PCA - Professional Cloud Architect
Practice Questions

Company Overview - KnightMotives is a car manufacturer specializing in autonomous, self-driving vehicles, including Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs), hybrids and traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. While KnightMotives has made strides with the in-vehicle experience in their BEV fleet, the hybrid and ICE vehicles have yet to implement these new systems and are viewed poorly by critics and drivers. The lack of modern in-vehicle technology in hybrid and ICE vehicles has resulted in declining sales and customer satisfaction. KnightMotives wants to modernize the consumer experience across all vehicles within five years Artificial Intelligence offers a unique opportunity to revolutionize the in-vehicle experience, as well as the shopping buying and service/maintenance experience. Investment in this new technology will require a shift in financial priorities on a global scale. KnightMotives also wants to improve their online ordering system, which is unreliable. Systems for customers to build their vehicle online for acquisition through a dealer are not delivering the data or reliability that dealers need, causing. A strain in the relationship between KnightMotives and dealers. Service technicians and sales staff need better tooling to enhance dealer successes, including built-to-order vehicles. Solution Concept - KnightMotives wants to shift from manufacturing cars to creating a complete and compelling “automotive experience.” Then strategy prioritizes delivering a consistent experience across all models, developing AI-powered features, generating new revenue from data monetization, adopting a digital focus to differentiate their brand from competitors, and developing better tools for mechanics and salespeople. Existing Technical Environment - KnightMotives's IT is largely on-premises with some applications on major cloud platforms. Their supply chain runs on an outdated mainframe, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is also outdated, making new promotions and dealer discounts difficult to implement. Dealers have no budget for new equipment. There is fragmentation across vehicles with multiple code bases, and significant technical debt from supporting backwards compatibility. Network connectivity to manufacturing plants and vehicle connectivity in rural areas are challenges. Business Requirements - Key business requirements include fostering a personalized relationship with the driver and delivering a cohesive experience across all models. Creating a better build-to-order model will reduce time on the lot and provide transparency for both dealers and customers. Additionally, KnightMotives seeks to monetize corporate data to finance new technology investments, as their current AI infrastructure is obsolete and corporate data remains siloed. Security is a paramount concern due to past data breaches Adherence to European Union (EU) data protection regulations, especially for emerging autonomous platforms, is critical. KnightMotives plans to make significant investments in fully autonomous driving capabilities, with initial implementation targeting regions with favorable regulatory environments. Prioritizing employee upskilling, attracting top-tier talent, and fostering better communication between business and technical teams are also critical objectives. Technical Requirements - • Modernizing the in-vehicle experience includes developing a consistent user experience (UX) that seamlessly integrates AI-powered features across all models, updating in-vehicle hardware and software in legacy models to support new UX features and AI capabilities, and ensuring reliable network connectivity, especially in rural areas, to support real-time AI features and data transmission. • Network upgrades are necessary to support increased data traffic and improve connectivity between plants and headquarters. • IT infrastructure modernization requires adopting a hybrid cloud strategy to leverage the benefits of both on-premises and cloud infrastructure, and gradually modernizing or replacing legacy systems to improve efficiency and agility. • Autonomous vehicle development and testing requires investing in cutting-edge AI and machine learning technologies, building a robust simulation environment, and ensuring compliance with evolving regulations related to autonomous vehicles. • Data monetization and insights requires implementing a robust data management platform, strict data security and privacy measures, and a scalable AI/ML infrastructure. • Increased focus on security and risk management involves implementing a comprehensive security framework to protect against cyber threats and data breaches, developing an incident response plan, and providing security awareness training to employees. • Providing a delightful experience for dealers and customers requires improving the online build-to-order system; developing modern dealer tools to streamline dealer operations, including sales, service, and inventory management; and implementing a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to track customer interactions personalize experiences, and improve customer satisfaction. Executive Statement - KnightMotives is committed to enhancing safety and saving lives by leveraging an extensive body of data — encompassing driving, road conditions, behavioral studies, and crash safety statistics — to create compelling digital experiences for drivers. Our AI consistently outperforms national safety statistics, ensuring the unique and coveted KnightMotives experience is aligned across all our vehicle models. Michael Knight, KnightMotives CEO For this question, refer to the KnightMotives Automotive case study. You are responsible for designing the network infrastructure architecture for KnightMotives's new environment on Google Cloud. You need to design the new VPC topology. You want to ensure a guaranteed bandwidth and low latency between the plants and Google Cloud resources. What should you do?

Your company is rapidly deploying containerized microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using a robust CI/CD pipeline. Security is a top priority, and you need to implement a comprehensive and efficient strategy to prevent container image vulnerabilities from reaching your GKE production environment. What should you do?

Your company has decided to make a major revision of their API in order to create better experiences for their developers. They need to keep the old version of the API available and deployable, while allowing new customers and testers to try out the new API. They want to keep the same SSL and DNS records in place to serve both APIs. What should they do?

Your company plans to migrate a multi-petabyte data set to the cloud. The data set must be available 24hrs a day. Your business analysts have experience only with using a SQL interface. How should you store the data to optimize it for ease of analysis?

The operations manager asks you for a list of recommended practices that she should consider when migrating a J2EE application to the cloud. Which three practices should you recommend?

A news feed web service has the following code running on Google App Engine. During peak load, users report that they can see news articles they already viewed. What is the most likely cause of this problem?

