deployment strategy that involves creating two identical environments, one running the current version of the application (blue) and one running the new version of the application (green). The traffic is switched from blue to green after testing the new version, and if any issues are discovered, the traffic can be switched back to blue instantly. This way, you can reduce the complexity of release deployments and minimize the duration of deployment rollbacks. A canary testing is a testing strategy that involves releasing a new version of an application to a subset of users or servers and monitoring its performance and reliability. This way, you can test real production traffic with a gradual increase in the number of affected users.

https://cloud.google.com/error-reporting/docs/formatting-error-messages

https://cloud.google.com/error-reporting/docs/reference/libraries#client-libraries-install-python

no need to install error reporting library on App Engine Flex.

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

The best option for implementing a scalable solution to support global Prometheus querying and minimize management overhead is to use Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed service that allows you to collect, query, and visualize metrics from your GKE clusters using Prometheus-based tooling. You can use Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus to query metrics across multiple clusters and regions using a global view. You can also use Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus to integrate with other Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, and BigQuery. By using Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus, you can avoid managing and scaling your own Prometheus servers and focus on your application performance.

The best option for creating the development and production environments for each team while minimizing costs and ensuring isolation is to create a development and a production GKE cluster in separate projects, in each cluster create a Kubernetes namespace per team, and then configure Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC) so that each team can only access its own namespace. This option allows you to use fewer clusters and projects than creating one project or cluster per team, which reduces costs and complexity. It also allows you to isolate each team’s environment by using namespaces and RBAC, which prevents teams from accessing other teams’ environments.

The best option for deploying a new release of your microservice on Cloud Run and testing it extensively in the staging and production environments with minimal user and developer impact is to deploy the new version of the service to the staging environment with a new-release tag without serving traffic, test the new-release version, and if the test passes, gradually roll out this tagged version. A tag is a label that you can assign to a revision of your service on Cloud Run. You can use tags to create different versions of your service without affecting traffic. You can also use tags to gradually roll out traffic to a new version of your service by using traffic splitting. This way, you can test your new release extensively in both environments and minimize user and developer impact.

https://cloud.google.com/anthos/clusters/docs/on-prem/1.7/concepts/logging-and-monitoring

"After making a change in the Cloud Build YAML configuration, you notice that no new artifacts are being built by the pipeline"- means something wrong on the recent change not with the image registry.

The correct answer is C. Configure Anthos Config Management with the GitHub repository. When there is a change in the repository, use Anthos Config Management to apply the change.

According to the web search results, Anthos Config Management is a service that lets you manage the configuration of your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters from a single source of truth, such as a GitHub repository1. Anthos Config Management can enforce several constraint templates across your GKE clusters by using Policy Controller, which is a feature that integrates the Open Policy Agent (OPA) Constraint Framework into Anthos Config Management2. Policy Controller can apply constraints that include policy parameters, such as restricting the Kubernetes API3. To use Anthos Config Management and Policy Controller, you need to configure them with your GitHub repository and enable the sync mode4. When there is a change in the repository, Anthos Config Management will automatically sync and apply the change to your GKE clusters5.

The other options are incorrect because they do not use Anthos Config Management and Policy Controller. Option A is incorrect because it uses a GitHub action to trigger Cloud Build, which is a service that executes your builds on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure6. Cloud Build can run a gcloud CLI command to apply the change, but it does not use Anthos Config Management or Policy Controller. Option B is incorrect because it uses a web hook to send a request to Anthos Service Mesh, which is a service that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, monitor, and manage microservices on GKE clusters7. Anthos Service Mesh can apply the change, but it does not use Anthos Config Management or Policy Controller. Option D is incorrect because it uses Config Connector, which is a service that lets you manage Google Cloud resources through Kubernetes configuration. Config Connector can apply the change, but it does not use Anthos Config Management or Policy Controller.

