Google Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Test sample questions

These starter questions help you launch a general studies mock test quickly. Swap them with your own worksheet, notebook, or textbook questions any time.

1. Which Google Cloud service should you use to run containerised applications without managing the underlying infrastructure?
A) Compute Engine  B) Google Kubernetes Engine  C) Cloud Run  D) App Engine Standard
2. What is the default network created when you set up a new Google Cloud project?
A) A custom VPC network  B) The default VPC network with auto-mode subnets  C) No network is created by default  D) A shared VPC
3. Which command initialises the Google Cloud CLI and sets the default project and account?
A) gcloud auth login  B) gcloud init  C) gcloud config set project  D) gcloud setup
4. What is the purpose of Cloud IAM in Google Cloud?
A) To manage virtual networks  B) To control who (identity) has what access (roles) to which Google Cloud resources  C) To encrypt data at rest  D) To monitor application performance
5. Which storage class in Cloud Storage is best for data accessed less than once a year?
A) Standard  B) Nearline  C) Coldline  D) Archive
6. What is a managed instance group (MIG) in Compute Engine?
A) A group of manually managed VMs  B) A set of identical VM instances managed as a single entity with autoscaling and auto-healing  C) A Kubernetes node pool  D) A Cloud Run service
7. Which Google Cloud service provides a fully managed relational database compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL?
A) Cloud Spanner  B) Cloud SQL  C) Cloud Bigtable  D) Firestore
8. What is the purpose of a service account in Google Cloud?
A) A user account for Google Cloud Console  B) An identity for an application or VM instance to authenticate and authorise API calls  C) A billing account  D) A network identity
9. Which networking component controls inbound and outbound traffic to VM instances?
A) Cloud Router  B) Cloud Load Balancing  C) VPC firewall rules  D) Cloud Armor
10. What is the difference between regional and zonal resources in Google Cloud?
A) Regional resources span a continent; zonal resources span a country  B) Regional resources are replicated across multiple zones in a region; zonal resources exist in a single zone  C) Zonal resources are more expensive  D) There is no difference
11. Which Google Cloud tool provides recommendations to reduce costs and improve performance?
A) Cloud Monitoring  B) Active Assist (Recommender)  C) Cloud Logging  D) Cloud Trace
12. What command deploys a container image to Cloud Run?
A) gcloud run services update  B) gcloud run deploy  C) kubectl apply  D) gcloud app deploy
13. What is Cloud Pub/Sub used for?
A) Storing relational data  B) Asynchronous messaging between services  C) Running containers  D) Managing DNS
14. Which IAM role grants full access to all Google Cloud resources?
A) roles/editor  B) roles/viewer  C) roles/owner  D) roles/admin
15. What is the purpose of Cloud Monitoring?
A) To manage IAM policies  B) To collect metrics, set alerting policies, and visualise performance data  C) To store application logs  D) To deploy applications
16. Which Compute Engine feature automatically replaces unhealthy VM instances?
A) Autoscaling  B) Auto-healing in managed instance groups  C) Live migration  D) Preemptible VMs
17. What is GKE Autopilot?
A) A managed Kubernetes mode where Google manages the cluster infrastructure and nodes  B) An autoscaling policy  C) A serverless function runtime  D) An auto-deployment tool
18. What does the gcloud compute instances create command do?
A) Lists existing VM instances  B) Creates a new Compute Engine VM instance  C) Starts a stopped VM instance  D) Connects to a VM via SSH
19. Which Google Cloud service stores application logs and allows log-based metrics and alerts?
A) Cloud Monitoring  B) Cloud Logging  C) Cloud Trace  D) Cloud Profiler
20. What is a VPC peering connection used for?
A) Connecting a VPC to the internet  B) Connecting two VPC networks so resources in each can communicate using internal IP addresses  C) Creating a VPN tunnel  D) Setting up DNS
21. Which storage option is best for hosting a static website on Google Cloud?
A) Compute Engine  B) Cloud SQL  C) Cloud Storage bucket with static website hosting enabled  D) Cloud Run
22. What is the purpose of Binary Authorization in GKE?
A) To encrypt container images  B) To ensure only trusted container images are deployed to the cluster  C) To manage IAM roles  D) To enable autoscaling
23. What does Cloud Spanner provide that Cloud SQL does not?
A) SQL support  B) Globally distributed, horizontally scalable relational database with strong consistency  C) Lower cost  D) MySQL compatibility
24. What is the correct way to grant a user the ability to view billing information in Google Cloud?
A) Assign the roles/owner role  B) Assign the roles/billing.viewer role at the billing account level  C) Give them access to the project only  D) Add them to the billing admin group
25. Which command exports data from a BigQuery table to Cloud Storage?
A) bq extract  B) bq export  C) gcloud bigquery export  D) bq load
26. What is the purpose of Cloud Armor?
A) To manage SSL certificates  B) To protect applications against DDoS attacks and application-layer (Layer 7) threats  C) To encrypt disks  D) To monitor Kubernetes clusters
27. In Google Cloud, what is a project?
A) A type of VM  B) The organisational container for resources, billing, APIs, and IAM policies  C) A network subnet  D) A storage bucket
28. What is the purpose of Cloud CDN?
A) To manage DNS  B) To cache content at Google's global edge locations for faster delivery to users  C) To create VPN tunnels  D) To run serverless functions
29. Which service provides a managed, serverless event-driven compute platform for running small functions?
A) Cloud Run  B) App Engine  C) Cloud Functions  D) GKE
30. What should you do to prevent a specific VM instance from being deleted accidentally?
A) Assign it a reserved IP  B) Enable deletion protection on the instance  C) Move it to a different project  D) Assign the roles/viewer role