An application development team believes their current logging tool will not meet their needs for their new cloud-based product. They want a better tool to capture errors and help them analyze their historical log data. You want to help them find a solution that meets their needs. What should you do?

You need to reduce the number of unplanned rollbacks of erroneous production deployments in your company's web hosting platform. Improvement to the QA/ Test processes accomplished an 80% reduction. Which additional two approaches can you take to further reduce the rollbacks?

To reduce costs, the Director of Engineering has required all developers to move their development infrastructure resources from on-premises virtual machines (VMs) to Google Cloud Platform. These resources go through multiple start/stop events during the day and require state to persist. You have been asked to design the process of running a development environment in Google Cloud while providing cost visibility to the finance department. Which two steps should you take?

Your company wants to track whether someone is present in a meeting room reserved for a scheduled meeting. There are 1000 meeting rooms across 5 offices on 3 continents. Each room is equipped with a motion sensor that reports its status every second. The data from the motion detector includes only a sensor ID and several different discrete items of information. Analysts will use this data, together with information about account owners and office locations. Which database type should you use?

You set up an autoscaling instance group to serve web traffic for an upcoming launch. After configuring the instance group as a backend service to an HTTP(S) load balancer, you notice that virtual machine (VM) instances are being terminated and re-launched every minute. The instances do not have a public IP address. You have verified the appropriate web response is coming from each instance using the curl command. You want to ensure the backend is configured correctly. What should you do?

You write a Python script to connect to Google BigQuery from a Google Compute Engine virtual machine. The script is printing errors that it cannot connect to BigQuery. What should you do to fix the script?

Your customer is moving an existing corporate application to Google Cloud Platform from an on-premises data center. The business owners require minimal user disruption. There are strict security team requirements for storing passwords. What authentication strategy should they use?

Your company has successfully migrated to the cloud and wants to analyze their data stream to optimize operations. They do not have any existing code for this analysis, so they are exploring all their options. These options include a mix of batch and stream processing, as they are running some hourly jobs and live- processing some data as it comes in. Which technology should they use for this?

Your customer is receiving reports that their recently updated Google App Engine application is taking approximately 30 seconds to load for some of their users. This behavior was not reported before the update. What strategy should you take?

A production database virtual machine on Google Compute Engine has an ext4-formatted persistent disk for data files. The database is about to run out of storage space. How can you remediate the problem with the least amount of downtime?

Your application needs to process credit card transactions. You want the smallest scope of Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance without compromising the ability to analyze transactional data and trends relating to which payment methods are used. How should you design your architecture?

You have been asked to select the storage system for the click-data of your company's large portfolio of websites. This data is streamed in from a custom website analytics package at a typical rate of 6,000 clicks per minute. With bursts of up to 8,500 clicks per second. It must have been stored for future analysis by your data science and user experience teams. Which storage infrastructure should you choose?

You are creating a solution to remove backup files older than 90 days from your backup Cloud Storage bucket. You want to optimize ongoing Cloud Storage spend. What should you do?

Your company is forecasting a sharp increase in the number and size of Apache Spark and Hadoop jobs being run on your local datacenter. You want to utilize the cloud to help you scale this upcoming demand with the least amount of operations work and code change. Which product should you use?

The database administration team has asked you to help them improve the performance of their new database server running on Google Compute Engine. The database is for importing and normalizing their performance statistics and is built with MySQL running on Debian Linux. They have an n1-standard-8 virtual machine with 80 GB of SSD persistent disk. What should they change to get better performance from this system?

You want to optimize the performance of an accurate, real-time, weather-charting application. The data comes from 50,000 sensors sending 10 readings a second, in the format of a timestamp and sensor reading. Where should you store the data?

Your company's user-feedback portal comprises a standard LAMP stack replicated across two zones. It is deployed in the us-central1 region and uses autoscaled managed instance groups on all layers, except the database. Currently, only a small group of select customers have access to the portal. The portal meets a 99,99% availability SLA under these conditions. However next quarter, your company will be making the portal available to all users, including unauthenticated users. You need to develop a resiliency testing strategy to ensure the system maintains the SLA once they introduce additional user load. What should you do?

One of the developers on your team deployed their application in Google Container Engine with the Dockerfile below. They report that their application deployments are taking too long. You want to optimize this Dockerfile for faster deployment times without adversely affecting the app's functionality. Which two actions should you take?

Your solution is producing performance bugs in production that you did not see in staging and test environments. You want to adjust your test and deployment procedures to avoid this problem in the future. What should you do?

A small number of API requests to your microservices-based application take a very long time. You know that each request to the API can traverse many services. You want to know which service takes the longest in those cases. What should you do?

During a high traffic portion of the day, one of your relational databases crashes, but the replica is never promoted to a master. You want to avoid this in the future. What should you do?

Your organization requires that metrics from all applications be retained for 5 years for future analysis in possible legal proceedings. Which approach should you use?

Your company has decided to build a backup replica of their on-premises user authentication PostgreSQL database on Google Cloud Platform. The database is 4 TB, and large updates are frequent. Replication requires private address space communication. Which networking approach should you use?

Auditors visit your teams every 12 months and ask to review all the Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) policy changes in the previous 12 months. You want to streamline and expedite the analysis and audit process. What should you do?