10 free Google Cloud Digital Leader practice questions with the correct answer and a full explanation for each, taken from the CertStash pack of 289 questions. Work through them, then open each answer to check your reasoning.
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Question 1
You are migrating workloads to the cloud. The goal of the migration is to serve customers worldwide as quickly as possible According to local regulations, certain data is required to be stored in a specific geographic area, and it can be served worldwide. You need to design the architecture and deployment for your workloads.
What should you do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Select a public cloud provider that guarantees data location in the required geographic area
When migrating workloads globally while meeting data residency requirements, you need a public cloud provider that explicitly guarantees data storage location in the required geographic area. This allows you to comply with local regulations while serving customers worldwide through content distribution. Public cloud providers offer global infrastructure with data location guarantees, unlike private clouds which lack the geographic flexibility needed for worldwide service delivery.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Limiting to a provider active only in one geographic area prevents worldwide service delivery and redundancy.
- B. Private cloud providers cannot offer the same global reach and cost efficiency as public cloud providers with guaranteed data location.
- D. A private cloud limited to one geographic area cannot efficiently serve customers worldwide or provide the scalability needed for global operations.
Question 2
Your organization needs a large amount of extra computing power within the next two weeks.
After those two weeks, the need for the additional resources will end.
Which is the most cost-effective approach?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Start a very powerful virtual machine without using a committed use discount
For a temporary two-week spike in computing needs, using a powerful virtual machine without a committed use discount is most cost-effective because you only pay for the resources you actually use during that period. Committed use discounts are designed for predictable, long-term workloads and would waste money on unused commitment periods. Purchasing physical hardware is unnecessary capital expenditure for temporary needs.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Committed use discounts require long-term commitments and are wasteful for shor-erm two-week needs.
- B. Purchasing physical computers incurs significant capital expenditure for a temporary requirement and lacks flexibility.
- D. Purchasing multiple physical computers is expensive for temporary needs and creates ongoing maintenance costs.
Question 3
Your organization needs to plan its cloud infrastructure expenditures.
Which should your organization do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Review cloud resource costs frequently, because costs change often based on use
Cloud resource costs must be reviewed frequently because usage patterns and associated costs change often based on actual consumption, scaling decisions, and optimization opportunities. Regular monitoring enables organizations to identify cost anomalies, optimize spending, and adjust budgets accordingly. Annual reviews alone are insufficient to catch cost overruns or optimization opportunities throughout the year.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Annual reviews are too infrequent to capture cost changes and optimization opportunities that emerge throughout the year.
- C. Cloud infrastructure costs remain part of the overall organizational budget and require the same planning as other expenditures.
- D. Cloud resource planning should involve more stakeholders and visibility than o-remises planning due to dynamic nature and broader organizational impact.
Question 4
The operating systems of some of your organization's virtual machines may have a security vulnerability.
How can your organization most effectively identify all virtual machines that do not have the latest security update?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. View the Security Command Center to identify virtual machines running vulnerable disk images
The Security Command Center is the appropriate tool to identify virtual machines running vulnerable disk images and assess their security update status. It scans infrastructure for security issues including missing patches and known vulnerabilities. Compliance Reports Manager focuses on compliance audit documentation rather than real-time vulnerability detection, and checking start dates is not an effective method for identifying security update status.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Compliance Reports Manager provides audit compliance reports, not vulnerability scanning or security update status.
- C. VM start date does not correlate with whether security updates are applied; older and newer VMs alike can be vulnerable.
- D. Compliance Reports Manager is for compliance audits, not vulnerability identification or security update assessment.
Question 5
You are currently managing workloads running on Windows Server for which your company owns the licenses. Your workloads are only needed during working hours, which allows you to shut down the instances during the weekend. Your Windows Server licenses are up for renewal in a month, and you want to optimize your license cost.
What should you do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Migrate the workloads to Compute Engine with a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) model
Migrating workloads to Compute Engine with a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) model is most cost-effective for owned Windows Server licenses that are used only during business hours. BYOL allows you to apply your existing licenses to cloud instances, eliminating the need to renew expensive licenses while maintaining full usage of your license investment. This approach optimizes costs while preserving your licensed software.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Renewing licenses for 3 years for workloads only needed during business hours wastes money on unused capacity during weekends and non-working hours.
- B. Renewing licenses for 2 years continues paying for licenses that could be brought to the cloud, and automatic renewal commitments reduce flexibility.
- D. Pay-as-you-go licensing for Windows Server in the cloud is more expensive than leveraging existing owned licenses through BYOL.
Question 6
Your organization runs a distributed application in the Compute Engine virtual machines. Your organization needs redundancy, but it also needs extremely fast communication (less than 10 milliseconds) between the parts of the application in different virtual machines.