The best option for investigating the issue with your application’s performance in Google Cloud is to configure Cloud Trace in your application. Cloud Trace is a service that allows you to collect and analyze latency data from your application. You can use Cloud Trace to trace requests across different components of your application, such as downstream dependencies, and identify where they take longer to complete. You can also use Cloud Trace to compare latency data across different versions of your application, and detect any performance degradation or improvement. By using Cloud Trace, you can diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues with your application in Google Cloud.

https://sre.google/workbook/incident-response/

"The main roles in incident response are the Incident Commander (IC), Communications Lead (CL), and Operations or Ops Lead (OL)."

The Operations Lead is responsible for managing the operational aspects of the incident, such as deploying fixes, rolling back changes, or restoring backups. The External Customer Communications Lead is not a standard role in incident response, but it could be delegated by the Communications Lead if needed.

The best option for ensuring that the three environments are consistent and following Google-recommended practices is to use Cloud Build to render and deploy the network policies and the DaemonSet, and set up Config Sync to sync the configurations for the three environments. Cloud Build is a service that executes your builds on Google Cloud infrastructure. You can use Cloud Build to render and deploy your network policies and DaemonSet as code using tools like Kustomize, Helm, or kpt. Config Sync is a feature that enables you to manage the configurations of your GKE clusters from a single source of truth, such as a Git repository. You can use Config Sync to sync the configurations for your development, staging, and production environments and ensure that they are consistent.

The most probable cause of the database timeout is an increased number of connections to the Cloud SQL instance. This could happen if the application does not close connections properly or if it creates too many connections at once. You can check the number of connections to the Cloud SQL instance using Cloud Monitoring or Cloud SQL Admin API .

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

The correct answer is D. Grant the roles/storage.objectAdmin Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to the Cloud Build service account on the state file bucket.

According to the Google Cloud documentation, Cloud Build is a service that executes your builds on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure1. Cloud Build uses a service account to execute your build steps and access resources, such as Cloud Storage buckets2. Terraform is an open-source tool that allows you to define and provision infrastructure as code3. Terraform uses a state file to store and track the state of your infrastructure4. You can configure Terraform to use a Cloud Storage bucket as a backend to store and share the state file across multiple users or environments5.

The error message indicates that Cloud Build failed to access the Cloud Storage bucket that contains the Terraform state file. This is likely because the Cloud Build service account does not have the necessary permissions to read and write objects in the bucket. To resolve this issue, you need to grant the roles/storage.objectAdmin IAM role to the Cloud Build service account on the state file bucket. This role allows the service account to create, delete, and manage objects in the bucket6. You can use the gcloud command-line tool or the Google Cloud Console to grant this role.

The other options are incorrect because they do not follow Google-recommended practices. Option A is incorrect because it changes the Terraform code to use local state, which is not recommended for production or collaborative environments, as it can cause conflicts, data loss, or inconsistency. Option B is incorrect because it creates a new storage bucket with the name specified in the Terraform configuration, but it does not grant any permissions to the Cloud Build service account on the new bucket. Option C is incorrect because it grants the roles/owner IAM role to the Cloud Build service account on the project, which is too broad and violates the principle of least privilege. The roles/owner role grants full access to all resources in the project, which can pose a security risk if misused or compromised.

The most effective ways to measure application reliability from a user perspective without making any engineering changes are to create new synthetic clients to simulate a user journey using the application, and to use current and historic Request Logs to trace customer interaction with the application. These methods can help you monitor the availability, latency, and errors of your application from an end-user perspective .

The first thing you should do to prepare your ecommerce application for the upcoming peak traffic season is to load test the application to profile its performance for scaling. Load testing is a process of simulating high traffic or user demand on your application and measuring how it responds. Load testing can help you identify any bottlenecks, errors, or performance issues that might affect your application during the busy season1. Load testing can also help you determine the optimal scaling strategy for your application, such as horizontal scaling (adding more instances) or vertical scaling (adding more resources to each instance)2.

There are different tools and methods for load testing your ecommerce application on Google Cloud, depending on the type and complexity of your application. For example, you can use Cloud Load Balancing to distribute traffic across multiple instances of your application, and use Cloud Monitoring to measure the latency, throughput, and error rate of your application3. You can also use Cloud Functions or Cloud Run to create serverless load generators that can simulate user requests and send them to your application4. Alternatively, you can use third-party tools such as Apache JMeter or Locust to create and run load tests on your application.

By load testing your ecommerce application before the peak traffic season, you can ensure that your application is ready to handle the expected load and provide a good user experience. You can also use the results of your load tests to plan and implement other steps to prepare your application for the busy season, such as migrating to a more scalable platform, creating a Terraform configuration for deploying to additional regions, or pre-provisioning additional compute power.

References:

1: Load Testing 101: How To Test Website Performance | BlazeMeter

2: Scaling applications | Google Cloud

3: Load testing using Google Cloud | Solutions | Google Cloud

4: Serverless load testing using Cloud Functions | Solutions | Google Cloud

https://www.terraform.io/docs/cloud/guides/recommended-practices/part3.3.html

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/export-data-bigquery

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/access/service-accounts#associating_a_service_account_to_an_instance

https://cloud.google.com/binary-authorization/docs/overview

The correct answer is D. Modify the application to use Cloud Logging software development kit (SDK), and send log entries with a jsonPayload field.

Cloud Logging SDKs are libraries that allow you to write structured logs from your Cloud Run application. You can use the SDKs to create log entries with a jsonPayload field, which contains a JSON object with the properties of your log entry. The jsonPayload field allows you to use advanced features of Cloud Logging, such as filtering, querying, and exporting logs based on the properties of your log entry1.

To use Cloud Logging SDKs, you need to install the SDK for your programming language, and then use the SDK methods to create and send log entries to Cloud Logging. For example, if you are using Node.js, you can use the following code to write a structured log entry with a jsonPayload field2:

// Imports the Google Cloud client library

const {Logging} = require('@google-cloud/logging');

// Creates a client

const logging = new Logging();

// Selects the log to write to

const log = logging.log('my-log');

// The data to write to the log

const text = 'Hello, world!';

const metadata = {

// Set the Cloud Run service name and revision as labels

labels: {

service_name: process.env.K_SERVICE || 'unknown',

revision_name: process.env.K_REVISION || 'unknown',

},

// Set the log entry payload type and value

jsonPayload: {

message: text,

timestamp: new Date(),

},

};

// Prepares a log entry

const entry = log.entry(metadata);

// Writes the log entry

await log.write(entry);

console.log(`Logged: ${text}`);

Using Cloud Logging SDKs is the best way to convert unstructured logs to structured logs, as it provides more flexibility and control over the format and content of your log entries.

Using a Fluent Bit sidecar container is not a good option, as it adds complexity and overhead to your Cloud Run application. Fluent Bit is a lightweight log processor and forwarder that can be used to collect and parse logs from various sources and send them to different destinations3. However, Cloud Run does not support sidecar containers, so you would need to run Fluent Bit as part of your main container image. This would require modifying your Dockerfile and configuring Fluent Bit to read logs from supported locations and parse them as JSON. This is more cumbersome and less reliable than using Cloud Logging SDKs.

Using the log agent in the Cloud Run container image is not possible, as the log agent is not supported on Cloud Run. The log agent is a service that runs on Compute Engine or Google Kubernetes Engine instances and collects logs from various applications and system components. However, Cloud Run does not allow you to install or run any agents on its underlying infrastructure, as it is a fully managed service that abstracts away the details of the underlying platform.

Storing the password directly in the code is not a good practice, as it exposes sensitive information and makes it hard to change or rotate the password. It also requires rebuilding and redeploying the application each time the password changes, which adds unnecessary work and downtime.