Where should your organization locate this virtual machines?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. In different zones within a single region
For extremely fast inter-VM communication with latency under 10 milliseconds while maintaining redundancy, virtual machines should be placed in different zones within a single region. This provides zone-level redundancy (protecting against zone failures) while keeping all VMs within the same region where network latency between zones typically remains under 10 milliseconds. Cross-region communication introduces unacceptable latency, while a single zone eliminates redundancy.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A single zone provides no redundancy against zone-level failures, failing the redundancy requirement.
- C. Multiple regions introduce latency significantly exceeding 10 milliseconds due to geographic distance.
- D. Multiple regions with multiple zones per region introduce excessive latency far exceeding the 10-millisecond requirement.
Question 7
An organization decides to migrate their on-premises environment to the cloud. They need to determine which resource components still need to be assigned ownership.
Which two functions does a public cloud provider own? (Choose two.)
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A, D
A. Hardware maintenance D. Hardware capacity management A public cloud provider owns hardware maintenance and hardware capacity management. The provider is responsible for maintaining physical infrastructure, replacing faulty hardware, and managing the capacity pool from which customer resources are provisioned. Infrastructure architecture and deployment automation are customer responsibilities, as is fixing application-level security issues.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Infrastructure architecture is the customer's responsibility; the provider supplies the platform but customers design their architecture.
- C. Infrastructure deployment automation is a customer responsibility or joint responsibility depending on the service model.
- E. Fixing application security issues is entirely the customer's responsibility; the cloud provider does not own application code.
Question 8
You are a program manager within a Software as a Service (SaaS) company that offers rendering software for animation studios. Your team needs the ability to allow scenes to be scheduled at will and to be interrupted at any time to restart later. Any individual scene rendering takes less than 12 hours to complete, and there is no service-level agreement (SLA) for the completion time for all scenes. Results will be stored in a global Cloud Storage bucket. The compute resources are not bound to any single geographical location. This software needs to run on Google Cloud in a cost-optimized way.
What should you do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Deploy the application on Compute Engine using preemptible instances
Preemptible VMs (now offered as Spot VMs) are built for fault-tolerant batch work that can be stopped and restarted, and they cost far less than standard instances, with discounts typically in the 60 to 91 percent range. The workload fits the model precisely: scenes can be scheduled at will, interrupted at any time, and each run finishes within the 24 hour preemptible lifetime. There is no completion SLA and the compute is not tied to a region, so losing an instance simply means rescheduling the scene while results land in the global Cloud Storage bucket.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. An unmanaged instance group only groups existing VMs for manual administration and provides no pricing discount or automatic handling of interruptions.
- C. Reservations lock in capacity that you pay for whether or not it is used, which raises cost for bursty rendering jobs.
- D. Changing the ratio of instances to vCPUs redistributes the same compute spend and does not deliver the deep discount this workload can claim.
Question 9
Your manager wants to restrict communication of all virtual machines with internet access; with resources in another network; or with a resource outside Compute Engine. It is expected that different teams will create new folders and projects in the near future.
How would you restrict all virtual machines from having an external IP address?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Define an organization policy at the root organization node to restrict virtual machine instances from having an external IP address
Organization policies must be set at the highest level in the resource hierarchy to apply to all current and future resources. Setting the policy at the root organization node ensures that all folders and projects created in the future will inherit this constraint, preventing any virtual machine from having an external IP address across the entire organization. This single point of enforcement is far more efficient and reliable than manually configuring policies on existing folders and projects.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Applying the policy only to existing folders will not restrict VMs created in new folders that teams will create in the future.
- C. Applying the policy only to existing projects will not restrict VMs created in new projects that teams will create in the future.
- D. Relying on manual communication and agreements is not scalable and does not guarantee compliance as teams grow and change.
Question 10
Your multinational organization has servers running mission-critical workloads on its premises around the world. You want to be able to manage these workloads consistently and centrally, and you want to stop managing infrastructure.
What should your organization do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Migrate the workloads to a public cloud
A public cloud provides centralized management of workloads across multiple geographic locations while eliminating the need to manage physical infrastructure. The cloud provider handles all infrastructure provisioning, maintenance, and scaling, allowing the organization to focus on applications rather than hardware. This achieves both consistent central management and removal of infrastructure management responsibilities that on-premises and co-location facilities cannot provide.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Moving to a central office building does not reduce infrastructure management and creates a single point of failure for mission-critical workloads.
- C. Multiple local co-location facilities still require the organization to manage infrastructure and do not provide centralized management.
- D. Multiple local private clouds still require the organization to manage infrastructure and do not provide the simplification benefits of public cloud.
That was 10 of 289.
The full Google Cloud Digital Leader pack has all 289 questions, each with the answer, the explanation and why the other options are wrong, plus a questions-only copy for timed runs. US$39, paid once, with free monthly updates and a pass-or-your-money-back guarantee.