References:

1: Writing structured logs | Cloud Run Documentation | Google Cloud

2: Write structured logs | Cloud Run Documentation | Google Cloud

3: Fluent Bit - Fast and Lightweight Log Processor & Forwarder

Logging Best Practices for Serverless Applications - Google Codelabs

About the logging agent | Cloud Logging Documentation | Google Cloud

Cloud Run FAQ | Google Cloud

The best options for defining triggers that indicate whether an incident requires a postmortem based on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices are an external stakeholder asks for a postmortem and data is lost due to an incident. An external stakeholder is someone who is affected by or has an interest in the service, such as a customer or a partner. If an external stakeholder asks for a postmortem, it means that they are concerned about the impact or root cause of the incident, and they expect an explanation and remediation from the service provider. Therefore, this should trigger a postmortem to address their concerns and improve their satisfaction. Data loss is a serious consequence of an incident that can affect the integrity and reliability of the service. If data is lost due to an incident, it means that there was a failure in the backup or recovery mechanisms, or that there was a corruption or deletion of data. Therefore, this should trigger a postmortem to investigate the cause and impact of the data loss, and to prevent it from happening again.

The best option for securing the CI/CD deployment pipeline is to configure vulnerability analysis with Artifact Registry and Binary Authorization. Vulnerability analysis is a feature that allows you to scan container images for known vulnerabilities and security issues. You can use vulnerability analysis with Artifact Registry, which is a service that allows you to store and manage container images and other artifacts. By using vulnerability analysis with Artifact Registry, you can ensure that your container images are scanned for vulnerabilities before they are deployed. Binary Authorization is a feature that allows you to enforce signature-based validation when deploying container images. You can use Binary Authorization with Cloud Build, which is a service that allows you to build and deploy container images. By using Binary Authorization with Cloud Build, you can ensure that only authorized and verified container images are deployed to your environment.

https://cloud.google.com/architecture/prep-kubernetes-engine-for-prod#roles_and_groups

https://cloud.google.com/architecture/continuous-delivery-toolchain-spinnaker-cloud

https://spinnaker.io/guides/user/pipeline/triggers/pubsub/

 The most efficient way to build an automated pipeline that deploys the application when the image is updated is to use Cloud Pub/Sub to trigger a Spinnaker pipeline. This way, you can leverage the built-in integration between GCR and Cloud Pub/Sub, and use Spinnaker as a continuous delivery platform for deploying your application .

The correct answer is A. Communicate your intent to the incident team. Perform a load analysis to determine if the remaining nodes can handle the increase in traffic offloaded from the removed node, and scale appropriately. When any new nodes report healthy, drain traffic from the unhealthy node, and remove the unhealthy node from service.

This answer follows the Google-recommended practices for incident management, as described in the Chapter 9 - Incident Response, Google SRE Book1. According to this source, some of the best practices are:

• Maintain a clear line of command. Designate clearly defined roles. Keep a working record of debugging and mitigation as you go. Declare incidents early and often.
• Communicate your intent before taking any action that might affect the service or the incident response. This helps to avoid confusion, duplication of work, or unintended consequences.
• Perform a load analysis before removing a node from the load balancer pool, as this might affect the capacity and performance of the service. Scale the pool as necessary to handle the expected load.
• Drain traffic from the unhealthy node before removing it from service, as this helps to avoid dropping requests or causing errors for users.

Answer A follows these best practices by communicating the intent to the incident team, performing a load analysis and scaling the pool, and draining traffic from the unhealthy node before removing it.

Answer B does not follow the best practice of performing a load analysis before adding or removing nodes, as this might cause overloading or underutilization of resources.

Answer C does not follow the best practice of communicating the intent before taking any action, as this might cause confusion or conflict with other responders.

Answer D does not follow the best practice of draining traffic from the unhealthy node before removing it, as this might cause errors for users.

References:

1: Chapter 9 - Incident Response, Google SRE Book